The world is separated into Biomes -- you start in the Forest biome. Distinct rooms are built out of various fragments of fixtures/landmarks/etc and related together in a non-backtracking fractal way. This goes on forever in your current biome.
Various areas have a chance of a Landmark appearing. This Landmark appears totally randomly and isn't based on the area in question, though they'll definitely increase the weight of some specific type appearing and the overall chance of achieving one.
Landmarks are separated into different types:
Lakes
Caves
Nest
Mansions
Towns
Routes
Of the six, Towns and Routes are visitable more than once. The rest fill up a list to their capacity and then will stop generating. Entering one will allow you to interact with it until you leave, at which point it disappears permanently, but opens up a slot for a new one to fill its place.
World Interaction
Each World room contains a variety of fixtures that can be interacted with in various ways with your Pickaxe, Drill, Axe, Shovel and Scythe:
Rocks -- pickaxe, drill
Trees, saplings, branch piles, stumps -- Axe
Dirt, gravel, sand, silt, clay -- Shovel
Other plants -- Scythe
Each fixture has a set of adjective modifiers like color, size, etc that form its identity. Each fixture identified this way can be interacted with in a procgen way to yield either something useful (in some amount) or nothing.
Trees will always give you wood at least.
Any interaction whether it's successful or not will consume 1 durability from your tool. When tools run out of durability they take increasingly longer amounts of real time to use -- so low stakes for sure though this can get super annoying quick.
Tools can be repaired with a homogeneous material known as Metal which is obtainable in various ways. They can also be repaired at Shops for money or fully repaired with a rare Grindstone item.
Lakes allow you to fish with a Fishing Rod. You can do Fish Fishing, Junk Fishing or Big Fish Fishing. Lakes have modifiers that determine the likelihood of these working and other properties, which is always available so it's not really indicated in their names, though different map areas may influence it.
Fish Fishing will consume a Bait item and also decrease the Fishing Rod durability by 1. There will then be a certain amount of real time that passes and then the Fish may be caught or not.
Junk Fishing also consumes Bait and will also allow you to catch fish, however you also have a chance of catching Junk which can be various types of items or literal Junk (which can be Scrapped into something useful or sold).
Big Fish Fishing consumes Fish and allows you to catch bigger fish. These basically just add additional targets to the potion ingredients system and also provide more meat and oil.
Catching a Fish or Big Fish will give you the appropriate type of Corpse.
Whenever you're done with a Lake and leave, the lake disappears and you can't go back.
Caves are long twisty mazes with branching passageways and possibly other stuff as well. They're basically a different Map type. You can't backtrack.
Every time you move forward in a cave, you consume 0.1 Torches. When you run out you have to exit the Cave, at which point it disappears.
Caves can contain fixtures like the overworld, but the focus is on dirts/sands/etc and obviously rocks, which have color/shape attributes.
There will occasionally be Chests, which can be opened to give you some kind of loot or more likely Junk, and occasionally Bronze keys.
There will also *occasionally* be locked doors, with Bronze being most likely, followed by Silver and then Gold. These lead to Loot Rooms if opened by the correct kind of consumable Key.
Loot Rooms tend to contain Torches but also contain a decent amount of Chests. Going into one doesn't consume Torches. Chests will contain the next higher tier of Key if they contain Keys at all. The Loot gets better as you go up the Tiers.
Caves will occasionally contain Bats, which can only be killed with the consumable Arrows, degrading your Bow by 1 point. Bat Corpses are similar to other Animals. Bats are otherwise harmless.
Caves will sometimes have Holes. Going down one takes a Rope and leads to a lower level, which increases the chances of Doors appearing and better rock outcrops as well.
Mansions are also on the zero-backtracking system and contain a series of Rooms.
Rooms can contain various types of open loot which is largely junk or food, as well as Lockboxes which contain treasure if opened by the correct type of key. Unlike with Caves, you can see the treasure before you open one.
The caveat with exploring them is that there are various types of unavoidable Traps that damage your health like falling shelves, gaps in the floor, etc. When you run out of Health you're forced to leave. You also don't regenerate health in here.
Once you leave this way (or by choice) the Mansion is deleted.
Nests let you fight monsters of the appropriate type. These will appear along with Fixtures that you can use for cover, which may or may not work according to the monster in question.
You get a certain amount of turns with your Sword before their speed stat kicks in and it's their turn to attack. Attacks can be dodged various ways which may or may not work depending on the Monster in question.
Attacking degrades your Sword. When it hits maximum degradation, it increases in strength every time you use it, minning out to 1.
If you get hit, you'll take damage. If you have Armor it'll soak up some of the damage but decrease Armor Durability by 1. When this is depleted, the Armor will lose strength until it minns to 0%.
You can also shoot Arrows -- these consume some fraction of a player turn each and deal damage according to your Bow. You can also shoot them *during* an enemy phase. Overall they're very useful in combat, however as a Consumable this limits their utility.
When a monster is dead, you'll gain their Corpse. You can keep fighting the same type of monster in a Nest until you quit or your Health runs out.
You do not regenerate health in battle. You can however restore it or boost it with the appropriate types of Potions.
When you leave a Nest for whatever reason, it's deleted.
You can't enter Towns, Houses, Nests or Caves. You can still use Routes or enter Lakes.
All actions are slow, including movement. If there's already slow actions in place (like degraded tools) it'll multiply the effect.
