Like my other pre-organization notes, am moving all related Notes in here. Anything in here will eventually be turned into a checklist in the VII. Loose Ends project.
The conditions surrounding a particular resource changes its name -- for example it makes sense to see prefixes like "Brine" or "Marsh" if the conditions have something to do with green water. Resources with the Mountainous rule might have prefixes like "Peak" in there, etc. Overall this should improve both game feel and player learning.
Discoveries v2
Given this set of changes, the discoveries tab as it is now doesn't make much sense -- though there are already issues with it. So instead, there will be a "Terrain" widget on the left with a "resources" section that tells you what to look for for the resources you've discovered, as well as the number of resources you have left to discover in a dimension.
Resources can be discovered in three ways:
By picking the resource up directly.
By having the resource show up in a recipe or information that traces back to a recipe. This ties into various systems that use materials such as the one that lets you do base or fishing research. Tl;dr though if you want to craft something you'll then at least know how to find the material for it.
By using Books -- this item is also used to open up Lore, but it makes sense here as well and adds another use for that item. It seems like a good idea to make Books also unlock other terrain-based discoveries (like trapping maybe).
Rocks v2
Rocks are getting a serious overhaul and are making their way into caves as well. These changes will make rocks a lot more interesting and useful, while simultaneously simplifying core game mechanics so raw resources are all on the same system.
First of all, both Insects and Rocks will get merged into the Raw Materials category. This means that you can open the Raw Materials tab in your inventory and easily track everything you're picking up instead of it being spread into three categories.
Rocks will become extractable, and the materials extracted from them are what is actually used in recipes (which makes more sense really). Rocks can also have multiple "rocks" within them in different concentrations, and additionally there can be other various useful materials potentially extracted from them with rarer chances.
Cave resources will be rocks rather than metals -- these will however be a bit different.
Overworld Rock Extracts
Flint -- this is where most of the current rock recipes (for weapons, etc) get moved to. A particular rock can be extracted for more than one type of flint, so for example Feldspar might turn into Feldspar Flint but you might also be able to get Feldaas Flint. The naming is mutagenic from the actual rock name.
Powder -- Fine-grained extracts of rocks. This is where the bombs recipe gets moved to.
Ore -- Surface rocks can sometimes have ores in them -- although the extract chance is low, this gives you a way to get metals without going into caves.
Starshard -- Rocks can sometimes have starshards in them, though this is rare. The extraction chance is quite low.
Cave Rock Extracts
Ore -- Always in a cave rock.
Precious Ore -- Also always in a cave rock, however the extraction chance is low. This is the new way to get precious metals.
Oil -- Can sometimes appear in a cave rock. Oil can be used anywhere Fat could have been (Bombs for example) and goes in the same category. Makes torch refueling / bomb creation a lot easier. Oil should also be a fuel refinery target, with some extra system where you have to refine it at least once but can continue to do so -- each refinement is risky to corrupt it but increases the fuel output. Honestly this system would work well with things like uranium as well. Or, since uranium is coming from rocks, merge the two in whatever way makes sense.
Flint, Powder, Starshard -- Cave rocks can resemble overworld rocks, however these substances are less common in cave rocks.
Additionally though I'd like to migrate loot over to pulling from the grand materials list in a dimension + that of dimensions along trade routes (though those are rarer). Would like to get shops on the same system. This would make loot made from stealing a heck of a lot more valuable -- another useful way to get the materials needed for a procgen recipe.
The best way to do the above is to create a separate itemgen function for world-init-gen, and hook that back into the resources generator (which is exactly one place). The rest of the itemgen functions pull from that list or indexes of it (need to make those). Would simplify things a heck of a lot. Trade routes would require prebuilding/indexing those too -- may want to scrap that though.
Another change I'd like to make is to make shops have furniture/loot that matches their specialty 90% of the time -- this was already planned, scrapped, but it does make sense again -- would make looking around for different types of shops way more profitable. Would also make houses different from each other theft-wise which is pretty important. Might require a lot of changes to furniture, or just some hacks to get the loot working differently, depending on how I want to approach this.
Melange itemgens should have some constraints per melange type -- melange dimension drops, melange cabinets, melange crates. (I now have a hook for all of these -- melange_loot{}).
I'm not sure how you unlock this or where it is in the labs.
The Prism fixture lets you turn various elemental items into other elemental items via Recipes.
The basic way it works is that you have to give it some medium-sized amount of a type of elemental item -- this will then become something you can craft. Alternately you can create the unlock via the procgen recipes system or a blueprint thereof -- this should open up additional options like getting fusions really early on potentially (depending on the dimension/seed).
