We come into the most beautiful worlds, where space is guaranteed on a scale large enough for everyone. But there is always far too much of it left untouched, like a poorly cooked dish.
Eventide makes the world around you part of the mechanics, not just a playing field. After all, a game is about the challenges, achievements and stories that emerge along the way. The Breathing World is a process the whole player community takes part in. Today I’ll explain how it works.
So as not to repeat the fundamental arguments behind our concept, let me point you to pieces written a few years ago: “Social Processes in the Breathing World”, “Systemic Differences of the Breathing World” and “Horizon: A Strategy Game with Space” (all in Russian). Although they were written for another project, everything described in them has carried over to Eventide.
To bring our idea to life, we are now using the world of Vintage Story, and with it the possibilities and elements of this post-apocalyptic setting with its grim backstory. The main antagonist here is the dimension of the Rust World, from which strange creatures and phenomena seep through. To these we’ve added the Rust Fog.
The Fog
The Fog doesn’t take space away forever. It covers the world, bringing temporal instability with it. This spatio-temporal mismatch blocks any interaction with objects. But players can set it right.
Any part of the world can be freed from the Fog. After that, everything beneath it becomes available for gathering, reshaping, building and the hundreds of other things any Vintage Story player can do.
The Fog can be compared to what artists call “negative space,” without which you can’t truly appreciate what’s in front of you.
Settlement and Dome
The main features on the “canvas” of a Fog-covered world are settlements, which maintain temporal stability under their own domes. The higher a settlement’s level, the larger the radius of its dome and the more land is freed around it.
Anyone can settle under the dome by staking out plots that protect their property. This is space open for colonization.
The settlement territory is a plot in the center of the dome, relatively small compared to the area freed from the Fog, and protected from Rust World rifts. It is run by whoever founded the settlement, or by a group of like-minded players. We don’t plan to set any significant requirements for founding a settlement or for keeping its dome running at the start.
The main challenge isn’t opening your dome, or even moving your settlement up to the next level. The hardest and most interesting part is building sustainable processes within it.
Civilization Points
Any crafting activity or fighting monsters earns civilization points. It is exactly this kind of activity that sustains the dome’s energy, which keeps the land protected from the Fog temporally stable.
If activity under the dome exceeds its needs, the charge bar fills up and the settlement gets the chance to move up to the next level. At the next level, the dome grows and the freed land around the settlement expands.
The larger the dome’s perimeter, the greater the Fog’s pressure, and the more effort it takes to withstand that pressure, let alone keep progressing.
Please keep in mind that it’s the dome’s outer perimeter that is the key value in calculating pressure. We’ll need it later when we look at neighboring and overlapping domes of several settlements. Spoiler: being neighbors can pay off more than running far away from each other and drawing lonely circles on the map. Though you can do that too.
The Effort Required
One question we keep asking ourselves is how to keep those circles of domes from turning into a hamster wheel that players have to keep spinning out of constant obligation. We believe we’ve found the right balance by adding interest to what you already do while living in the world of Vintage Story.
One of our goals at this stage of Eventide’s development is not to change the core survival gameplay, where every player enjoys almost complete autonomy, but to add new layers of motivation and of interaction with the environment and with other residents, without any obligations imposed on one another. At the same time, we’d like the presence of any other person pursuing their own goals in the same space as you to have obvious value.
There isn’t one scenario in front of you, but many possibilities and combinations of them. More complex crafting earns more civilization points, and so does defeating tougher enemies. More residents, even acting separately, add up to more points. A well-coordinated group expedition into the depths of the caves brings both new finds and trophies and a big influx of civilization points. A well-kept settlement with plots for free building or ready-made buildings for rent attracts new residents.
But even if there is no activity at all under your settlement’s dome for a while, it will take 28 real-world days or more to lose a full charge, depending on the settlement’s level. Once the charge hits zero, the settlement will lose a level and drop to the previous one with the dome’s energy fully restored. Its dome radius will shrink, though.
Translocators
We try to leave the core gameplay of Vintage Story untouched. But it seems there are some mechanics we simply can’t preserve while limiting the available space. We were seriously worried that exploration might be sacrificed, until we unexpectedly came up with a solution that made exploring the world far more interesting than in the original game.
