Living Terrain

[sMartins]

One of the things I like the most of resets is the fact that the landscape is nice and untouched, now we have RAIN , so:

Unclaimed Terrain will slowly come back to its original shape, holes will slowly refill and high slopes will slowly smoothed out.

This way also beaches can have the terrain deformation but they will come back to the original shape way faster and only minor slopes allowed.

[Sevenless]

One of the biggest issues with "discovering" lost terrain is paving/terraforming making something very obviously a ruin. And as cool as ruins sound in theory, I think the only thing people really enjoy is finding the items the ruin left behind. Overall, ruins don't seem to decay fast enough. End of world is *filled* with bases that still have objects on them, and the owner not being online for 50 weeks or something.

Not sure how to address the decay part, wouldn't want everything to rot faster right now for sure.

[Jubal_Barca]

One of the biggest issues with "discovering" lost terrain is paving/terraforming making something very obviously a ruin. And as cool as ruins sound in theory, I think the only thing people really enjoy is finding the items the ruin left behind. Overall, ruins don't seem to decay fast enough. End of world is *filled* with bases that still have objects on them, and the owner not being online for 50 weeks or something.

Not sure how to address the decay part, wouldn't want everything to rot faster right now for sure.

I think one could make ruins a lot of fun, but it would be a case of adding explicit ruin-related content. A few things that might be good:

• I'd like it to take a long time (possibly longer than at present) for paving to decay, but also make it more possible to pull it up in a way that recovers the stone after a certain amount of time, so people actively go and dismantle stuff in order to re-use items. Same could be true of dismantling buildings and walls. This might be interesting and mirrors the real world side of things too: the reason a ton of historical walls etc around the world are just foundations is often that people nicked the stone to build something else after they got abandoned.
• I don't know how long claims take to decay, but it feels like that should be a lot, lot faster than object decay.
• Having some explicit "there was a building here but it collapsed/fell down" objects that replace a few of the basic buildings might be quite fun, as basically things you can loot for supplies or maybe which have a percentage chance of a grumpy abandoned household spirit nesting in them that you need to placate or whatever.

So I guess my view could be summed up as "add a couple bits of content but mostly just give fast enough claim decay + the players having enough incentive to pull ruins to pieces and they probably will do that"? Or is there another reason people don't loot or build over good ruins that I'm missing?

[sMartins]

I think the decay speed is somewhat reasonable right now, most of all if we forsee worlds lasting longer and longer with the aim of a persistent world.

Most likely the decay part is very much bounded with general and server perfomances, so there is some kind of tech limit to take in mind.

Having some explicit "there was a building here but it collapsed/fell down" objects that replace a few of the basic buildings might be quite fun, as basically things you can loot for supplies or maybe which have a percentage chance of a grumpy abandoned household spirit nesting in them that you need to placate or whatever.

Very nice! Peculiar buildings for ruins .... a boss fight with the stats of the previous owner and that jazz ..... would be very interesting, and much better than dungeons, that I dislike and I don't consider they fit the game at all.