Game Projects

Basic Stuff

Text-based

Mixes together both Islands v2 and Carter (which is itself based on a bunch of stuff).

Sea and Ship

Your Ship is expandable and functions as both a mobile and fixed base, which is definitely the right balance.

While islands are where the vast majority of your resources come from, the sea also has a lot of stuff happening on it:

Islands are separated by shallow seas. These have some light POIs/mechanics.

Archipelagos are separated by deep seas. These also have more interesting POIs/mechanics but the sea is also quite dangerous at the best of times.

Wind

Like in Islands v2, there's a wind system that you have to tack against and cuts your speed down accordingly.

The difference this time around is that your overall speed is dictated by your mass-to-sail ratio, so the bigger your base, the more sails you need, and this also complicates changing direction without crew.

Deep Sea Dangers

If you're lucky, you just get a horrible storm. If you're not, well, there's both maelstroms/etc and sea monsters out here which are quite hard to deal with without capsizing (and taking ship damage is quite likely).

Obake/death system

There are three mechanics, all of which have to do with Obake:

Dying on an island or POI locks all your loot (including what's in your Cart) behind the Obake

Dying on your ship locks fixtures/sails/etc behind an Obake.

If your ship capsizes, regaining access to it is locked behind an Obake and you get a weak raft to use. Needless to say this is *terrible* and will probably also happen a good bit.

Obake need a specific set of materials sacrificed in order to get your stuff back. Reasonably easy, though annoying.

World

Every 3x3 tile on an infinite grid has one archipelago. They can therefore be quite far apart or unreasonably close with shallow water in between. Deep Sea POIs also appear out here on a grid tile basis.

Archipelagos have 10-49 islands randomly distributed on a 7x7 grid. Pyramid scaling for 10-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40-49. Deep Sea tiles are also 7x7, though the POIs can cover more than one space (or just be present on multiple tiles, depending on what it is exactly).

There are some Signs that point to the location of nearby archipelagos and deep sea POIs (and also help you navigate to them), so you're not sailing blind. Maps are obviously more helpful, however. Yours gets filled in as you explore, and various Maps of various types will fill in more details. More on this in the Mapping section.

Archipelagos are temperate (50% chance), cold (25%) or hot (25%). [0,0] is also always temperate. This determines the types of biomes that spawn within islands:

Universal -- beach, cliffs

Temperate -- lake, river, forest, mountains, volcano (rarer), snowcapped peak (rarer), grassland

Hot -- desert, oasis, mesas, volcano (common), jungle, swamp

Cold -- snowcapped peak (common), tundra, pine forest, geothermal, mossland

Each island always has a beach, picks cliffs with 50% chance and picks 1-3 of its possible terrain. Temperate will also, in 25% chance pick either volcano or snowcapped peak.

Island size is distributed -- 5% (or at least one island) will be Large, 30% will be medium (or at least 5), and the rest small. Size here dictates the amount of layers.

Archipelagos can either be Wild, Ancient or Inhabited, each with 1/3 chance. This dictates the proportion of POI types, with Wild having more Wildlike POIs, Ancient having more Ruins and Inhabited having more Settlements. "Heavily" versions (25% chance) replace all other types with the primary POI type. So a "Heavily Ancient" archipelago wouldn't have Wildlike or settlement POIs at all but would have Ruins anywhere that those would've otherwise appeared.

[0,0] is soft Wildlike. More resources, which is important early on.

POI amount is based on the Archipelago and either 50%, 100% or 200% the number of Islands, pyramid scaled. These are distributed completely randomly, promised to islands which then promise them to specific biomes. Biome variations of POIs do all kinds of fun things.

POI sizes, meanwhile, are distributed across all the ones present -- 10% will be large, 30% medium and 60% small.

Large islands make it harder to find POIs for obvious reasons (assuming any exist!), but have more resources in general.

Resources: Basics

Resources are handcrafted and biome/POI-specific. These all have their own special mechanics to harvest them. Stone, wood and fiber are fairly ubiquitous and are needed to make Fixtures that do various things to refine resources. All refinement takes place on your Ship.

Metals are present in Caves, with large POI varieties having a single Jewel (the regular ones don't). Regular caves don't count as POIs.

With the exception of Springs (present in Rivers and Snowcapped Peaks), water has to be refined to be drinkable. It is however an infinite resource either way. Coconut water is also a valuable water source (as are the coconuts themselves) but takes refinement. Still good in a pinch though, with how common Beaches are.

Food is fairly common in a variety of forms, however with the exception of Fruit, has to be processed in some way(s) to be usable -- these versions are better in a bunch of ways however.