Vintage Story has “translocators”: teleportation devices that players can find and repair. When repaired, such a device links up with one of many other translocators within a radius of up to 8,000 blocks. Sounds simple, except for one detail: translocators are quite hard to find. They lie deep underground in vast, sprawling cave labyrinths inhabited by many dangerous creatures.
Teleportation is convenient, but in the original game the effort it takes to find a translocator didn’t always match the reward. In the time you spend searching for a translocator near your home with no guarantee of success, you could explore exactly the area you need in the direction you want just by traveling on the surface.
In our case, with the land beyond the dome covered in Fog, underground translocators inside the dome have taken on a unique role. When you find and activate one, you are transported to a new place where a small dome of its own forms around the paired translocator, thanks to its link with the settlement’s temporal stability. This gives you new extra territory that rewards your search far more than in the original game.
Enclaves
We call the territory around a paired translocator an “Enclave.” Right now the radius of such a dome is 3 chunks, or 96 blocks, but that’s a matter of balance in any case. Even as it is, an enclave gives you a substantial piece of land where you can find plenty of useful resources or even found a settlement, which would expand the Fog-free radius to 15 chunks (480 blocks).
In its basic form, each enclave is a cozy microworld lost in the Fog, but we don’t recommend settling there without your own source of temporal stability. If the dome on the settlement’s side shrinks and the translocator providing the link from the main dome ends up in the Fog again, the link will break, and the Fog will swallow the enclave too.
Such situations won’t happen very often, and in some cases they won’t happen at all, as we’ll discuss below. So let’s set the apocalyptic mood aside and talk about the unexpected beauty of the enclave concept: deep inside each of them there are several more translocators that will lead you further, and the next ones further still.
The resulting system is somewhat reminiscent of wormholes and W-space in EVE Online, with one difference: any such space you take a liking to can be turned into a big settlement dome and expanded in every direction. What we get is practically endless and truly meaningful exploration.
Temporal Torch and Temporal Surge
Up to this point I’ve been describing mechanics that are already implemented and tested in Eventide. Now I’d like to add a few concepts that aren’t implemented yet to this picture of large and small Fog-free circles on the ground, to show its potential.
We are considering ways to restore temporal stability deliberately but temporarily, which makes the Fog disappear:
- Temporal Torch: a handheld device that consumes temporal gears and, when activated, pushes the Fog back within a range of up to 12 chunks.
- Temporal Surge: a temporary stabilization that occurs at the site of a spatial rift closed by players and lasts for up to 12 real-world hours within a radius of up to 12 chunks.
Both offer a more deliberate strategy for fighting the Fog than translocators, which lead to random places. We have a few more ideas, but for now I’ll stick to these two to show what solutions exist for the dilemma described below.
Pros and Cons of Overlapping Domes
Those handy with a compass may already be wondering: if most of the freed space lies inside a settlement’s dome, how do you found the next settlement without encroaching on someone else’s dome? Without the options listed above for venturing deep into the Fog, and without enclaves, there’s no way.
But are overlapping domes really so bad? Pressure on a dome, as I mentioned, is calculated from the length of its perimeter in contact with the Fog. If another settlement takes on part of that perimeter, it reduces the pressure on your settlement’s dome and makes progress easier. We plan to introduce additional features that unlock for settlements at each level, so progress is more than just a bigger dome radius.
Neighboring settlements work together, pushing back roughly the same area with circles drawn from several centers relatively close to one another. But what happens in the areas where their domes overlap?
Land under any dome is open to everyone. So when two domes are active over the same patch of land, nothing changes. What does matter is who gets the civilization points, and how.
The first thing that comes to mind is to split the points earned between the settlements whose domes are present where the activity happens. But how does that look to a resident of a particular settlement? In such an area, they would earn their settlement fewer civilization points. That creates grounds for conflict, which is the last thing we want. After all, our goal is to make the presence of any other person in the same world as you valuable to you.
What if overlapping domes multiplied activity instead of dividing it? For any activity in the overlap zone, each settlement receives full civilization points. That way a player benefits several settlements at once with a single action.
Territorial Subordination
This approach does come with unavoidable risks, though. In a hypothetical example with two neighboring domes, all is well as long as each of them keeps some part of its own outer perimeter. But one dome can obviously expand much faster than the other, and the result is absorption: one settlement’s dome ends up entirely inside the other’s, no longer touching the Fog and no longer under outside pressure.
