Aye, I figured you'd come by… Dev Diary #4 is here.
We talked a lot about diving. But the truth is, almost half of DIVE or DIE happens above the dead waters, at the camp!
When your divers climb back out of the Abyssal Pool, they come home to a handful of buildings huddled around a lighthouse, in the middle of a world that drowned a long time ago. That camp is your responsibility. And while the depths try to kill your people quickly, the surface does it slowly, in ways that are easier to ignore until it's too late.
It really comes down to two things: keep your people fed and keep them sane.
Food and old artifacts won't come to you. You either bring them up from your dives, or you set up a system at camp to keep them coming. Focus too hard on diving for crafting resources and your camp might end up losing people because of the lack of food, or worse, sanity.
However, picking up too much food and not enough materials during your dives may impact your long term objective of finding what it all means and what the Rainmaker actually wants. So every day you check the Camp Report, and you watch two numbers that quietly decide everything: Nutrition and Morale.
Nine buildings inside one fragile camp
Your camp is made of nine buildings, each with a job to do:
Lighthouse: to recruit survivors and launch expeditions.
Diving Deck: where every dive begins.
Workshop: to craft your tools and gear.
Town Hall: to level up your crew and divers.
Library: to keep track of what you've discovered.
Memorial: to honor the dead, and you will have a lot of dead!
Fishing Hut: to pull food and treasures from the water.
Infirmary: to heal all kinds of damage to your fragile divers.
Altar: to make offerings when you're out of options.
Most of these speak for themselves. Three of them, in detail below:
The Fishing Hut
Diving isn't the only way to feed your camp. The Fishing Hut lets you pull food, and sometimes treasures like crafting materials or old artifacts, straight out of the water, without sending anyone into the dark. It's slower than a dive and a lot safer, a steady little trickle that keeps everyone alive between expeditions. Put the right person on it, and that makes every drop in the ocean count.
The Infirmary
Nobody comes back from the abyss in one piece, physically or mentally speaking. The Infirmary is where you put them back together, the broken bodies and the cracked minds both alike. Wounds and madness pile up fast down there, and a survivor you don't treat is a survivor you'll be losing with all their upgrades and stats! (Ouch!)
The Altar
And then there's the Altar, for when everything is against you and the days are running short. Here you can offer up nutrition, morale, among other things, to buy yourself a few more days against the Flood. It's never a fair trade but it is worth it! Sometimes, a few more days is all that's standing between your camp and the end of everything.
Who joins, who dives, who dies
Every day, a free survivor or two stumbles upon the Lighthouse and who knows if it’s a boon or a bane? But it still falls to you to decide who stays and who gets left behind, and deal with the consequences. Each one arrives with their own unique stats and traits, and those traits go both ways. Some people are exactly what you've been missing. Others bring trouble you'll be stuck with for a long time, whether you realize it immediately or not.
Just don't forget that everyone you take in is another mouth to feed! Keep more people than your food can support, and you've only made things harder on yourself.
Here's the thing about your people, though. Anyone can dive when you need them to, but they're not all the same. One might be a born fisherman, another better off mending wounds in the Infirmary. Put them where they fit, and they bring buffs that make the whole camp stronger together.
And they do grow… Manning a building or heading out on a dive earns them XP, and leveling up at the Town Hall lets them choose new skills. Fishing, to pull rarer hauls from the water and Medicine, to heal more. Prepare your tools for whatever it is that's waiting below (yikes). So try never to leave someone standing around doing nothing. A day a survivor isn't learning is a day you don't get back.
If you want to go deeper...
There's one more way to make your camp stronger. The kind you don't think too hard about. To understand what the Rain really is, you might have to stop fighting it. And start letting it in.
👁️👄👁️
The Flood is coming. So, we hope you build your camp well and manage it better.
- Théo, Achille & Julien