Problems with progression and introduction for new players

This issue is a summary of various discussions and my own observations. I hope it would be useful to discuss and document this problem so it can be fixed.

So basically, the main problem here is that survival in Exile is too hard in the beginning, and too easy at the end. This is caused be multiple things, and is partially intentional, since survival becoming easier is part of the focus of the current system of progression. The main problem here lies with the main survival mechanics of hunger and thirst. In the beginning it is very hard to replenish hunger and thirst, unless you already know what you are doing, and figuring out what to do is hard due to these constraints. New players need to be able to randomly stumble into strategies to do that, but due to the fact that they are on a countdown to death each time means that they will probably quit, dying at the beginning with no sign of improvement can be very frustrating. This is true for the tangkal fruits (they are so high up the player might not notice them, and small tress where they are easily accessible are very rare) and for water (digging puddle holes to get it is not intuitive at all to most people). In contrast, at the end once you have a big enough anperla farm set up and more than 10 water pots, you have to never worry about those mechanics ever again. The end of the game switches theme completely, since at that point you can do little other than just build decorative structures or go explore the ancient city, which has similar problems (as a beginner it's too hard to stumble into anything interesting, and once you have everything there is nothing to do). These are the main things that I noticed, feel free to add more.

Possible solutions (obviously more careful thought has to be put into these, this section is just brainstorming):

Make anperla less effective as a food source, possibly lower down the number of tubers per plant from 3 to 6, would also motivate farming other plants
Make random fallen tangkal fruits below trees. The player is more likely to find those and figure out that they are good food.
Plant diseases: add a certain partially controllable threat to the crops. These would make the plant useless and infertile. It adds a motivation of actually tending to the farms (i. e. removing infected crops before infection spreads, that would probably be the only way to fix it, not some way of curing individual plants) Maybe a higher chance of these occurring in better soils? Creates a kind of trolley problem where you have to make a choice of faster harvest with possibility to lose it, or slower harvest and keeping it all.
Food spoilage: self explanatory. Food rots over time. Hard to implement, but would enable a whole new part of tech and strategies for it. This is meant to punish mindlessly hoarding every kind of food item, mostly happens at the end of progression.

I do plan to add some code to make food disappear from trees in winter, and it would be possible to have tangkal fruits fall out of the trees in late autumn. Crop disease/insect pests and food rotting are also on my mind. For the former, I'd like to do blights that affect specific crops and jump to nearby plants of the same kind (so vast fields of just one plant are penalized) and particle-spawner "locusts" that just eat whatever is nearby, endangering vast fields regardless of what you planted. Food rotting could be handled by adding a metadata time stamp to food, and then checking it versus current time when a container or inventory is opened, by overloading the right click before the formspec gets displayed.

Digging a well, or at least a seepage hole, is a real world technique for getting water. I think the main problem with it is most people don't expect video game water to work like that, because games that let you do that are rare as hen's teeth. Personally I had no trouble spotting those orange tangkal fruits up in the trees, but it was a while before I figured out how to get up to them.

It would be good if some fallen fruit could generate at mapgen, so players could immediately find them and eat them, though there would have to be very few ones so that climbing would be required to get a stable supply of them. Food rotting might still be tricky though, since items will probably will have to be checked in multiple instances i. e. player inventories, block inventories, entity forms to avoid cheesing the system.

Another thing that I missed: furnaces/ pottery firing are very hard to grasp, since there is no feedback that your pot is actually firing, and kiln design is a bit hard to intuitively figure out. Maybe pots could glow when they reach temperature and emit particles to show that they are firing? I am very sure that there many issues like this that I don't remember.

Overall, the main goal of this all is for survival to stay an important part of the game even after agriculture is set up and to tech new players. I think this is the change Exile needs to become a complete and coherent game, maybe with a large update to the ancient city as well. At that point I think Exile could almost be set to version 1, or close to that to indicate that there may be bugs.

You wouldn't be able to cheese the rot system via entity forms -- they time out and vanish after a while on their own, although I think there's a setting for how long it lasts. That's an interesting idea to have some visual indication when a pot is heating. I'm not sure what to use that wouldn't look silly, because clay doesn't glow or anything when fired, it's basically just cooking it to remove moisture and harden it. I wonder if the particle system could be rigged up to do some kind of transparent particle sent vertically to fake a cheapo heat haze-ish effect without needing shaders?

