But the player character is not special, story wise the PC is just a random human.
Would it be possible to “win” the Cataclysm by escaping to space and leaving the planet for a different, Blob-less world? Something like the Exodii did but remaining within the current dimension.
How are you doing anything with a spaceship considering it’s beyond the reach of our entire civilization at this point.
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I suppose you could steal one from a testing and/or manufacturing facility, load it with your stuff, and set sail. There’s no guarantee you could successfully live in space just doing that, but a sufficiently paranoid or adventurous survivor could try.
Something like this would probably be associated with an Old Guard questline for government approved breaking-and-entering into such a facility, likely to retrieve old design papers in exchange for the craft. Alternatively, someone might establish radio contact with the International Space Station and retrieve a few important things to load onto a backup or R&D spaceship and fly up.
Alternatively, you could visit a XEDRA dimensional lab and try to create a portal to someplace within the local dimension and teleport yourself into space, possibly becoming the first individual to travel to another star or galaxy. You’d really just be copying the Exodii in this manner but traveling to virgin stars and planets instead of post-apocalyptic ones.
I thought of that for some time, but the fact that you have the blob in you would mean that if you ever find another planet it should have the chance to inform the big bad blob and just repeat the cycle anyways.
For this to work you’ll have to go grind for the Exodii bod first, but then there’s little reason to not go dimensional joyride with them instead of the uncertain, incomplete spaceflight capabilities of you current civ.
Yes, that does make sense. I suppose finding a way to rid yourself of the Blob would be a pre-requisite to the spaceflight escape, if made into a mission chain or something like that.
Now that I think about it, would crew aboard the ISS be free of blob contamination?
I dunno, do they filter their pee to have water? Because if they get water from Earth then they’ll have the blob as well, what I’m not sure of is if they turned feral or not.
They recycle their urine, yes.
I think we already have a pretty clear answer as to what they think about a “happy ending” currently. Even mere steps towards stopping the blob is not gonna be canon, at least not any time soon.
At least there’s a lot of room to to formulate the salvation of humanity, or at least its survival. While they say that Earth is doomed into getting sucked dry, the Cataclysm is but the beginning in humanity’s journey into the dark days ahead, and not its end.
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The game is unfinished, ofc it’s not going to have “end game” content yet. It is a slow rolling open source project so that sort of content will filter in at the pace of what boils down to a very technical passion project be it by mod or by, like Mr. Granade says someone merging an ender dragon challenge to satiate that desire in the future.
Personally if there was an “end game” challenge a player could go for I think someone a while ago posited adding an “endgame” challenge lab where you go and nuke or sacrifice yourself into a big portal which ends the storms and scattered portals constituting you having “saved” the doomed world which obviously still is completely destroyed and full of monsters. But hey at least you beat the challenge and saved what’s left of humanity?
That would be cool though, but again this whole game is a work in progress and the priority isn’t making that sort of content yet so one shouldn’t expect that sort of thing to be worked out just yet.
The true next stage of the game probably needs to resemble a bit different gameplay in some ways
One of a time 10, 20, 30 years after the cataclysm.
With decaying cities on the order of the old Discovery show “Life after People”, advanced undead, faction wars and NPC AI, etc.
I know they have bases now and people have not been playtesting because the prerequisites are steep. But maybe there should be an advanced start option that has you already in a starting base 3-4 years after the cataclysm to get us more playtesting/ improvements to that game.
Do these NPC faction spawn after some time currently? If so then how long before they appear?
Hub 01, Refugee Center, Exodii, and numerous minor factions are in the game from day zero.
Refugee center, you can get a map to if you have the evacuee shelter stert and go to the computer and select “contact us”. Gives a map to where it is, which could be close. Could be a long, arduous, multi-gaming session journey.
In case of all of them, at current, they are all early Ultima style quest hubs. But a bit lower AI than even late 80s/90s Ultima. In Ultima 4/5//6 the NPCs had basic day to day routines.
As far as I know, they only react with the outside world if something is kited into them or stolen from them after failing a skill challenge. Then they go to a combat AI routine. They just stand there unless Combat is triggered.