Elemental items should all be aggregated into an "Elemental Materials" or "Prismatic Materials" category. Maybe "Elements" or "Elementals"?
You can also Prismize various elemental items -- this will add their element to the prism (or more specifically the base)'s element count. The amounts here are static and are based on rarity / game balance (scraps/cores/keys are definitely going to have 1:3:9 ratios for example).
You can also Prismize Quartz, Starshards, Aether, Money, base fuel and other basic things like that -- these are necessary base qualities of recipes.
Recipes are random but can be reseeded with starshards. They take some amount of the element and some amount of base qualities.
Any element-based item can go into a prism, including split-elemental things like tetradshards, myr triads or fusions.
If you "Use" your elemental superpowers on elemental fixtures that it attacks like doors, shrines, strange loops, etc, you get some kind of base element item that can be put in the prism for an equivalent amount of that element quality.
Bases Portals (whenever the Portals Update happens)
Base rooms should be able to be connected together cheaply with portals -- this should keep you within the base. Ideally this is cheaper than placing portals outside your base.
There need to be transdimensional attractors or a similar system to make it so you can portal between dimensions or world_floors.
Random note: it worked in the turns-based system as a bug, but it should be a feature in the real-time system --> getting stuck in portal fields should enable time travel. This makes sense from a lore perspective, and is kinda expensive so not as much of an OP thing as you'd think.
Everyone in Shatterloop is some kind of transhuman -- have mentioned this before.
The process that started right before the game started has a tendency to fuck with biological systems. These issues can be resolved by sourcing the correct kind of materials for hand-wavy lore reasons (which will make sense when I build out the lore but not right now). The biological systems affected are:
Medical Biologics -- starting health and health regeneration essentially.
Gastric Biologics -- You should start out with some kind of difficult food/water issue, though not as bad as it currently is in hard mode. And/or it should also be upgradeable fairly easily.
Neurological Biologics -- Your memory's fucked, as are digital memories in your gear (on the same system). The Maintenance guild prepared for this and hardcoded some stuff (like finding Asher). Repairing this will unlock bits of the story, with maybe cutscenes or something.
Aural Reintegration -- When you die you lose all nonphysical stuff on your person (aether, currency, enchantments if I get there, etc). This can be improved but only with exotic materials in the late game.
There are additionally some machine malfunctions:
Atomizer -- needs something to bypass its issue.
Fishing Rod, Crossbow, etc -- Shape integrity issues, need to create crude facsimiles to restore function.
Leaping Latch -- can't jump into the fourth tetrad. This is unfixable - it'll point you towards cave holes instead.
Also probably other stuff that'll tie into the game and/or lore. The early game should feel kinda sci-fi-ish.
Also
Adding to the above, one idea is to make newflesh recalibration a missing biologic. This would force the early game to be a roguelike (with a limit somewhere so you don't forget that upgrade) with permadeath and I can up the difficulty a good bit. This also ties into the lore and story some since you presumably go to a different seeds when you die.
You can't complete a base or enter a town without doing this upgrade.
all named machines should also be key items - you should be able to start with a bunch of them so you can see their desc and lore easily. This also allows you to enchant them. Same deal with modules probably, wherever it makes sense.
Scouts should be able to follow you so you can move around and then send them out again. This should cost Hunger, though not too much (like 1 per movement?) and they should follow you in a natural way relative to their existing position. If you push up against them you should swap with them.
However while they're following you you can only move to water tiles. You can then click "Unfollow" and the menu should always be open, as a "Scout" menu item.
Spectral Scouts should always have Starshard vision and color vision.
To fit into the lore and also the gameplay, you should be able to "go infinite" on various things, particularly stats and items.
Infinity is represented internally by literal javascript Infinity, which seems to just work without additional coding. Getting that value into things like the inventory seems to require a backdoor, however.
It gets hit well before mathematical infinity, because of the physics of the universe. Solid light for example hits it at exactly a million -- it varies depending on what you're doing it with, but a million is a good example. There's some lore to describe why this doesn't consistently happen when people are shipping bulk products or w/e.
.take() and .give() does nothing to change this number, while .has() always works.
Things like the magic system can occasionally cost an infinite amount of something -- in those cases the infinity going into it will work, but will turn to 0 once done.
