Travel & Survival

Travel & Survival

Unlike RPG games like D&D, where survival often plays a minimal role, in this game we add much more importance to it. This is so the world has meaningful risk and costs associated with it, which add friction to travel between regions and even adventuring locally. Each adventure should require preparation and intent, and should reward properly supplying your party, which in turn feeds the complex player-driven economy.

Mechanics

Mechanically, traveling and exploring take real world time, cost fatigue and also cost hunger and thirst. This happens even while you are not on the webpage, so often a session of the game will end with setting a new travel route after thoroughly preparing, then coming back in a few hours when you arrive at your destination. Generally, you will see your hunger and thirst depleted much faster than your fatigue.

To keep from starving or being parched, you'll need to bring food and water provisions along with you on any trip. Each biome has a difficulty score, which affects how long it takes to travel or explore in the biome. Biomes also have temperatures, which when combined with the gear you are wearing, calculate your current character temperature. If you are too hot, you get thirsty more quickly, and too cold, you get hungry more quickly. If you are very hot or very cold, you also start to take damage.

Travel

Traveling in the game happens on the empire level zoom view of the map interface. You click where you want to go, and the game calculates the fastest route to get there. You'll notice that this brings you along roads, over bridges, and through fields instead of forests. If you want to take a less-optimal route, you can click shorter waypoints along your path and more directly plan your journey. You can press "C" at any time while in this view to cancel your current trip, which will cause you to exit travel mode and be left wherever you currently are. If your fatigue reaches zero while traveling you will automatically sleep, which will pause the travel until the sleep is complete (unless you are traveling with a carriage and driver, in which case you'll keep going while sleeping).

Exploring

Exploring is similar to travel, but instead of selecting a destination, you select a radius to explore around you. The resulting time it takes is a function of the area of exploration and the biomes covered in that area. Once you are done exploring, you will have the chance to discover any hidden locations in the area you explored. These can be temporary wilderness locations, containing harvestable resources, ruins, or dungeons. Or they could be permanent but hidden locations on the map that have to be unlocked through exploration, possibly in combination with certain clues.

Encounters

Both traveling and exploring can result in encounters. These can either be combat encounters or NPC encounters. These encounters are queued up while you are not online, or happen in real time if you happen to be online while traveling. Combat encounters are things like roving bandits, or a wild bear. NPC encounters are things like a traveling merchant, or a strange old hermit.

If you die to an encounter, you will be returned to the city or town you set as your respawn point. You will lose anything you did not have equipped or in your backpack (should you be wearing one). The idea here is to make large caravans a much more attractive target for looting that solo backpacking travelers. These encounters can be PVE, or they can be PVP, with the attackers lying in wait (similar to exploring) to catch any folks traveling through the area.

You can also attempt to escape combat encounters, which can either end with you escaping with all of your entities/items or just your equipment and backpack (but not having to respawn).

Entities

Players can have "entities" with them - these are things like animals, vehicles, and NPCs that travel with you. A lot can be said about entities, but importantly they affect your travel speed and weight capacity. Basically, if you have any sea vehicle (row boat, carrack, galleon, etc), everything else is going to be on that. so that vehicle's speed and capacity are your speed and capacity, everything else's weight (including your own), counts against that capacity. On land, you can travel with groups of entities, like a shepherd with their flock or a caravan of carts. The game is not aimed at developing massive corporations, so players have a limit on how many entities they can travel with (this can be grown to some extent with skills).

Death

If your health should go to zero while traveling, you will die. You will then be resurrected at the last temple or shrine you made an offering at - however, everything you had with you that wasn't equipped will be lost (you keep your backpack and its contents too, if it was equipped). Travel previews will tell you if you will run out of hunger, thirst, or die - but it doesn't prevent you from taking that route. The only times you are prevented traveling are when you are carrying too much, you have an entity requirement missing, or you are trying to travel to a biome you are not allowed to based on your current entities/skills (sea, mountains, etc).