Takes place in real time and uses a database via the gtx0 login directly. I guess if I plan for wider release it could instead have a user-named "name" field that tags the savefile instead if they don't want to login or register. If I get there I'll want to have Pouch Journal capabilities, however.
Lots of procgen stuff all around -- crops, various farming systems, etc.
One Room at [0,0] containing a Plot that can hold 10 plants. Four explorables in each cardinal direction. This tile contains no properties, good or ill.
Access to a few seed types (maybe 4).
Enough starting money to purchase a few seeds (maybe 5 of whatever the lowest price tier that's generated).
Zero refinement capabilities, zero scanning, zero Genetics.
One market with baseline stats and one Market Node.
The farm grid is an """infinite""" (boundless until it hits JS limits which will never be reached in normal gameplay) grid that fans out in all directions from the starting [0,0] tile.
Each tile has four states:
Unknown -- can't do anything with these tiles yet.
Explorable -- the engine will tell you the properties of the room as well as its Resource. An Explorable tile can be Explored for Coin (the game's currency). Exploring will change the tile state to the next one, and collect whatever resource is on the tile. Exploring a tile will also make the tiles orth-1 to it (upgradeable) Explorable.
Explored -- The tile has been explored and the resource has been collected. For Coin, you can Develop the tile into a Farm room, an Industry room or a Modules room.
Developed -- the tile has turned into one of the aforementioned rooms and if a farm room, plants can be placed, and if the other two, fixtures can be placed.
In addition to its Resource, a tile will also have a set of properties that grants boons or banes to various things that are placed in the room. Leveraging time properties is therefore a good overall strategy.
Farming can be done in any developed Farm Room. These are all Plots that start out at having 10 plants (both upgradeable and depending on the tile).
The UI for the game will allow you to purchase Seeds that you've unlocked. Seeds can be bought with Coin and this is always required -- plants don't spawn new seeds.
Seeds can be planted in a Plot.
Growth happens in real time and irrespective of gameplay time. There's a range of values between ~2 hours and ~24 hours for a plant to reach maturity.
Once a plant reaches maturity, it is automatically harvested and the plant is removed from the Plot.
Basic Market Mechanics
When you have some plants in your inventory, you can sell them on the open market. Starting out, you have access to one market with fair prices for everything.
With the Coin earned here, you'll be able to at minimum purchase more seeds -- crop yield at fair prices is worth 2x the seed price. This gives you *something* to work with incrementally in the early game.
Each tile has a single resource. I'm not sure how many there are -- it'll be based on a fair 3-4 prop dist of every possible crafting target. Maybe for the sake of starting simplicity they'll be color coded red,blue,green,yellow,orange,purple,white,black. Or whatever makes sense after I detail things some more.
Resources are crafted together to purchase upgrades -- new Seeds, Industry capabilities and Modules. If there's a ton of these, various sections will be locked away behind Labs which have to first be unlocked and will be a bit more costly than individual recipes. Assuming the Lab system is used (looking pretty likely), then some stuff will be unlocked at the outset at least so you can play with stuff initially.
One of these targets is Transmutation -- each resource has some means of getting there by combining together two other types of resources (or doubling one of them 50% of the time). These recipes are procgen, and realistically the Transmutation targets are locked behind a Lab if not several layers deep.
As far as Seed upgrades go, that one looks like it's boundless because of how much variety there will be in seed types / overall genetics. Modules are probably bounded though because there's a fixed amount of things I'll want them to do, though maybe not; we'll see as I get more into the weeds of it. Industry is also likely to be fixed, although you never know.
