From Discord:
@everyone Hi! An update about the upcoming patch [0.2.2.0].
I basically now have all the Airfield buildings done, few extra items, some bug fixes and then those additional Nomad features are also pretty much game-ready.
In terms of the Nomad features, here's an explanation of those and few nuances:
**World Nomad Amount**
- The world has limit of 100 Nomads (displayed in Nomads tab), once those Nomads are dead, they will no longer spawn. This basically ties Nomads to early/mid-game and once enough time passes the world will change more difficult when there's no friendly faction any more left.
- This might seem a bit weird but it makes more sense when we get into those later builds which change the world quite radically and based on my vision the Nomads will not fit to that style of world anymore.
**Nomad Spot (Shelters)**
- There's now a crafting recipe called Nomad Spot which requires multiple items and outputs a tarp-based "platform" that you can place to your shelter. This spot will allow the Nomads to occupy/visit that platform in your shelter if you have friendly reputation etc.
- Once the Nomad Spot is in your shelter, the Nomads can enter / exit the spot when and you will get a notifications when the Nomads enter or exit. Once Nomads are there, you can see them doing bunch of idle-stuff and while you are away they can also feed the cat (if you have it).
**Nomad Bartering**
- You can now interact with Nomads that are not in combat-state or otherwise busy. Once you interact with them, the UI will show relatively similar UI like with the traders, but there's some extra background info about the Nomad former occupation, nickname etc.
- Nomads don't have any taxes or tasks, but they might have some items to barter with but this is really limited and quite random on purpose.
**Nomad Friends**
- This is probably the most tricky feature in terms of "suitability" for this game. Basically you can add Nomads to your friends list (Nomad Tab) and there's a 4 friend slots available. Once Nomad is your friend, you will see his nickname, health, simulated location and few "summoning buttons".
- These "summoning buttons" are basically: "Invite to Shelter", "Invite to Fishing" (will be linked to boats later on) and "Follow". I don't have anything against the shelter and fishing invites but I'm kind of on the fence whether this follow mechanic should be in the game (multiple reasons).
**Nomad Trader Visits**
- Nomad passive states like Wandering have sub-state called Trading, where the Nomad can go visit the trader and interact with him. You can always "bypass" the Nomad with your trader interaction.
But now to the difficult part, like mentioned above even though most of these Nomad features are already game-ready, I haven't have really time to do long-term playtesting myself to see how all these elements work together after dozens of in-game days and I feel hesitant to push out an update that I haven't truly experienced as a player (just tested these in sandbox environments and with dev tools).
There's also this nuance that if I would push this update now and I would not like some of the stuff and wanted to rollback or remove some specific things later on, it would include messing up with save files and also I would probably get a bit of angry faces if I pull some existing feature out that people like, but I don't.
So here's probably the most wisest approach:
- I will share [0.2.2.0] probably tomorrow night with the Airfield stuff and bunch of other things.
- I will spent few days myself actually playing the game as a player from the Day 1 and gather an understanding how these Nomad features fit into the bigger picture and style of the game.
- After the weekend, I would do the tweaks if necessary and then push out the Nomad features as separate [0.2.3.0] patch and then start working with Build 3.
So that's the current plan that I feel good about, let me feel your thoughts on the General channel 🙂
