Devlog #6 — Fuel, fire, food and drowning

This round was about the stuff that keeps you alive between fights. Cars now need fuel and can be wrecked. Benches need power or gas to run. Food actually does something when you eat it. And the water finally fights back: stay under too long and you drown. We also gave the whole interface a grimier, Beyond-only look.

A grungier interface

The menus and HUD got a full restyle. Your health, oxygen, food and water now sit as four painted smears running up the bottom-left of the screen instead of a row of icons. Inventory and equipment slots use the same cut-corner squares as the hotbar, and whatever you've got selected glows green. The inventory, loot window and item tooltips all sit on a worn, grungy panel, and the big titles use the same font as our logo.

The new inventory: grunge panel, cut-corner slots, green glow on the selected item

Dying got the same treatment, and we fixed a bug where you'd respawn looking at the inside of your own body.

The whole look is built as a separate layer on top of the base game, so it can be switched off in one click if we ever need to.

Boxes with lids, and barns you can see inside

All 295 loot boxes on the map were swapped for proper crates whose lids swing open while someone is looting them and close again when the last person walks away, with a metal creak each way. Lockers swap to an open-door look the same way.

A crate with its lid open while being looted

The big barns were a problem: very dark inside, and very heavy on performance because their collision used the full-detail model. They now use a much lighter collision shape (three to six times lighter), and interiors are brighter, so you can actually see the loot without us adding new lights.

One of the barns, now lighter on performance and easier to see inside

Cars need fuel, and they break

Cars now burn fuel. You pour refined fuel into the engine bay, and each unit lasts about a minute and a half of flat-out driving. A small driving readout shows fuel and condition.

Cars also take damage now. Hit things hard enough and smoke starts pouring from the bonnet; push it further and the car is wrecked. Wrecked cars can be repaired back to half health with the right parts. When a car is wrecked with people inside, they get thrown out and take a hit instead of dying on the spot.

Untested so far: passengers being thrown out (only the driver has been tested), and how hard you need to hit something before the car takes damage, which still needs tuning.

Power, gas, and recycling

The crafting benches now have running costs:

Generator: burns refined fuel (one unit runs it for five minutes) and powers anything within 25 metres.
Advanced Workbench: needs a running generator nearby.
Chemistry station and Advanced Furnace: need propane. Each holds five bottles, and one bottle lasts ten minutes of use. It only burns while someone is nearby.
Recycler: needs power, takes eight seconds per item and gives back about half the materials. Guns break down into gun parts.

Propane is now in the loot. It turns up in about a third of monument crates and roughly one in five big crates, so you can actually get the chemistry station going.

The monuments also got their own recyclers. They need no power and work much faster (two seconds an item), so the monuments are worth the trip.

A monument recycler, free to use and fast

Food that does something

Up to now, eating did almost nothing. Now:

Raw meat and dirty water fill you a little but make you sick.
The campfire cooks raw meat, raw fish and dirty water in eight seconds each.
The cooking station makes proper meals with buffs:
Hearty Stew: fills you up and heals about 1 health a second for five minutes.
Diver's Broth: halves how fast you use oxygen for ten minutes.

You can only have one meal buff at a time; eating another one replaces it. A small plate above your vitals shows which buff you have and how long it has left.

The food buff plate above the health, oxygen, food and water smears

We also fixed the campfire, which was letting you cook from 56 metres away because of how big the model is. It's back to a normal arm's-length range.

The water fights back

Until now, you could stay underwater forever. Now your oxygen drains once your head goes under (about 33 seconds on a full bar), and at zero you start taking damage. Diver's Broth doubles that time, which makes it a real choice for anyone going after loot underwater.

It also feels different now. Sound goes muffled under the surface, bubbles drift up from your face, and as your air runs low the screen darkens, blurs and loses colour, pulsing faster the closer you get to empty. Come up with less than half a bar and you take a big gasp of air.

Running out of air: the screen darkens, blurs and goes grey

The gasp is a placeholder sound for now and will be replaced with a real recording.

Trees, coming up

We've started on harvesting. We looked at how other survival games handle chopping trees and settled on a plan: the forest stays as cheap scenery until someone hits a tree. Then that one tree becomes choppable, a notch grows in the bark with each swing, and it falls away from you (watch your head). It leaves logs and a stump, and grows back later.

We've also brought in a new set of realistic pines to sit alongside the existing trees.

Our current trees (left) next to the new pines, and a new pine up close

Under the hood

The game's settings (which item is fuel, which is gas, which loot table goes in which crate, the interface art) now live in one place instead of being scattered through the code. We also fixed a crash where the hotbar and vitals could lose their textures mid-game after a long session.

What's next

Choppable trees: the notch, the fall, logs, stumps and regrowth.
Forests on the main map once the tree mix is settled.
Car work: flipping an upside-down car back over, switching seats, and getting into tall vehicles.
A full round of hands-on testing of everything above.