# Adventure/Survival Focused Game Loop

As it stands, the current game loop is just, land on a planet, mine, start research, get good weapons, kill everyone.

While I'm not complaining, as this does offer up a decent amount of flexibility, the people who just play not for the combat tend to get a little shafted, as their route for content ends a tad early.

To increase the engagement and longevity of our gameplay loop, we will focus on and expand our core tenets. These are exploration, survival, combat, and progression.

Restructuring the game around these tenets will create a more interesting and less predictable experience. Alongside this, things are currently very easy and will be more dangerous. By creating a more risky environment we increase player planning and engagement.

## Progression

Progression will be crafting, exploration, and combat focused. Explore the galaxy to further your research, craft new items to prepare you for your exploration, and fight for the chance to steal better gear or tech than you have.

### RND

**Earning points**:

Scanning unique mobs and flora gives you points. Hostile mobs and rare flora grant you more points. You will also discover science notes in ruins and in chests (found scattered throughout worlds). This is on top of experimental surgery, botany, nanites?, and the survey scanner.

**Unlocking tech**:

The destructive analyzer can be used to unlock new technologies. By destroying specific items, flora, and fauna-loot, you will be able to create tech related to that destroyed thing. An example would be unlocking low-level medical technologies after crafting a medical paste from planetary flora.

## Survival

Instead of being provided a ship that gives almost everything to you from the start (combat ships, advanced neu ships, etc) we will strip down available round-start gear to the bare minimum. Item scarcity will be prevalent, making exploration and crafting extremely important.

Planet flora will have gameplay value with differing uses such as medical treatment, food, crafting, damage resistance, and more.

Food will become important, with hunger having greater drawbacks the longer you go without being fed. Some food may have buffs to stamina, resistances, etc.

### Crafting

Crafting items to survive your travels will be common as resource and item scarcity will be prevalent. This includes things like medicine, weaponry, armor, and tools.

To survive some planets you will need to craft resistance buffs.

Lathes will have maintenance requirements like oil or lube to keep them running. You can craft the requirement for maintenance by harvesting resources from planets.

## Exploration

Planet flora and fauna will be overhauled to give you resources that allow for greater variety in crafting and survival

Exploring will be key to leveling up your research

There will be planets of various difficulty (in terms of fauna and the environment), with some planets requiring you to have resistances against certain elements.
An example would be a planet that is radioactive, or one constantly has acid rain. To explore these planets you must craft various items to give you resistances. The harder the planet difficulty, the higher the possible loot.

Planets will not only have ruins, but special flora, fauna, and loot depending on the biome. The more rare the biome, the more rare the loot or mobs.

Planet generation will be overhauled to encourage exploration

## Combat

There will no longer be "Combat ships" or "Factions". See the section on Hostile Space Regions. Ships will no longer start with excess weaponry.

You will need to purchase weapons from traders, cargo, or research and print them.

Traditional crafted weapons will become much more common as guns become rarer.

## Solar System Distribution
Due to the fact that shiptest uses virtual z-levels, it's not quite possible to fully and properly port these over to /tg/. Maybe with some very hacky manuevers, but ideally, these should be avoided.

This gives us the chance to switch to full z-levels, or a separate system that gives us modularability. Of course, with the increased planet size, this ups the memory usage and processing power required to keep them all loaded. Using this strategy would require some large changes to how our solar systems are generated currently.

As an alternative, the number of planets could be massively cut down, into the realm of 4-5 planets. This gives us the flexibility to do a few things

- Increase the number of ruins per planet
- Increase (or remove) the limit for ships docked onto a single planet
- Implement some sort of moon system
- Mostly to provide more things to explore, with a smaller footprint
- Increase the space between planets
- Add more space dangers
- Increase the importance of having your ship adequately fuelled and stocked for long space travel

## Docking / Entering Planets
Landing on planets is buggy.
Sure, we could improve it, and I would LOVE to. However, there are a couple alternatives to explore:

1. Star-trek-esque transporation, i.e. "beaming"
2. Drop-pods

### Beaming
Beaming seems pretty cool. It'd be fairly simple on the code side, and would allow us to play into the whole sci-fi aspect of SS13 pretty well.
However, shifting to survival focused game loop sort of leaves this to standout as too high tech.
Perhaps, some expensive ships could have this, but for smaller ships this sort of thing probably would far too advanced and high-tech.

### Drop pods
Drop pods are sort of the ideal route to take for simple expedition and departure. They can be stocked up with various supplies (food, tools, medical supplies, fuel) and launched onto the planet below.

Potentially, all the pods could be stocked with shelter capsules by default, or something of the sort to help get a quick ground base made up. This would then be used to gather resources, plants, food, etc.

Getting back to the planet should require some extra effort. You just spent all that time gathering resources, you should have to spend a little to get back.

This could be in the style of Rimworld podlaunchers, where you'd need to build a launcher, fuel it and then launch. Maybe we let people choose any ships that are in orbit around the planet to launch into (possible combat situations). The pod would obviously still be available from when you launched onto the planet in the first place. Or new ones could be crafted in the event of natural (or intentional) disaster.

## Hostile Space Regions
Due to having PvP be optional, but wanting it to be encourage it semi limits us in terms of what we can do with combat.

One way of getting around this block, would be to implement space regions. Mainly, a NEU and KOS region.

The NEU region, would probably be one planet, and it's surrounding space area. This would be free of all PvP, and the planet / moons in the area would most likely be fairly lackluster in resources, to encourage players to venture into the KOS zones.

The KOS zones would be full of dangerous, and resourceful planets, plenty more space dangers, and possibly NPC merchant ships (themed as Syndicate, Nanotrasen, TeraGov) selling weapons, armour, and alien tech, and other unobtainable things. And of course, would allow for full PvP between ships.