To get around this, you need to turn the stat or item into ℵ︎ (probably represented by -2). Idk how you do this exactly - I thought up things like enchantments that add infinite mana (or whatever) infinite times, but idk how that would work or if it's even feasible. In any case, ℵ︎ handles both finite amounts and infinite amounts without changing.
Infinite spells do various things with the systems they affect -- this needs to be taken into account when I build the magic system so it doesn't literally try to handle infinity.
Some kind of potential pipeline to hit aleph mana:
Have a way of gaining "infinite" mana, maybe by some kind of ramp -- maybe a megalith that fortifies mana and a spell that revives megaliths that costs less than the mana the megalith gives.
Similarly, have a way of gaining infinite currency -- a decplicator spell plus infinite mana would make short work of it.
With infinite currency, use the Enchanter to make an Enchant Megalith that when the spell is cast, copies it an infinite amount of times. This costs infinite currency to make so it goes down to 0.
Regain infinite currency.
With infinite currency, make a spell that gives you an infinite amount of mana.
Apply this to the megalith, and then also apply the enchantment that recasts its spell infinite times.
Activate it and go aleph.
With aleph mana you'd be able to cast anything that costs infinite mana as many times as you want (including an infinite number of times) without losing any. So from here you could use infinite currency to make a spell that makes your currency infinite, then give it the infinite-cast enchantment so your currency goes aleph.
With those you can make infinitely powerful spells and cast them for free, however you still need a nearby crystallizer. To get around that, make your base fuel infinite (the refinery itself can probably do this, although you have unlimited magic potential at this point and can do it in other ways), turn it into an infinite battery, and make a crystallizer portable -- now any time you camp you can make infinitely-powerful spells. You can also easily get the number of tents to infinite as well.
Starseeding is a system that allows you to change the properties of various items randomly.
Uses a Starseeder fixture (name subject to change obviously).
An item will list out its properties. You can "keep" whichever properties you want, and starseed the rest.
This will then create a brand new item via those properties and apply them to the old item.
Each time you do this costs 3 starshards. Gets expensive quickly, to deter using this to get around tercos/natural game progression.
Unlike v1, there shouldn't be limits because it's just exclusively using the natural itemgen{}. Instead, it should only look at properties the itemgen{} produces.
The hard part of this engine is assigning each item type to an itemgen, based probably on its category and/or properties within it. Nevermind, industry{} simplifies the hell out of this.
The starseeder should be able to make potion ingredients do different things.
Run through the itemgen, sticking a "unique" property on items where the properties are going to vary or are changeable.
This is going to mess with the genetics system a bit -- maybe those species get special names separate from the base species. And again, they need the unique identifier.
Anything that's unique, if you gain more of it, instead append a number on it (and maybe index it in the props as a groupslug thing) so the inventory system works right. Also change the name prop.
The ghost station is a weird fixture that has limited use but can be useful. It essentially targets things that have been Lost for whatever reason.
Bring back Atomized items for 2.0x the aether gained from them (upgradeable up to 1.0 with magic)
Restore Disenchanted Enchantments.
Gain back Sold items.
Restore Fractured items
Pretty much any item that's deleted in some way is instead stored in a "Ghost dimension" and can be revived at a Ghost Station.
Using it requires Ectoplasm, which is gained by *permanently* deleting stuff that's been recycled. There might be other costs as well depending on what you're doing.
Another weird fixture that shares some elements with the Prism. Basically there are a variety of consumable currencies in use in the game, and this (relatively expensive and late-game) fixture allows you to transmogrify between them so you can distribute your wealth in one area better.
The currencies targeted are:
Mana Pool -- the amount you have total, not your maximum.
Dimensional Currencies
Starshards
Base Fuel
Aether
Ectoplasm
Probably stuff I'm forgetting.
The implementation is similar to the Prism -- you need a certain amount of that consumable to be able to work with it, and then you can make trades between it and other ones.
This can be a pretty good way of boosting your mana or starshards, however it's not as broken as you might think because these are expensive and late-game to build. They're definitely a good way to transfer infinities.
Quivers should be renamed to Bows. This will hit a lot of objects, all of which need to be tested again, so delaying this for now.
With this change, you should be able to find Quivers as loot -- these are usable items that add arrows to existing bows.
Whichever shop is running archery (fletchers? just normal weaponsmiths?) should also sell quivers.
General Combat Loose Ends
Weapon speed and effect speed are definitely a thing -- these should vary by the weapon / materials used to craft it and should also be upgradeable in some sane way.
It seems like there's going to be significant overlap between spears and arrows, possibly other handed range weapons as well. Idk what the solution is here yet.