You can't build a Campfire.
Regaining health requires achieving <~20% Hunger. Then you'll Regenerate in real time, however this will also increase Hunger. If it crosses the threshold you'll stop.
Eating restores a certain amount of Hunger, but different foods also dictate Regeneration rate and your max health. They'll also dictate the threshold above and how much Hunger you lose due to Regeneration.
Hunger also ticks down as you move or do actions, however different foods will have different bonuses herein.
You can Eat at any time in the overworld from the Foods available in your inventory. The food eaten will replace all other bonuses with its own.
Stews
Eating a "Stew" will allow you to mix different foods and get *all* their bonuses. However Stews can only be made at Campfires, and Campfires can't be made if you're at zero health.
Stews are made by using the Cooking Pot tool and throwing foods in there until the combination gets you to 0% Hunger, tallying their bonuses accordingly. You can however pull things out of Stews before making them if you want.
Each use of the Cooking Pot degrades it by 1 durability. At 0 it takes an increasing amount of real time to Cook, otherwise it's instant.
The Frying Pan will cook raw food items in real-time, with the rate dependent on how close it is to the fire. This can be adjusted.
Cooking a food will boost its properties up to a certain temperature and then will start ticking them down instead. The temperature varies depending on the food. Meat tends to require higher temperatures.
At its critical temperature it'll release juice -- this can be either plant juice or meat juice.
You can remove juice or add oil. Foods will gain different properties depending on what they're cooked in between nothing, plant juice, meat juice, oil or combinations depending on the food.
Potion ingredients based on plants can be added as spices with additional potential effects, good or bad.
Resultant items from the Cooking process are heterogeneous items that probably take on additional names.
The Frying Pan loses durability in real time as you cook. When it reaches 0 you can no longer cook.
You can create a Campfire anywhere in the overworld. It takes two wood to get started and then will decrease your wood by 0.1 in real time. When you run out of Wood the fire goes out and you can't do anything else.
Restarting it takes an additional 2 wood plus whatever you need to keep the fire going. I think whatever you're working on should stay in memory however.
Raw items can be turned into more usable ones using the Knife tool, in an extraction process similar to Shatterloop's where you get exactly one item from it. The difference is that potion ingredients are always a 100% chance since that's kinda the basis of the game here.
Extracting a material uses 1 durability of the Knife. At 0 durability it takes an increasingly longer amount of real time to extract (it's normally instant).
Below I'll list out all items and their extracts. They also all contain potion ingredients unless otherwise specified.
Tree, sapling -- wood
Other plants -- fruit/tubers/other food, fiber
Insects -- bait
Fish -- meat, oil
Animal corpses -- meat, oil
Rocks -- metals ores of various types depending on the rock and whether it was pickaxed out or drilled out.
Metals have different names and different properties. They come out of rocks as Ores.
The Crucible turns Ores into Metals on a Campfire in real time according to their melting point, which varies depending on the metal.
Metals have different properties, which allow you to make better Tools. Ores can also be Alloyed into novel Metals that mix names and properties, with the melting point being whatever the highest one is.
You can at least see what kind of properties you're going to get before you make something.
Once melted, the Ores can either turn into specific types of Ingots or just the homogeneous Metal material. The amount you get is the amount of Ores you put in there divided by 2 rounded up. So doing single Metals is more efficient, though not as far as your real world time goes.
Each melt decreases a Crucible durability by 1. When it reaches 0, the whole process takes an increasingly longer amount of time.
You can Craft various things at a Campfire. This also consumes Wood and takes a certain amount of time depending on the recipe (generally short, though Tools take longer).
Tools can be repaired with Metal.
New Tools can be made from Ingots. They take 5 each.
Torches are wood + oil
Ropes cost 3 fiber
Arrows cost wood + fiber + metal and you get 3x.
Tools can be melted back down into 4 of their respective Ingot, however you can't melt down your last tool of that type.
Ingots can be turned into Metal. You can also do this at the Crucible at its end stage.
Routes allow you to go to different overworlds. They're reversible so you can come back. Taking a route does however cost money.
The algorithm here just assigns each area a seed number and connects them together by way of adding/subtracting 1,2 or 3, with areas having +1/-1 connections always and potentially more seeded by the connection itself.
Towns offer either Shops or Services. Each Landmark gives you a new one in some category until they're all filled.
Shops allow you to Buy and Sell stuff in some item type each or maybe aggregates depending on what it is. There's a markup that runs both ways and can be improved down to zero via Potions.
Services meanwhile serve as Analysis / Scanning depending on how those systems work exactly. They cost money, which can be upgraded up to 0 with Potions.
You can access town shops or services at any time from the menu. They also don't disappear once used.
The real meat of the game here are Potions, which tie into *every* system of the game.
Potion ingredients can be pulled from every fixture whatsoever and can also be found on their own as loot or occasionally bought at an Apothecary.
Each ingredient has a certain amount of Potions that can be made from it (maybe 3 or 4). To get a Potion you need to mix at least two ingredients that share the same Potion effect. Adding more uniques doubles the Duration of the potion.
You don't know what any of those effects are until you successfully make a Potion or use an Analysis service on the ingredient. So a lot of potionmaking is blind experimentation.
Potions are made at a Campfire in a Cauldron. They don't take real time unless its durability reaches 0.
