Treadmill world

[jordancoles]

Increase qualities the further east you go to encourage living west and traveling east or setting up small camps to the east and transporting loot back west

[pppp]

The whole idea of treadmill stems from trying to have both unbounded and bounded growth which is logically impossible but psychologically it sometimes can be done. Call it fooling oneself, but whole gaming is fooling oneself to have some fun. Treadmill means that most of the time there is progress but sometimes there is a forced step back. Players have some influence as to when the step back occurs which is easier to accept.

Increase qualities the further east you go to encourage living west and traveling east or setting up small camps to the east and transporting loot back west

I had an idea along these lines but I withheld it because I think it overpowers old side of the world and because it is problematic to fully apply. Since I see a few people would like to give more value to the old side I write it down here:

Regarding qualities and characters it seems the treadmill idea can be applied too, with more or less difficulties and quirks.
In the principle objects would have different qualities if examined in different stripes of the world, decreasing towards the west.
It seems it is quite possible to implement it in case of plants, it is much harder in case of crafted items and looks like shit in case of characters.
It is effectively quality decay and character decay but the moment of stepping back can be chosen by players to a large extent.

Implementation:
Each supergrid or world stripe will be given quality stamp (denoted <qstamp> later), something similar to timestamp concept used in various branches of engineering.
Current world will have quality stamp equal zero.
Each item and structure will have have quality stamp equal to quality stamp of the place where it was created. Each plant would have <qstamp> of the place where it was harvested. Bug warning: when crafting all involved qualities of tools, workstations and ingredients must refer to the same position, e.g. player position, because of some smart borderline tricks.
New grids will have increased quality stamps, say 100 points per new strip. It might be necessary to introduce more than one chain of quality stamps because various items grow quality at different pace.
Item quality for the purpose of using in recipes will be calculated as
<effective quality>=min(10,<created quality>- max(0, <current qstamp>-<created qstamp>)),
it means decreasing effective quality in newer world stripes, but not increasing it if moving towards old world past the place of creation, with safeguard not to go below 10 q.

One option is to apply this method to plant quality only when planting and ignore quality stamps when crafting and using. The effect of this mechanism will be limited but it will still make old grids most valuable soil because planting in newer areas will irreversibly lose quality. Linking chances for q increase with current q and making it decrease with higher q would balance it somewhat and would create a choice between worse start and faster progress vs better start with worse progress and quicker inevitable loss at the end. Reducing q growth with higher q is effectively a hard-ish cap because it can be overcame to some extent. Salem plant purity works in a similar way.
In this configuration each faction which wants to be at the top all the time, not only sometimes will have to grow a line of plants in each world stripe effectively increasing the grind into insane levels. On the other hand growing a line of quality plants every few world stripes might be quite feasible.

The same can be applied to crafting and building structures, that will empower old world even more.

Next stage is to use modified q in using stuff, in particular in using curios and food. Everyone will want to live and eat in the old world.

Then next two stages are to apply decreasing qualities to LP, skills and attributes. That's where disaster begins.
Depending on to which ones of the three treadmill will be applied studying and using LP might be best done in new or old part of the world. There is no way to sensibly balance that because of nonlinear functions (diminishing returns) are indirectly applied to skill and attribute gains. One way or another there will be places privileged for gaining stats and the game focus would shift towards just walking into the right place.

[Lyrroth]

if world isnt very huge compared to this one, its wrong... the world be literally polluted with several camps of the same person to milk benefits from each base on each strip, making the world falsely more alive with less space, not bad idea imo just not fitting tbh iyam

[Attas]

I love this idea, Haven needs more nomadism.

I'd only suggest the lore for this to be the beginning of some sort of ice age. Extreme north is a glacier, extreme south is a tropical hell - this could be done in-game by either some text when you try to cross the world border ("It's too cold/hot to continue"), or graphic animations of seasons (patches of snow in the northernmost regions, lots of dry lands in southern ones).