Exile

Created by Dokimi
for Minetest 5.4

CAUTION: Some people may find parts of this game difficult or disturbing.

Installation

Installation from the Minetest ContentDB is preferred; just add Exile from the in-game menu ≫ Content ≫ Browse online content ≫ search in the textbox ≫ click on the Install plus sign.

If extracting manually, Exile should be placed in the games folder of your user’s Minetest settings, like so:

Minetest > games > exile > mods/menu/.../etc.

Where Minetest is ~/.minetest in most Linux, and macOS configurations, ~/.var/app/net.minetest.Minetest/.minetest in Linux Flatpak, and %USERHOME%\Roaming\Minetest in most Windows versions.

Since 0.2.3, Exile requires naturalslopeslib (nsl). If you’re installing the source from git, you’ll need to install nsl as well. Extract it into the ./Exile/mods/ folder or use git pull --recurse submodules if you have cloned the repository.

Gameplay

Challenging, at times brutal, wilderness survival with simple technology. Use your wits to find food, water, and shelter before succumbing to the elements, while exploring the mysterious world, and developing your capacities to endure your exile.

Features

Player health effects — Hypothermia, exhaustion, disease, …
Dynamic natural world — Seasonal weather, erosion, water flows through soil, …
Plausible building materials — Make shelters from the rain, kilns, smelters, …

World Settings

Valleys is the standard mapgen for Exile. Carpathian is also supported, for a somewhat more difficult and slower-paced game.

Flat mostly works, but Merki, and therefore the Glow Paint and Herbal Medicine made from it, will be unavailable. Enable it in game.conf if you’d like to try it anyway.

Gameplay Guide

Check out doc > walkthrough for a more detailed guide.

Many different strategies might work, and part of the fun is figuring out what does, and catastrophically does not, work. ⌣ ⌢

Here are some early steps you might pass though:

1. Craft basic tools. Find a suitable camp site quickly before you get tired.
2. Build a bed to rest in, plus shelter, and maybe fires for warmth.
3. Weave rudimentary clothing and blankets to begin improving your rest rate.
4. Make a kiln, and fire pots. Harvest wild foods from trees while you wait.
5. Collect water with pots, and build up a freshwater supply, into a cistern if needed.
6. Farm food plants, herbs, and fibrous canes to build up supplies.
7. Explore and gather mineral resources for more advanced tools.

You start in spring. Maybe some pangs of winter linger, so beware the night. Enjoy the rains while you can. Soon the hot, dry weather of summer will arrive. Running out of water, or becoming exhausted from the heat, is a real risk. After that will come the sub-zero conditions of winter. Starvation and freezing are hard to avoid without preparation.

Some Tips and Tricks

• Beds are important: If you’re exhausted you get hypothermia/heat stroke. Get under shelter in a nice temperature.
• Time: Do your crafting, organizing, planning while you rest.
• Weather: Extremes sap your energy. Like real life, walking around in a snowstorm is a bad idea!
• Temperature: Build a shelter, with a fire place or lots of torches. You can also go underground; caves sufficiently deep are safe from weather.
• Water: You can drink cave drips (click them). Water pots collect rain water. Some plants, and food quench your thirst. If you’re desperate, you can try to melt ice, or dig a seepage pit in wet ground and wait for water to flow into it.
• Food: Eat things and see if you live! You can catch animals with clubs (right-click while wielding).
• Clothing: Simple grass clothing can be woven quickly, and can be a lifesaver. Better clothes can be made by soaking bundles of the right kind of plants.
• Farming: Digging tools also can till soil. Punching depleted agricultural soils with fertilizers will restore them.
• Illness: Keep an eye on “health effects.” You may have eaten something bad, or have a terrible disease.
• Drugs: Some plants have useful medicinal effects. Be careful not to overdose, however.
• Spelunking: Go deep enough underground and you might find something….
• Woodcutting: Hardwood trees are more difficult to cut than soft wood. You will need better tools for those.
• Climbing: Build stairs and shelters around your base. This will save you energy and protect you from extremes. You can use sticks to build a ladder, or a pole to shimmy up, to get to high places, or descend if you’re careful.
• Environment: Not every step in crafting can be done at a work station. Some things need to be fired, or soaked in water, etc.
• Industry: Build ovens, kilns, furnaces the same as you would for real. Start a fire with access to air, and a sealed chamber that gets heated up.
• Fires: Blocks are hotter than slabs. Charcoal is hotter than wood. Fires can be temporarily extinguished by punching while them holding sediment.
• Charcoal: Make it as you would for real — make a wood fire sealed up to limit airflow.
• Glassmaking: Sand and wood-ash can be made into green glass. The ash must be soaked, dried, and roasted to make clear glass — Glass can be melted onto iron trays to make panes for real windows!
• Iron smelting: This is hard. It needs plenty of charcoal, and a space below the iron mixture for slag to drain out.

Settings for Multiplayer

The variable time_speed defaults to 72, and at this rate a player who logs on at 8:00 AM every day will get a change in season every 2.5 days.

Changing speed to 60 will make days last 24 minutes and a new season every real-world day, but he will see the seasons in reverse. At time_speed of 96, days last only 15 minutes, but the player might see spring (year 1) on day 1, summer (year 2) on day 2, etc.

Set exile_hud_update to 1.0 second for multiplayer servers on the Internet; a LAN server can probably handle 0.2 seconds.

Mods for Multiplayer

• Wield3d is recommended.
• Alternode was used to add the “infotext” popups in the spawn shelter on the Land of Catastrophe server.

Development

Exile is open-source software — that means the game is as good as you choose to make it. It also means development can be erratic and haphazard at times, so be patient!

Exile is currently in “Alpha,” therefore you can expect that there may be bugs, missing features, performance issues, and perhaps compatibility-breaking updates. Despite this, Exile does have enough features to be a playable game and should be stable and mostly bug-free.

See the GitHub repository for known bugs, and to report new ones.

Credits

Gratitude is due to all those whose mods have been adapted for use in Exile (see ./mod/ folders for details).

Thanks also to all who have given feedback, fixes, etc.
A full, up-to-date list of contributors can be found on the GitHub repository, under the Insights tab.