Build Log #05
New Ways to Die
The fifth biweekly report of the MLM beta
Build Log #04 explained why the production chain was built: because one day the world would ask you to drink. That day arrived. Thirst and lack of air became causes of death, and water turned into the resource that governs a session. Death still means respawning with your belongings intact. Real death, where dying costs you what you carry, comes with partial looting, and the groundwork for it went in this period.
The world stopped being a place where you could stand still.
01What changed on the server side
Grouped by subject.
New causes of death
- Thirst and lack of air can now kill you. Characters die from lack of water in the stomach or lack of air in the lungs. The consequence is unchanged: you respawn and keep your items. Losing what you carry comes later, with partial looting.
- Water runs on a 30 minute clock. Consumption is balanced so a character goes from a full water level to zero in about 30 minutes of continuous play. Roughly 4.8 L per day is needed if drinking alone, though food carries water too.
- Two warnings, one outcome. A message reading "Want to drink." appears somewhere between 1% and 25%, and it appears at random, so you may never see it. "Will die without water." means you are at zero. Death is immediate for now; damage to organs comes later.
- Drinking has limits. A character refuses to keep drinking after about three sips from empty, so you cannot simply top up in one go.
- Offline characters are safe. Air, water, and food are not consumed while logged off.
- Dementals feel it too. Dementals now drink rainwater, at first only while dozing and later at all times, because without it they died too fast. Wake them and they stop drinking, which is now a way to kill them.
Groundwork for lootable death
- Lootable deaths are being prepared. The death signal no longer appears on the radar, the first visible step toward bodies that can be found and looted rather than announced.
- Starting with the deaths you cause yourself. The rollout begins with looting only for deaths from suffocation, thirst, or a lightning ball. Loot drop for other causes was postponed, with a stated few days for players to secure their belongings first.
- Corpses got a system. New mechanics for dead bodies went in, and more than 13,000 corpse piles were removed from the world in one pass to make room for them. A race condition that placed two corpse piles on the same coordinates was found and fixed.
- What stays with you. On death the standard rule applies: everything except what is worn. A matchbox bundle held in hands cannot be lost, unlike loose matches from matchboxes.
Players started hunting players
- The killings began. With looting still not enabled, players nonetheless began killing each other on sight. By mid-period the developer counted three recurring attackers: a clay killer who never appeared again, a shooter stalking hotel guests with a torch, and one killing players at their respawn point with a warfork.
- Nowhere is neutral. Hotel rooms proved no safer than the streets. One player was followed into his own room, killed, and stripped of his valuables before he could return.
- The pistol gives you away, barely. A pistol or revolver shot is heard as "Pop" and carries beyond the visible screen, so sound became the main early-warning system. Other weapons sound different.
- Guns now depend on condition. Weapon condition affects firing. A gun in poor condition often produces a "Click." and does not spend the cartridge. For revolvers, rifles, and shotguns the condition of weapon and cartridge are used; for pistols and assault rifles the magazine condition counts too. Pocketshots can fail as well.
- The available arsenal. Revolver, pistol, shotgun, rifle, and assault rifle are in the game. Handgun and triplegun are Wolf Pack based. A machine gun is planned. A single found ammo box holds around 1,000 pistol cartridges.
- Advice from the developer. Run with sound on to hear the "Pop", check door containers as you pass, lock your doors, and stop treating strangers as friendly now that players from outside have arrived.
Tools, containers, and items
- The chainsaw. Chainsaw quality sets how fast tree condition drops per second, and higher quality burns less diesel. Liquid can be changed while it runs, and sawing must be stopped with Esc before switching, since both hands are needed.
- Cans and bottles open. Cans, whiskey bottles, and cartons can now be opened with the right tool, and the opened containers work as ordinary liquid containers afterward. Cartons in particular became useful for alchemy. A bug that would have left every opened bottle and can empty was caught and fixed before release.
- Matchbox bundles. Twenty full matchboxes, a cardboard folder, and resin at a campfire produce a matchbox bundle worth 1,000 matches, intended as a banknote for moving large amounts without counting.
- Clay flask. The clay flask gives 0.05 L granularity when pouring, the finest control available.
- Medical items. A medical thermometer, tourniquet, latex gloves, rubber warmer, scissors, and a forensic autopsy manual entered the game. Scanning a mob shows relevant medical information.
- Buckets as blindfolds. A bucket can be placed on a target's head to block their sight, provided the hood slot is free. It works on dementals as well as players.
- Rollers and skates. Condition now affects roller blades and skates, giving a speed bonus that applies less reliably at low condition. Stairs are twice as slow on them, and floors inside buildings give double speed.