When clay gets hot enough it will glow yellowish-white, it is a good indication that it is firing. Though that may happen at higher temperatures, approx. 1000 degrees, so not sure if that would work for the low temperature firings in Exile.

I suppose we could fudge it.

Some thoughts...

New Players: Agree 100%. Needs attention.

I like the idea of people being able to stumble into the correct answer. It's more natural than tutorials.

Also, I preferred allowing multiple strategies. e.g. Iron was always intended to be a choice, not a necessity (but people pursue it because it's there). Perhaps we could have some horrid Zero-level that is actually survivable. Just enough stuff that a noob can survive like an animal. (My very early builds were like this - no tools. Nothing!)

Technology progression is a choice. You can succeed as a wild animal man! If you want.

Final Balance: To get this balance right, it is necessary to imagine what the game will be when all major missing features are added. The current version is far more like regular Minetest than ever intended - those were the easiest elements to implement.

We want the final version to be balanced.

I'm thinking of story elements. Narrative and role-playing are intended to be central features. "End game" is less about building all the technology, more about bringing your character's story to a satisfying end.

I like Rimworld's emphasis on enjoying the story, even if that story is a disaster.

Adding missing realism features: Food rot, pests, disease. All this was planned. The game will always tend towards a post-scarcity utopia, because its a game (you can craft a canoe in two seconds!), but more realism will damp this down.

Another idea.

From my old To Do list.

Multiple spawn points. e.g. have 12 spawn points. Each one from a different faction that exiled you. I was thinking of adding buildings to each one, a different style for each culture. That would give some shelters, examples of kilns, smelters etc. A mini in-world tutorial of sorts.

Some more fully developed thoughts...

The core issue: We are trying to widen the "Skill range" of the game. Accessible for beginners, yet still challenging for experts.

Minimum skill level: We can't design for everyone. So, say, let our minimum be a teenager who has played Minecraft, or an adult with basic familiarity with games. But not, say, a young child, or someone entirely new to all games.

Degree of emphasis on skill: The game has major narrative, social (multiplayer), and creative aspects. It's not merely about tests of skill. No one should feel like the game is punishing them because they want to focus on one of these other aspects. Perhaps some biomes should be comparatively easy to survive, for people who prefer to build or socialize. Meanwhile other biomes can be brutal tests of ability.

Most balanced skill level: Allowing a minimum skill level is different than optimizing the game for beginners. Considering we are all making this for our own enjoyment, balance should be best for mid-to-high skill players.

Progression of Mechanics: Ideally as player skill increases they will engage with new harder game mechanics (e.g pottery kilns). However, those more difficult mechanics must not be essential to play the game at all. Otherwise beginners cannot play (e.g right now pottery is often needed to get water, so beginners give up because this mechanic is too hard).

Minimum skill and knowledge needed to survive:

food
water
rest
temperature

We need some obvious options for each that can be understood by a teenage "Minecraft expat".

Some random ideas

food + water: a small tree that looks reminiscent of a Minecraft apple tree (e.g red fruit) and has a safe sounding name. Make it rare, but available in most biomes. Low value. Few fruit per tree. Function: similar to how beginners use tangkal, but easier to get at, and more widespread so beginners will encounter it early on.
Maybe a bottle gourd plant as an alternative to clay pots. Means beginners can avoid the unfamiliar pottery crafting mechanics.
Rest & temperature: caves do this a bit, but it's still too easy to be cold. Max temp tolerance could be raised e.g. desert dwelling people often walked around semi-naked. Perhaps make clothes protect against sunburn, dust storm damage, etc rather than boost max temp tolerance (following from discussions about Red Ocher - I suspect people used is as sunscreen. I've seen film of semi-naked desert people who cover themselves fully in red ocher). Also, maybe have an easier accessible piece of warm clothing/blanket e.g. a rawhide of a common easily hunted animal, thermally good but very impractical (slowly rots? Attracts flies?).

Partial Failure modes: Get away from binary WIN/FAIL modes. Make it more a spectrum WIN---kinda wining---kinda failing--FAIL. e.g. make death/hypothermia/dehydration long and agonizing. It gives more chance to recover, but remains a painful penalty for failing.

