reef barn
[[[Reuploaded from steam forums for sake of furthering discussion within PlanetSmith community]]]
I'm very excited to see this develop. Seeing your technical demonstration on youtube of the work that was put into the project for 5 years so far was most impressive, and I particularly agreed with the complaint against Minecraft that because its world generated infinitely, one direction had no deeper exploration value than any other direction, and all directions were just a roll of the dice for what the game decided to generate in front of you.
Another thing I think Minecraft has always done rather poorly (but really didn't need to) was having good calls to adventure; dynamic events that could happen near the player that would draw them toward adventure or spice up the current gameplay.
Instead of the player going out and finding interesting things, interesting things could come to them and could then either be pursued or completely ignored based on the player's current priorities.
Minecraft (eventually) did these in a few VERY minor, lame ways with things like wandering traders or lightning storms, but overall, Minecraft was designed in such a way that adventure never found you, you had to go and find it, which I always thought was an unnecessary shame to have be the only way to access adventuring content in gameplay.
In an open-world survival crafter, the player will either be adventuring of their own volition and already looking for interesting things anyway, OR they'll be at home expanding their base and/or upgrading their equipment. Having dynamic happenstances that might pull a player away from building and change casual play into tense play, or divert their already ongoing adventure in an unexpected direction that perhaps they hadn't adequately planned for (thus making that outing more interesting) would do wonders to help keep the gameplay loop from ever getting too stale, and it's something I really hope PlanetSmith will do as a recurring design philosophy that I always felt Minecraft badly lacked.
Way too much of Minecraft's good content was gated behind a 'ya' just gotta stumble upon it by chance' approach in how the player got to first experience it, resulting in good content taking far longer than necessary to be enjoyed by the player despite the player being geared up and more than ready for different flavors of excitement in their playthrough. This is something I desperately don't want PlanetSmith to also fall blindly into complacency with as more content gets added to flesh out the experience.
A 'Call To Adventure' design philosophy for PlanetSmith could include both simple and complex calls, scaled both for healthy variation, as well as difficulty.
Simple calls, could be things like a unique, spooky noise coming from a nearby cave that indicates a specific mob has spawned or will spawn somewhere deep within it. Perhaps a pack of roving wolves start skulking around the outskirts of your base if you have livestock in a pen. Maybe just PlanetSmith's own version of a wandering trader. These sorts of calls would be easy to ignore if the player would rather build or was busy with their own adventure.
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