Time System / survival needs

A time system is present. Only movement on foot or by Ship increases time, however you can also advance it manually with a Couch. Sleeping will also advance it 8 hours. Various refinement processes take time but somehow magically do what they need to do themselves (idk how that makes sense but it doesn't matter; it's a game balance thing).

You need 8 hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle (starting at 6am), need 3000 calories and 3L of water. A lack of water or food will start degrading your health until it eventually kills you. Hunger in cold areas will kill you 2x as quick, while hot areas it's instead water. The requirements don't change, however.

You can elect to not sleep (and might want to), but this causes the status effect Exhausted, which cuts all your useful stats in half, doubles hunger/thirst requirements, and accumulates a sleep debt of 2 hours per day -- sleeping pulls from the sleep debt first, so 8 hours means you still need 2 more hours to get rid of the status effect. If you reach a cumulative 24 hours of both regular needed sleep plus sleep debt (it takes 8 days), then you sleep 24 hours straight at the end of that day and wake up both hungry and thirsty. It does remove Exhausted, however.

Water and hunger needs accumulate from day to day -- you can fast or drink less or whatever on one day and make it up later. My thinking is that you start at 3000 food and 3000 water and go down by 125 calories of hunger and 125mL of thirst every hour. Some food and water will drop this rate for a while, or can oversaturate.

You can drink from Springs directly. As mentioned, fruit can be eaten as-is, but it doesn't offer many calories or much benefit (with some rare exceptions). Some POIs offer water and/or food so you can explore them more easily.

You also have an Oxygen supply underwater. This can be expanded but it's a bit tricky, a later-game thing. Also you need a Scuba Suit to actually do anything besides bump around blindly.

Sleeping requires a Bedroll and in inclement weather or heat or cold you also need a Tent. These both take up quite a lot of inventory space. A cart with Tent and Bedroll present on the top layer will allow you to sleep directly from its menu. When you get good Looms going you can make a Hammock that covers both Tent and Bedroll and takes up less space -- but the downside is you need to be in a wooded area. This also works with a Cart, but has the same caveats.

You can't sleep inside a POI. You can sleep in a Cave, and it only requires a Bedroll.

Other Stats

Health -- goes down in response to dangerous stuff (or neglecting hunger/thirst). Recovers fully when you sleep, regardless of how long that is.

Mana -- regenerates fully every 24 hour cycle. This also cancels out any benefits to maximum mana.

Stamina -- goes down in response to various mechanics, but recovers quickly in real time.

Various items will improve your stats here (maximum amounts, loss rates, consumable recovery). Food tends to have an effect that lasts quite a while.

Trading System

The Shops system of this game works quite a bit differently. Instead of buying and selling things with some fixed currency, you're instead making Trades. However, Shells (and *particularly* Shell Jewelry) work fairly well as a de facto currency. Nonetheless, this system is quite complex:

Settlements value some things more and other things less. This basically is dictated on the resources that island has, or in the case of Cities on large islands, the archipelago as a whole. You can make highly profitable trades but deep sea travel is probably required and you have to manage the general loose madness of this system.

Individuals can also have preferences (for example, for musical instruments or complex food).

Adornment will allow you to make better trades. This is complex and is based on making clothes out of local predators, the quality of the clothing, the quality of your jewelry, etc. Worth pointing out that you can't wear Adornment and Armor simultaneously.

Doing favors for the local settlement (see: Quests) will allow for more favorable trades, particularly if you get favor from the local Chieftain and/or Shaman.

Doing quests for the Grand Chieftain and/or Grand Shaman (on a City in a Large Island) can improve your reputation in some islands as well, though granted you can't do that until you've gained reputation in several settlements.

Trades

You can talk to each person to get a sense of what that settlement likes/dislikes and that person as well. They rarely tell you about themselves, however. All the information is out there, but distributed among islanders. Same deal with their favorite colors (or a Settlement-wide preference). The words are pretty loose though.

If they have something you want, you can propose a trade for it among items you have. This isn't exactly intuitive. They can have the following responses:

Hate -- You can't trade with them again until 24 hours has elapsed. Trader reputation with the settlement will go down.

Dislike -- They'll basically just tell you that it isn't enough. If you do this too many times they'll tell you to come back tomorrow when you've given it some thought. Different individuals have different tolerances here -- some can even be infinite.

Neutral -- the trade is successful.

Like -- the trade is successful, and your trader reputation with them goes up.

Love -- the trade is successful, and your trader reputation with the settlement in general goes up.