Make Failure fun: Similar to above. The process of screwing up should involve dramatic and interesting experiences. Make respawning exciting e.g. Gee-whizz portal effects on spawning a new character. Give players some skill-free but fun tasks/abilities so they always have something they can succeed at.

Avoid failure traps: e.g. Spawn new players in easy biomes.

in world "Tutorials": e.g. find abandoned books explaining smelters. See old ruins of ovens. NPCs share info.

Actual tutorials/encyclopedia: Immersion breaking, so only as a back up.

Events: Do a few "windfall" events for new players. e.g. a bag full of gear washes up on the beach.

Slow Down hunger/thirst rates: Even giving players an extra 15min before hitting a crisis point would help new players explore/learn.

Adequate Information: e.g. tooltip description of what each health effects does, e.g. tooltip description of what tools and workbenches are for (so you know before spending resources to craft it)

Strategies: Focus tech into two main ways of surviving

mobile hunter-gatherer
settled civilization (also Pastoral herder, and undercity dweller, but we are missing content for those)

At the moment "civilization" is the optimum path because it is so much better when you get there. It's the barrier to entry that makes it a hard choice, not the outcome. Ideally all strategies should be equally "successful", but require radically different play styles with differing pros and cons.

Adding some downsides to civilization (e.g. crop failures = famine), plus strengthening hunter-gather abilities (e.g. clothes from animal skins, water skins) should help make it easier for new players. The unfamiliar game mechanics are mostly on the civilization strategy (e.g. smelters). Hunter-gather crafting is more similar to regular Minetest.

End Game:

The problem with "end game" is expert players have run out of ways to fail. It stops being a primitive survival game, which is the core of Exile. (personally I start setting myself absurd challenges e.g. underwater igloo homes). High level technology (both player made and from the Undercity), need to be kept in check otherwise it dilutes and destroys the core experience of Exile.

A side thought: the Undercity might be the right place for setting crazy hard challenges, things that are borderline unbeatable and require applying all the skills learned in every other part of the game.

here are some ideas:

Food in late game: To make the players less dependent on anperla, maybe implement more recipes with other plants, easy to prepare and with restoration levels similar to anperla, so it makes sense to have crops of different plants. For example: add a salad with Damo, Alaf Seeds and vegetable Oil.
More about Food in late game: Make the character have a favorite food at character creation time (can be mentioned in his Sentence of Exile as they "last meal"), or add a new status effect that comes at random times giving the character the craving for an specific food. So when the character eat their favorite food or desired meal, it will restore more, making the player willing to have the ingredients for as many recipes as possible. (This can also help the new players to discover new recipes, because if "Damo Salad" is mentioned they will try to discover how to mix Damo with other things to make the salad)
Food spoilage: What if the only way to discover if a food is rotten is tasting it, so the check to know how old a food is, only is made when the character attempts to eat it, if the food is rotten instead of finishing eating it, appears in the inventory labelled as rotten.
Other idea about food spoilage: When apples are rotting if a bad apple is kept besides of other apples, all the apples will get rotten, so when the player is eating from a stack, if a rotten piece is found all the rest of the stack gets rotten. Or when the character is eating from the stack use the oldest of dates and a random probability to define if all the stack is rotten.
Thoughts about end game: I also like to put my self absurd challenges (even if i haven't reached end-game yet), so maybe we can add a achievements system, maybe a hidden one, so the player only knows about one once it is finished, things like eat 1000 anperlas, find an underground city, craft a jade block, walk 1000 blocks away from spawn, navigate in a canoe, make a maraka cake... etc. So the player get messages like "You feel like you have eaten too much anperlas", "things are getting deeper and darker", or "I've a feeling we're not in ~~ Kansas ~~ anymore." (instead of Kansas the city from where the character was exiled), and so on... just give to the players the number of achievements completed and the total of achievements, so even if the player reach a stable point where all the needs are supplied, they can have fun trying to discover the missing achievements.
Other achievements: (i can think more if you like) "this isn't my first rodeo", after losing the first life or surviving the first day "leave no stone unturned", after geting the first granite boulder "ouch, that hurts!", after getting damage by punching fire

jeremyshannon / Exile

Problems with progression and introduction for new players #40