Welcome back to the weekly dev log for the Lost Isle. Getting everything set up the way we wanted to earlier this week didn’t work out, but I’m here regardless with a breakdown on how you can survive the Lost Isle during our upcoming closed beta.
A fairly big part of the human experience involves taking care of the human part of that experience. As part of crafting the Lost Isle, we wanted to take the mundanity of staying alive and turn it into interesting choices, challenges, and motivations. We obviously aren’t the first to do this. There are quite a few excellent and gritty survival games. On the opposite end of the gaming spectrum are many fantastic RPGs where your character has access to so many godlike powers that it just doesn’t make sense to worry about eating.
We’ve played these games. We’ve loved these games. But, we believe that there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t be a paranoid packrat AND an unstoppable killing machine.
In the Lost Isle, you’ll be taking your frail mortality to an old and dangerous world. The same mind worrying about its next meal will also need to grapple with the hungering madness of an eldritch void. You’ll be building a new little home for yourself on the grave of one god and the deathbed of another.
Each player will start on the shores of the Lost Isle with very little in the way of equipment or resources. Like many other survival games, you’ll have to craft tools and equipment to protect and feed yourself. There’s plenty out there that wants to eat you, make sure that you don’t end up on the menu. Your character’s interactions with the world will be based on their stamina and health. Cut down a tree? Lose stamina. Get stabbed? Lose health. Simple enough so far I hope. How do you get health and stamina back? Medical supplies, spells, and (most importantly for this dev log) food.
It couldn’t be a survival game without food, but we wanted there to be more than just a hunger meter. Instead, each character will have three item slots for consumables. When you eat a food item it will fill one of the three slots and give you a temporary buff to your stamina or health recovery AS WELL AS buffs to other skills and aspects of your character. As long as one of those three slots has an item in it, your character won’t take damage from being hungry.
You can, of course, eat things straight off the ground for small buffs. Totally allowed. Not every member of the team will judge you for living that way. I will, but I’m just the writer. I’m not the one who’ll be tearing apart your homes and looting every little thing you managed to gather. If you dare to take an extra second, however, you can cook the food you gather, hunt, and grow into meals that give stronger and longer lasting buffs.
Again most of us won’t judge you for eating off the ground, but there isn’t a single one of us that will complain about you trying to turn your campfire into the Lost Isle’s first restaurant. Either way, we want you to be able to plan meals that will help you survive the darker side of the Lost Isle.
Got questions so far? Post them below. We didn’t want to go in too deep and ruin the experience of mixing foods and herbs, but let us know if you feel more confused than informed. Next week, we’ll jump into the fantasy side of the Lost Isle and talk about the dungeons we’ve scattered around for you to loot and explore.
Thanks for reading!
- Patchwork from Wunder Entertainment