They do not send out patrols. There is no real trade or NPC needs with them. Nor do they attack or loot nearby or far away points on the map like a player could.
Edit: when I mean real trade, I mean economy. You can drop off tons of useless stuff for great stuff with no regard to if the faction actually needs that item.
Nah I know them, I’m just wondering if there are others that only appear after some time passed. I already know about the Tacoma ranch, and I keep seeing the Marloss religion folks and the Valhalla ones in data, but never encountered it in a game yet.
What would be nice in terms of factions would be if the player was allowed to interact with Bandits instead of them going immediately aggro on PC.
It would be quite interesting to have a setup where one can actually become a bandit - as it stands, if the player does something that is morally wrong (like attacking another NPC even if in self defense) or “stealing” an item from a dead person, every other NPC nearby will get their panties in a twist and the Player Character will get a morale debuff that almost means the NPC won’t eat or drink anything because they will be “too sad” to craft.
Personally, I think it would be nice to have the choice as to whether we could join the “bad guys” and do missions for them or just staying neutral with them by “helping” them / giving them intel about other survivors.
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I have to say that the real goal for the player, provided that we have a sandbox with survival and choice here, can be added by developing factions. I mean… we only have, approximately, a few factions that we can “join”, mycus, which you can really join (seriously, this is the only way to literally become part of a faction, so also 1 of the most dangerous), a few missions (a couple of NPCs in the refugee center who have a maximum of 3 quests each, quest generator for scientists obsessed with military subjects (who in turn have 4-5 “bring-kill” quests) and for small things), we have no content with factions at all, and there is no what it could lead to: If I could really join the refugee center and get into the subway, then I could not only turn all people into bloody mincemeat, I could also find people there who want to leave the shelter, those who will give me a quest, there would be an opportunity to create a storyline that the leader of the refugee center is a vain scum who is interested in other people’s lives. if I became a significant person in the eyes of the military with the whole navy, I’m sure I could exchange them for some service or resources, at least for fuel, military control or information about something interesting. if I really joined the mycus cult, wouldn’t I be able to complete the quests of the mycus unified mind itself and cleanse the world of the blob, giving unity to all factions, even if they waged a full-scale war with mycus, which would turn the world into an even more dangerous place where only sectarians would be welcome to the player? currently, the factions in which you can contribute are literally useless, they represent nothing more than parts of the history of the cataclysm. their influence on what is happening in the world is very small. all human NPCs are static and do nothing, even mycus with its monstrous growth rate, even in messages in a dream does not ask you to spread more spore colonies in that small town that could be turned into a beautiful mycelium. it feels like the player would be a monkey in a cage, over which they just conduct a fun experiment, and call it to other people on TV, “primate survival in a simulated apocalypse, episode 7: painful death?”
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We could work towards this kind of thing over time, but be aware that what you’re suggesting is an entirely new game worth of content and features.
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Oh. I agree wholeheartedly.
But, doing so would be even more revolutionary than the nested container update and lead to a very dynamic game with much more emergent game play.
And could have fans in and of itself with advanced 5 year starts, done right.
Really looking forward.
I think one cool start with NPC map awareness is in the base camp building and missions itself. Currently, if you build something or send out someone, they disappear into the ether.
I know this probably isn’t ideal and there is probably valid technical reason for it just to pump that feature out. But, it could be so much cooler. And be the gateway to bigger things if these missions actually existed out in the world itself. Where you could ride out in a truck and check on your tree cutters or see and even help the people building your housing unit.
Then to NPC factions…
Imagine running into a Refugee Center raid on a small town in your journey. NPCs piling up foods and ammo and equipment with piled up and pulped zombie corpses everywhere as they eye you cautiously. As they look up at the sky scared as hell and scatter into buildings as a portal storm is coming!
Do you talk to them? Use up precious ammo and take what they gathered, risking retribution if they know the location of your base? Or run into the basements with them not to suffer what lurks in the storms. Sharing what you and your followers have and increasing goodwill.
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