In that case it makes sense to assume that the second dome has simply dissolved into the first, and all civilization points in that area now count toward the main dome. The owners of the second settlement still keep their own settlement territory, protected from rifts, with a full system of self-government.
It’s a bit like city-states turning into larger entities. And if things go badly for the main settlement over time and its dome starts to shrink, the absorbed settlement will get its own dome back. It’s anyone’s guess who will end up as the “capital.” The Breathing World always stays dynamic, opening new pages in the world’s history.
The Eternal Dome
Still, our world has to start somewhere, and it has to come to rest somewhere, even in the darkest times of minimal activity. The Eternal Dome of the first settlement is our common safe harbor. This is where colonization begins in the first era, and where everyone can gather to rethink history and start over if forced to retreat before the Fog.
At the heart of the Eternal Dome is an NPC settlement with no real mayor, but you really can live on its territory and anywhere under its dome. The dome is protected by a special artifact and can never drop below the Town level. Whether this settlement can grow, expanding its dome to higher levels, is a topic for another devblog and a more thorough discussion. For now, let’s talk about another important point.
I’ve said several times that we want to interfere with Vintage Story’s core gameplay as little as possible. But there is one stage in the “survival” nature of Vintage Story that, in our view, boxes players in from the very start and may well affect how long people keep playing.
It’s that players are forced to stay for a long time near the spot where they first appeared in the world, a spot they didn’t choose. The need to build a shelter from monsters as quickly as possible and set up a place to make starting gear, plus being thrown back to the spawn point after death, turns a world of any size into little more than an illusion of available space.
We know this from experience. Once we finally had the chance to explore our surroundings and choose an interesting place to live beyond those first runs from the respawn point, moving turned out to be nearly impossible, given everything we had made, built and gathered by then.
In Eventide you’ll be able to explore the available space at your own pace. Perhaps by the time you arrive in our world, there will be many settlements with their own territories where you’ll be welcome. Or perhaps the whole world will only be taking its first uncertain steps toward colonization. What matters is that you’ll have a real choice of where to make your future home. We think that’s important.
Within the Eternal Dome there will be several stable translocators leading to enclaves. Even more such translocators (dozens) won’t be open but can be found. It’s up to you whether to share these finds with others right away or keep them to yourself. The space under the first dome will be large enough to settle there if you wish. Although we think being part of a living settlement is far more interesting, the choice is yours. After all, with a small house and the bare essentials in a place like that, you can take bolder risks in the fight against the Fog.
What the Experiment Is About
The Breathing World concept is a hypothesis that has never been put to a long-term practical test. Right now we are trying these mechanics out ourselves, and I really like the result. I’d love to invite everyone to try what we already have, but I understand how important first impressions are, so we need to polish some mechanics that could affect the outcome.
I fully realize that my own enthusiasm proves nothing, but I’d like to make one important point right away: the Breathing World is a concept for those looking for truly long-term social gameplay.
Many people expect clear progression from games, or are used to “gameplay” that turns into decoding a scheme: what do I need to do to get what I need? As soon as a player reaches the end of the scheme, where progression stops, they lose interest. Vintage Story is no exception here, sadly.
From an individual player’s point of view, that’s not a problem. They “beat the game” and moved on. But for those who want to create a long-term world, and for those who want to settle in such a world for the long haul, it’s a huge problem. In such worlds, progression takes the place of purpose.
Vintage Story has excellent crafting mechanics, some of the most detailed and interesting I’ve seen. Here we make all kinds of tools and gear with ever more advanced technologies until we get to smelting steel. The developers even name the stages of their game that way: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and so on.
It resembles the history of humankind, with one difference: tools have always been a means to life’s ends, not an end in themselves. That’s especially frustrating when you see how richly detailed the unhurried life of Vintage Story is.
With the mechanics described here, we want tools and their progression to take a back seat and become a means again. The goal would then be securing and expanding the space for life and everything it makes possible. Your own life and the lives of others. We fully understand that such a goal doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it’s an important condition for judging what we offer.
The proposed system has room for technological progress that boosts what you can do. But it also has room for much more. For example, social activity aimed at attracting residents. More meaningful PvE activity. Deeper exploration. Building infrastructure and impressive architecture as a competitive advantage. Unlike following technological templates, all of this offers plenty of options and interesting solutions. But above all, those the Breathing World concept is aimed at should be drawn by the stated goal: creating a place for virtual life.