With a higher trade reputation (local or settlement-wide), more items will be available. Other types of reputation just give you better deals. If it goes too far negative, they'll refuse to trade with you altogether unless (or until) your regular reputation is sufficiently high.

You know your stats but you have no idea of how that goes into value in a strict numeric sense, nor the value of any particular item. There's a range of acceptable trades as well.

Shells

Shells can be collected on Beaches. They have a variety of colors and qualities. Shells of any kind can be ground into shell dye -- but doing this with broken or low quality shells makes the most sense. Shell dye is useful in certain Crafts (others take other kinds).

Shells can be made into Shellery at a specialized fixture from Shells of a certain color(s) and quality, and twine of matching quality. These are worth more than the shells that compose them in trades but obviously they're harder to make and a lot of things have to match. The more shells on a piece of Shellery, the more valuable it is.

Storage Mechanics

There are a *lot* of resources of various types on islands. You're going to want to carry a lot. Unfortunately, you have storage considerations:

Your personal inventory is dictated by the quality of your backpack. Without good Sewing skills (and weaving or tanning, etc), it's going to be harder to make the good backpacks. Nonetheless there aren't explicit Labbed limits here.

You can make small simple chests via your general Woodworking skill. These are small and don't necessarily stack correctly so take up more space than they would otherwise.

Better chests (which always stack) require metal pieces, which are a lot harder to make. Quality will improve the space available.

You can make a Cart which allows you to move resources around -- the quality (and material) of its storage section dictates the space available, the quality (and material) of the frame dictates its durability and the quality of the wheels dictates how much slower it makes you. Draft animals work even better for large amounts of storage, but have caveats. See the Carts section.

Jewels are rare and have several uses, but one is making a Magic Chest, which takes up one inventory slot but can hold more than one inventory slot within them. This is your best long-term storage solution since it's recursive -- giving your Cart more room, making you need less room for storage on your ship, etc. However, jewels are rare and magic chests are quite hard to make. You can rarely buy them but they're always valuable so they cost a lot.

Additionally, since food and water are important, you'll want to carry supplies of those as well, unless you can source them. You can live off the land with campfires, but these consume materials as well. More on this in the Camping section.

Equipment doesn't take up storage slots, and with better belts you can equip more -- the downside is this will (usually) impact your speed.

Fixtures

Fixtures take up room on your Ship and are necessary for various refinement/salvaging functions. Also repair/refueling Oxygen/etc.

There aren't Labbed limits to what you can build -- you just set up the project and feed it the required resources. Fixtures can also be upgraded in a similar way. However they can be complicated to build -- they need crafted products (particularly tools), which likely require fixtures of their own.

Fixtures also have a durability that goes down as you use them. When it breaks you can't use it until you replace one of its components (which one it is is random). The more of it that's metal (or refined metal), the better the durability. Upgrades typically follow this schedule, but will also give it additional perks.

Basic fixtures require wood of some kind, stone of some kind and fiber of some kind (likely in crafted forms). All three are widely available. More complex versions require their own fixtures obviously, but at some point it scales back to those three, with a couple exceptions (like clay for kilns). Upgrades obviously require more complex materials.

Horses

Horses can be found on Grasslands, Deserts and Mossland. They have to be tamed via that mechanic and have their own food needs, which are provided by Hay made from grass (infinite in grasslands, limited in Deserts) or Mossfeed (made from moss in mossland, also infinite).

Horses constantly need to be fed or they'll die. There are perks, however:

One will carry you around the world (no cart!) faster and can be equipped with saddlebags for additional storage.

Two and Four can carry Carriages of Medium or Large size respectively, that offer considerably more storage than Carts. Unlike Carts you get a speed boost (though not as much as a horse by itself).

Both types of horses need one unit of feed every 24 hours. The next day if this fails they'll be hungry and move 1/2 as fast. The day after that they'll die.

They can be given fruit or especially sugar for a speed boost. This doesn't replace feed but improves the detriment if they're hungry.

Like Carts, neither Carriages nor Horses can enter POIs, with some exceptions (though granted Carts can enter those areas as well).

There are three horse types, found where you'd expect:

Grasslands Horse -- fairly balanced, -33% speed in hot or cold regions.

Desert Horse -- Fine in hot or temperate regions, 1/2 speed in cold areas.

Alpine horse -- Fine in cold or temperate regions, 1/2 speed in hot areas.

Horses that are part of a 2 or 4 horse team have to be the same type.

If you don't want them to explicitly die, they can be traded away. Might be valuable, might not be. You can sometimes buy them as well, in the archipelago areas you'd expect.

