Overview

The open world will be a game made with the Engine. It will be similar to Minecraft, but will emphasize realism, emergent gameplay via low-level foundational mechanics, and better graphics.

Principles

Realism

One of the game's goals is to provide a physics-based framework that rewards creativity and knowledge of real-world survival by supporting a wide range of environmental interaction and manipulation mechanics. The framework renders virtually any action possible via abstraction; instead of formal prompts like "press Enter to open the door", there will be many naturally-occurring (not hardcoded) ways to open doors, including using one's hands to turn the handle, picking the lock and then pushing it open with hands, using explosives to destroy the door, starting a fire to burn through the door, using heavy, rigid items to ram the door, etc. Another example: instead of forcing the player to craft prefabricated boat items to venture on the water, buoyancy physics and in-depth crafting mechanics will allow the player to build their own boat from raw materials. Then, to move the boat in the water, they could use sails (cloth/wind physics), rows (the speed of the boat will depend on its weight and the amount of force the character's body can exert into the rows), an engine (mechanical engineering principles enable engines to be crafted from the ground up), etc. In Minecraft, there is only one boat that can be crafted and one way to move it through water. In this game, there will be no limits to boat construction, and a plethora of ways to move it through water.

Ideas

• Modeled after planet Earth, including:
  • Land. World map is the same as Earth's map. Same scale, same climates and biomes. Generated using biome data (elevation, type of terrain, landmarks, etc). Survival in different regions will be completely different, like IRL. Being able to survive in a region of the real world will translate well to the game (and maybe sorta vice-versa!). This will require developers to research real-life biome-specific survival methods.
  • Flora and fauna. The game will have the same species as Earth, in their respective regions. There will be no invented species. This will reward people who are knowledgeable about Earth's biology or skilled at primitive survival IRL by improving their chances of survival in the game. It will also be educational (many times more so than Minecraft was. e.g. Minecraft somewhat misleadingly taught me to cook meat to improve its caloric content (that's not how calories work); This game will take a more realistic approach: Cooking food will improve its nutrient bioavailability, its digestibility, its safety (kills bacteria), etc).
• Body
  • Nutrition
    • Foods contain different nutrients, which effect performance and body health
  • Naturopathy
• Several game mode options for levels/categories of realism
  • This will allow people to get whatever they want out of the game
  • Highest realism setting will be as close to real life survival as possible. For example, meat will go bad depending on temperature, fish won't bite during certain conditions, shelter will need to be built with thermodynamics in mind or it won't keep you warm, etc.
• Player skill: time perception
  • In combat, slow-mo can be activated for varying durations and time scales, improving outcomes of fights

Components

Flora

Fauna

Terrain Gen