If you want it all to be a surprise, and not to have major puzzles and goals laid out for you in very bare game-designer terms, if you want the MAGIC of the game to remain, stop reading now!
We've spent a bunch of time this week designing the next steps in Survival mode, and ensuring the tiering and unlocking makes sense, so that a player feels a rapid sense of early accomplishment, as well as laying down their long-term goals - and, quite importantly, ensuring that they can unlock Tier X stuff when they are at Tier X-1.
At some point in the next 2-3 weeks, there will be a major patch that will require you to start a new Survival world. We'll be giving plenty of warning before this happens! There's 2 main reasons for this:
- We don't have any T2 or T3 ores in the worlds
- Crafting and Smelting stations aren't craftable.
The first one should be fairly obvious! The second one probably requires a little more explanation.
The basic storyline of Survival is quite straightforward; you're the stranded member of a futuristic race that rely extensively on robots. Your spacestation was badly damaged in a meteor storm, (caused by everyone in Creative mode) You escape in the nick of time, but, sadly, your ship crashes upon impact, leaving you with just your trusty build gun, 5 torches, a single battery, a smelter, a crafting station and a central power hub to attach everything to. Your short-term goal to survive, and your long term goal to rebuild your spacestation.
These items are all made of the same material that doll's heads are made of, and therefore indestructible. It's less clear why your engineers didn't make the rest of your spaceship out of this same material.
Part of this story is, of course, to stop the player progressing too rapidly; your first Smelter and Crafter are 100% essential for you to progress, but your second one is going to be some hours into the game. This has the knock-on effect of forcing the player to start building their primary base by the crashed spaceship, and ensures that they can't move their entire base right next to their mining operations immediately. Later on, the choices open up, but allowing the player too much freedom initially is the very definition of 'just enough rope to hang yourself by'
Your next Smelter and Crafter will be created using T2 metals (Nickel, Steel, Gold and Titanium) - that allows you to start to design your base however you see fit. It's quite possible we'll require some other reason to force the player back to the surface.
This major patch will introduce T2 metals (possibly T3 as well), and give you the machines you need to progress to T2. It will also allow you to craft the first of the Suit Upgrades. As, personally, I'm absolutely gagging to be able to upgrade my suit a lot, it's quite likely that a slew of craftable upgrades will arrive in very short order!
Major spoilers coming up now. Last chance to stop reading.
When the player starts off, their major hazard is the cold. The first suit upgrade the player is likely to get is the Solar Efficiency T1 upgrade; this should provide ample solar power (during the day) to allow the player to freely move about on the planet's surface. We're aiming for this to be available, random spawns notwithstanding, to be available to the player after an hour or so.
For those of you that have been paying attention, you'll have noticed that, barring bugs, T2 metals spawn BELOW the first cavern layer. This first cavern will be made much more dangerous, leading to the player needing to craft their second suit upgrade to deal with it successfully.
The second suit upgrade is a more efficient heater; we'll be marking off the first cavern as 'extremely cold' - you'll be able to venture quickly into it, but you will drain your suit power and die of hypothermia very very fast. The second suit upgrade should negate a portion of this, allowing you to make headway into the cavern, and thus start work on collecting your T3 ores. CamoBots (which are an internal name, and have no specific game-name) will only be present in this layer, adding a further level of danger.
We'll be applying a similar restriction to the lower cavern layers, which will be much hotter than the first one, leading to the player being forced to craft the improved cooler to progress, and that will require T2 materials.
The reasoning behind this is fairly interesting; the hot/cold/insulation/power mechanics work very very well right now; initially we were going to improve the insulation stat to allow the player access to the first cavern, but that has the knock-on effect that *all* temperature becomes irrelevant to the player.
Upgrading the solar power only effects the surface; upgrading the heater only affects the first cavern, and upgrading the cooler only affects the lower, hotter caverns. It's a neat solution that doesn't render other parts of the game pointless, and allows the player to get a sense of real achievement as they can suddenly get access to new areas.
We are aware that this affects travel in other biomes; so, for example, the player may need to craft a filter for the suit before they can travel in a hot desert.
We also have extensive plans for the suit upgrade and perk system, as well as designs sketched out all the way to the end of the Survival mode. Oh yes, this mode has an end - and when it ends, Manufacture mode begins!