Interface, world, and loot
- Hover to inspect. Information about interactive objects no longer requires clicking with an empty right hand. Hovering the cursor over an object for two seconds shows its details.
- Predator's vision. A new vision mode was added to the client.
- Buried goods leave a trace. Ground where something has been buried is not visible, but you feel it underfoot as soft soil, and a message reads "Something may be buried here." The ground keeps signalling until the next rain, and heavier rain erases the signs faster, which makes burying during rain the safer practice.
- Rare dementals and denim. The spawn rate was increased fivefold late in the period, which brought more rare dementals into the map. Full decks of cards were found on men in denim, and the chance of a full deck was doubled.
- Tools on dementals. Dementals can now carry tools in hand. Players reported finding crowbars, shovels, shovel axes, axes, pliers, pocketknives, and pipe wrenches among them.
- Noise wakes the dead. Noise makes sleeping dementals wake earlier, including the sound of your own voice, so shooting or talking has consequences beyond the immediate.
Bug hunting and stability
- Two critical bugs found and fixed. One surfaced through a player report and was traced in code; another was caught during the revolver testing. Both were fixed with affected characters restored.
- The freezing bug. A freeze linked to killing or dying, and connected to moving a dumpster or cage while being attacked, was narrowed down through repeated reports and fixed.
- Condition corrected. Items sitting at zero or very low condition were updated after a fix, and the maximum on a repair value was corrected.
- Reporting still matters. The standing instruction to the channel was to report every bug, even ones that cannot be reproduced.
02What changed on the client side
Releases
Several client builds shipped across the period, alongside near-daily server updates. Notable client changes included the hover-to-inspect information system, Predator's vision mode, correct display of newly modelled items, and support for player-supplied demental sounds carried over from the previous period.
Version 14
The v14 build made blind man's buff possible as a playable scenario, added new items, and introduced the matchbox bundle for packing many full matchboxes into a single item holding 1,000 matches.
03Community contributions
If your name isn't here and you contributed, post in the forum and we'll catch you in Build Log #06.
04Events
Demental clearing and weather test, July 12. Dementals stuck around the map were teleported to the Cathedral yard for players to kill. Partway through, a thunderstorm was activated to speed things along, doubling as a live test of severe weather. The gale failed to trigger, so only the thunderstorm was tested. The demental population fell from around 4,000 to roughly 2,300 during the event, and players were asked to clean up the bodies afterward. The conclusion drawn from the feedback was that weather debuffs need to be added before running it again.
The hotel killer, July 13 to 15. A player was followed into his own hotel room, killed in the fight, and returned on an alt to find the valuables already taken. More reports followed of a shooter stalking hotel guests. By mid-period the developer counted three recurring attackers operating in the world: a clay killer who never reappeared, the shooter stalking hotel guests with a torch, and one killing players at respawn with a warfork. The hotel stopped being neutral ground.
Blind man's buff, July 16. A live game in the hotel lobby. One randomly chosen player wore a bucket on their head, blinding them, and had to kill the others with a spear while everyone else wore can alarms on their belts that made noise as they moved. The last survivor won a shotgun.
Russian Roulette Raffle, July 17. Six participants came without any items, anything brought being destroyed permanently, and each received a revolver and 21 cartridges. Standing in a circle, they played six rounds, each round requiring as many cartridges loaded as the number of the round. The last player standing won the forensic autopsy manual.
Thirst and suffocation enabled, July 16. Death from lack of water and lack of air went live as new causes of death, with all water levels reset to maximum at the moment of the update. Items are still kept on death.
Corpse purge, July 17. More than 13,000 corpse piles and all dead bodies were destroyed to make way for the new body mechanics, along with all living dementals at that moment.
05On the bench
Named but not yet shipped:
- Real death. Dying still costs you nothing but time. Partial looting is what makes death real, and it begins with deaths from suffocation, thirst, and lightning. Loot drop from other causes is postponed but coming.
- Hunger. Water is live; food is the other half of the survival loop and is still to follow.
- Organ damage. Death from thirst is immediate today. Later, organs will begin to fail first.
- Weather debuffs. Identified as the next step after the harsh weather test.
- Quality affecting degradation. Quality will later influence how fast items degrade.
- Machine gun and further weapon additions.
06By the numbers
A quick snapshot of the period:
07Closing
Build Log #06 will cover July 19 through August 1.
Water is now the clock every session runs on, and there are more ways to die than there were two weeks ago. What death costs you has not changed yet. That comes with partial looting.