Mounts, travel and buildings

Document 10 · 2 min read

Mounts

Land mounts at launch: horse (fast on the road), big-antlered elk (good in forest and snow) and draft horse for wagons (carries caravan cargo).
In first person: the camera sits at the rider's height, with the reins and the animal's head visible, like the rider in video A. Mounted combat is limited (lance, bow).
Breeding and training: tamers capture and breed mounts; crossbreeding generates bloodlines with stats (speed, stamina, load, looks). Bloodlines give speed, stamina and load within a cap, without combat power; what becomes an NFT is the mount look (see 08).
Care: feed, stable and tiredness, as an economy sink and to bring the animal to life. Without care the mount pauses (stays in the stable, with no hunger or death) instead of dying; absence is not punished (see 20 §2.5).
VR comfort: boat, airship and mount have a stable horizon and a visible fixed reference; a flying mount in VR uses a cockpit-style reference (see 03).
Flying and aquatic: after launch. Flying shrinks a large world and skips over content; when it arrives, it is restricted to its own routes or regions.

Travel

Roads with caravans, outposts and inns.
Limited fast travel: carriages and boats between cities, paid and with a short travel time, with no free teleportation, so the world keeps feeling big and routes have value.
Landmarks visible from afar and a compass in place of a minimap (see 03).

All buildings enterable

Proposal: every building has an interior, with no loading screen on entry. It is one of the strongest promises of a first-person game and one of the most expensive. How to do it without a giant team:

Modular interior kits per style (half-timbered house, stone house, treehouse, tavern, shop, temple), assembled from pieces that fit together.
Procedural furnishing with rules per room type (kitchen, bedroom, workshop) and manual adjustment in important buildings.
Unique hand-made interiors only for story buildings, urban dungeons, town halls and main shops.
Interior streaming when the player approaches the door. At night, the windows show from outside the light of real rooms, the amber of the references.
Player houses and shops use the same system, with the interior decorated by the owner.

For planning: an average village has 40–80 buildings. The alpha has 4 settlements (Lumen, Espelho (Mirror), Galho-Velho (Old Branch) and Ramalta, see 20 §5) and Chapter 1 adds Porto Sal (Salt Port), with a few hundred interiors (number to be recalculated with these settlements). This is only viable with the kits and procedural furnishing.

"Absurdly large" scale

The alpha is the ~~16 km² block around Lumen and the launch is Chapter 1 (~~64 km², see 04 and 25), but the long-term goal is the complete world of 1,120 km² (20 §3), growing in 4×4 km blocks with each expansion. With every building enterable, the usable area is far larger than that of the map.