Greetings medievalists!
We’ve talked about water interaction with constructions and surfaces, now it’s time to talk about water and organic stuff. To talk about this is to talk about depth levels and how it affects humans, animals and plants.
When it comes to flora, the majority of plants and trees will not be able to grow in water. If water covers them, they’ll slowly start to lose hitpoints. We plan to introduce some simple irrigation systems eventually, through wetness caused by water, but we’ll focus on that once all the planned stuff works as intended.
Animals will be able to walk, haul and eat on shallow water, but the majority of them will not idle nor sleep on such surfaces. The same logic is applied when they swim on surfaces with low depth (previously referenced as medium). Deep water (the deepest water level) will not allow them to pick stuff from the ground nor eat.
Humans follow similar logic as animals but with additional options. They can walk on shallow water, but they can also build on it, play games, eat, pick stuff and cut trees and plants (that can grow on such depth). Low depth allows them to just swim and pick stuff up. In this depth they can swim beneath floors that are positioned on a level above them, but they can’t climb onto it. Deep water allows them just to swim, but they can climb onto surfaces and floors of the same level.
Voxel with low depth water is reached by ladders, stairs and slopes, while deep water voxel is reached from the upper ground level.
Settlers will be able to fight in water, but keep a few things in mind; Shallow water will offer a bit more flexibility, since settlers will be able to use all their weapons and shields as usual, but when it comes to other depth levels, that will only allow for melee combat. Shields will be ineffective and rangers will use fists. With this being water and all, certain penalties will follow combat, related to critical chance, damage, and speed. Simply put, people will fight slower when in water.
Overall, all living things that pass through water will get speed penalty and effectors that will lower their body temperature. Combine that with colder environments and it’s a recipe for getting Hypothermia.
People will be able to pass out on every depth level, but doing so in low and deep water will result in slowly losing health followed up by drowning. When it comes to drowning, yes, you will be able to trap a settler/enemy/animal in a room and fill it with water.
You’ll be happy to hear that fishing is coming to Going Medieval. Fishing is a new order type with which your settlers will be able to catch pike, trout and eels. Pike is just one fish and offers a larger chance of failure during the fishing process, but provides more meat if caught. Trout flock offers multiple fishes to catch and a smaller chance to fail. However, there is not much meat in the whole flock (one pike will give more meat than the entire trout flock in an area. Eels are somewhere in-between these two. You will notice their flocks in water areas close to shores. Settlers with a “Hunt'' job will go and fish in these areas. Once caught, you will be able to directly cook them, smoke them and use them to create various meals.
Unfortunately, boats (nor any water based vehicles) will not appear in the update. Again, to simplify the reasoning behind this: it is not an issue of water logic, rather pathfinding logic. A settler occupies a space of one voxel. If we create a boat, it would have to be lengthy in size, let’s say 3 voxels. Objects of that size wouldn’t be able to pass through narrow passages that players tend to construct in our game. And that’s just if we talk about a boat for one person which… doesn’t look/sound fun. Now, if the boat had a capacity for 4 people, that would be something else. But then comes another problem. What if each person on a boat wants to do something different? What if they want to use a boat automatically so they could pass on the other side? Should they wait for others to board first? If not, that means a settler will try to reach a boat and might miss it, causing them to recalculate their new route to the destination. These are just a few scenarios, but there are many, many different ways these scenarios could occur and developing one system to cover all of it might not be worth the final result.
You will notice that we didn’t mention anything about drinking water. Simply said, that will not be possible. We made a conscious decision to not turn water into a resource. That means settlers will not be able to drink it, harvest it nor use it for say… washing purposes. While we are aware of the common myth that said that people only drank alcohol in medieval times, we also allowed ourselves a bit of flexibility here since our game is set in alternative history where 95% of the global population has perished due to rampant plague. There is also a thing where water as a resource would have to retroactively be integrated with existing systems, which would in turn cause a bunch of unpredictable issues. We might revisit this idea again, but for now we chose to opt out of it.
You might be surprised by this decision, but once you experience all of the available options in the next Update, maybe it will become clear why we choose to do so. While these Medieval Monday Talks are here to give you insight into the game development process, they are also a nice opportunity to set proper expectations.
One more MMT awaits us and it’s coming in two weeks. Maybe then we’ll have a clear date when you can expect this Update. Until that day,
Stay medieval
Foxy Voxel