Gradual restore terrain off deed & highway

[Antony 280]

I think terrain should gradually reset very slowly off deeds and highways. You could label this as a tremor, causing the landscape to restore it to normality.

 

This may make the game more appealing to new and returning players looking for natural terrain not lived in by decade old accounts and plateaued hills. It'll allow for players to dig for gems and bones which can only be discovered digging below a depth never reached before on tiles.

[TheTrickster 2,284]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

 

I have pondered this a bit while travelling around on-server, that the terraforming of terrain should slowly fade once fallow.  

 

Have angles of repose for various terrain types and and rates of subsidence for them, so that anything over that angle of repose slowly flattens towards repose, with the rate highest with highest slope and decreasing as the angle of repose is approached.  Sand would be quickest, with dirt not far behind, grass/steppe would be slower and have a higher angle.  Rock would not settle at all.  This will still have an effect of lowering the terrain overall (after all, gravity works), which is true to RL.   Paving, building etc effectively locks in the terraforming.

 

[Jonydowy 616]

It has been suggested a few times i think but they like the idea of ruins and huge signs that someone used to live there.

Which is too bad,i'd love to see terrain slowly go back to its form..or even a new form would be awesome too..anything really,just to make servers nice again. Traveling on smaller servers now days is depressing and while i understand their view..still,there are some hugely terraformed stuff.

[Flubb 773]

I believe Sinduk had a pretty compelling implementation of terrain decay as a WU mod, which I imagine should be easy to transfer to WO if not outright add it.

Likely not on the existing servers though, people are used to the static nature of the terrain there.

But I'd love to see it on the "steam server", it's an all new cluster anyway, if it could just be enabled there and disabled everywhere else; it would make the new cluster a bit more distinct and give the "fresh server experience" it offers over the existing clusters a bit more longevity.

 

Alas, even a partially enabled feature can cause diverging requirements on code, and the plan is to basically just release the same game with a new server and client, so I don't see it happening is a distinct Steam server feature either. Which is a shame because deed ruins could be handled so much better with this, alongside "ruin structures" that could spawn from buildings decaying.

[Cayce 235]

I like this idea a lot, have thought about it myself in the past, but it needs to be thoroughly thoght out.

 

Not everything in Wurm is deeded and I'm not talking about people not living on a deed. Just think of the highways connecting everything or that sweet little meditating path location prepared by someone with hedges and other decoration. And what's with canals/tunnels for traveling? Mines already have a way to prevent them from collapsing - should we also have something to prevent that terrain tremor from happening or would that mean that nothing changes because everyone would use it off deed?

 

It would probably need something like "x tiles away from existing structures or roads". Structures already decay off deed, so in time everything not tended to and not too close to where players want something to stay the way it is, it could slowly diminish and change.

If that WU mod still exists I need to take a look :3

[Ekcin 2,415]

I am somewhat hesitating considering the consequences and possible problems of such changes. Note that on most servers not only deeds and highways exist, but also a huge network of parish roads, hidden paths, little bridges and all that. In fact, for deed holders and alliances aware of and concerned with their environs this might create new sets of chores, could make ways and trails impassable, turn slopes into deadly cliffs and so on. Not to speak of a likely new source of bugs and side effects. We already have super fast building decay once the creator is gone.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Ekcin

[Odynn 2,248]

I have suggested quite a few times a way to regenerate the landscape... not revert it to what it used to be but smooth slopes overtime as long as there are no paving /walls / deeds in their way. Wurm remains a living game and randomly reverting areas to what they used to be years ago wouldn't do it justice, though landscape regeneration (maybe at servers restart) would give new players the feeling of fresh land to explore while retaining some of the previous deeds and ruins aspects.

[Skatyna 439]

15 hours ago, Antony said:

It'll allow for players to dig for gems and bones which can only be discovered digging below a depth never reached before on tiles.

 

Your funny  I dug over 1 million dirt on places and depths never been reached before and NEVER EVER got a bone lmao. GL with that..

[TheTrickster 2,284]

12 hours ago, Odynn said:

I have suggested quite a few times a way to regenerate the landscape... not revert it to what it used to be but smooth slopes overtime as long as there are no paving /walls / deeds in their way. Wurm remains a living game and randomly reverting areas to what they used to be years ago wouldn't do it justice, though landscape regeneration (maybe at servers restart) would give new players the feeling of fresh land to explore while retaining some of the previous deeds and ruins aspects.

 

Yes, this is the kind of thing I envisage.  Structure holds the terrain in place, so nothing happens under roads/paving/walls etc (even packed dirt).  Once those decay, though.....  

 

A basic softening of the landscape, with the changes that have come before blending together and therefore fading, but not reversed.

[Delacroix 348]

-1. A huge selling point to Wurm is the permanence of one's actions, and anything that changes that simply cheapens the experience.

 

If you want a game where your actions don't matter, there's millions already out there.

[TheTrickster 2,284]

On 5/22/2020 at 5:00 AM, Delacroix said:

-1. A huge selling point to Wurm is the permanence of one's actions, and anything that changes that simply cheapens the experience.

 

If you want a game where your actions don't matter, there's millions already out there.

 

Ah, but "selling" point is the key.  Permanence is sold, through deeds with upkeep.  This is about the stuff that has been genuinely abandoned.  The people who have made these changes have already moved on, either somewhere else in game or off the game altogether. 

 

I would argue that permanence is not a particularly strong selling point for getting people to try it out.  When I was looking at Wurm, permanence was not even on my radar.  I figured that it would be available at a price and gave it no more thought.  When starting out, everything I made was low QL anyway, and due to decay was frankly dramatically temporary, with the particular exception of terraforming.  I couldn't keep fences up for a couple of weeks without constant maintenance, but if I dug a large hole and dropped the dirt next to it, then forevermore there is a large hole and a large mound, until someone actively flattens it back out.  At my original village, my yards are long gone, my animals are long dead and gone, my fields are now covered again in trees, every resource I gathered has likely decayed to nothing, but the hole I dug in a sandy beach is still there.   It's kind of comical.

 

That someone else can come along and change it anyway defeats the notion of permanence anyway - that kind of "all your actions leave a permanent change" already simply does not exist in the free landscape.