Taming

Taming of horses is a real-time system. They appear in a herd within a 2D grid that you don't explicitly see.

You can move towards a particular horse at a particular speed. This will move you closer to other ones as well by moving along the unseen grid. If they look up, they'll get spooked according to their range stat and spookability stat and threshold for speed stat. If they get spooked altogether they'll run away. This affects everything in the herd. You do see the distance to each. The stats here (and general herd clustering) is based on the horse type in question -- like other stuff you can stick it in your Journal as you encounter them. These are handcrafted.

Anyway, once you've approached a horse successfully, you have to attempt to ride it. This is again real time and you have to lean into turns or you'll get bucked and have to start over. Eventually though its taming bar will fill and it'll be tamed.

Stables

Horses need Stables in order to store them on your Ship. These are relatively easy to build but take up a lot of space. The upside is that you can store a good bit of feed with a lot of fixture upgrades if you're not going to use them for a while. Crewmates can also be assigned to give them feed (granted they're also using food and water, but stockpiles of these and assigned areas makes this more automatic).

Water Storage

All water storage and transfer uses a mL/L system based on the capacity of the container. Water containers can be made of three materials:

Clay -- Clay is infinite so this is an attractive option, however clay vessels have a limited size and a 10% chance to break altogether when moved.

Wood -- doesn't break and has bigger storage sizes if you carve it out of bigger logs (particularly pines). Space is still limited, however, and they degrade over time instead.

Metal -- any size you want, doesn't degrade. The downside is how hard it is to actually make large versions of this without a really good Metalworking skill + enough space to actually do it.

Crafting recipes require a specific amount of water. To make this process easier, you can form-fit vessels of any of these sizes. The amount of that material needed changes (and rounds up).

Canteens

Canteens are helpful for holding water on long journeys. Each one can carry 1L of water. They can be made from coconut husks, animal organs, or metal. The former two are widely available but degrade over time. The latter doesn't degrade but takes up more weight in your backpack. Backpacks of higher quality can have 1-2 canteen slots that are free (regardless of material!)

Canteens can be filled from Springs, boiled/filtered water of various kinds, and (most usefully) filled with infinite snow which will turn to water after 24 hours.

Drinks

All of the above can also hold Drinks, which replenish water and also grant additional benefits (also sometimes a degradation of water amount, ex -- coffee). Drinks are made at a specialized fixture and sometimes require additional ones (roasting and grinding coffee beans for example). Some examples:

Coffee -- increases walking speed, degrades water.

Tea -- increases walking speed less than coffee but doesn't degrade water.

Herbal teas -- protect against status effects of various types, or cures them.

Milk -- replenishes both thirst and (some) hunger. Cream/etc does more for hunger but starts impacting water.

Coconut water -- decreases the amount that thirst goes down for a few hours.

Alcohol -- more strength and stamina, however other skills decrease significantly.

Tonics -- wider benefits.

Poisons -- useful in Traps.

Everything here is homogenous. The quality instead just determines the useful amount you get out of the resources you input.

Food Preservation

There are a variety of food sources, which degrade in their native form, eventually becoming "Rotten food" which just has to be discarded. This depends on the food in question and should make realistic sense. Seeds/nuts/beans last forever.

To get around that you need to either dry or cure them. Dried food lasts a while longer, and is easier to do, but doesn't last forever. Cured food, meanwhile, lasts forever but the downside is it consumes water as well. It also requires salt.

Salt can be obtained from distilling seawater (which is infinite obviously). This is also the main way you get water at sea. You can also find salt rocks.

Both Drying and Curing take place at a Campfire, the latter just also requires salt. See Camp mechanics here. There's a more dedicated fixture on your Ship which doesn't consume rocks the way Campfires do.

Biome Layers

There are Small, Medium and Large islands. They differ in this way:

Small -- each biome only has one map, which corresponds to the primary sub-biome.

Medium -- all sub-biomes are present as their own maps.

Large -- There are multiple areas that have their own sub-biomes.

The bigger the island, the longer it takes to move through biomes. That bottom layer will always take the least time, so in the case of small islands you can traverse through biomes as the same speed as traversing tiles three layers deep.

Bottom layers are always a grid of tiles. There will be a link to an exit and links to each sub biome as well, which goes where you'd expect. For Large Islands there are also links to the other level-2 areas somewhere inside the extended level-2 map (for a beach, maybe it's in the dunes). This does always match the sub-biome, however.

Each biome has three sub-biomes with their own resources. One is primary. Biomes can also have their own mechanics (Tides on Beaches and Cliffs for example).