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UPDATED. See page 3 for updated description. You can ignore this whole post.
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This may be a rather wild thing and a very long shot. I don't even like anything similar to The Sims but the more I think about it, the more exciting it looks to me.
Basic explanation:
At some point, after your world becomes a better place to live in (certain bosses killed, certain corruption rate achieved), you may decide to make a child. Not necessary a family. Just a being who will live in your world after your demise. An NPC that you will raise and teach. Eventually you can leave it with a bequest and take control of it afterwards.
Examples of how it can work: Phase 0
You may need to invite other player to make a baby (your partner may need some Gender Change Potion too). How the actual process of conceiving may work in the game and what items or crafting stations it may require (it can be very different depending on someone's imagination) is not important. There is a Nurse, she'll tell you. But first, you need to craft a Baby Bed and select it as a spawn point.
Phase 1: Pregnancy
A debuff applied to female character. Lasts from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Female character needs to have Well Fed buff to maintain HP, otherwise it gets silently drained at 1/sec to 5/sec speed. Movement speed is noticeably decreased, jump height is seriously decreased.
Additionally, monsters' spawn rate is increased and they always try to target character with this debuff first. Each night the Blood Moon or Goblin Invasion happens. Alternatively to this, some special set of monsters starts spawning everywhere regardless of current biome and NPC presence.
Some special actions at this phase may provide permanent mana boost to the baby. Ask Nurse and Wizard.
(the boost may be random and unknown to the player, may require overcoming some tough challenges)
If female character dies during this period, the pregnancy is aborted and everything gets back to normal.
To successfully give a birth, you need to be at Nurse's house, or have her around. When debuff is faded, the baby gets spawned at the Baby Bed and players get notified about this.
Phase 2: Newborn/Infancy
At this point the Baby Bed gets occupied by the baby. Mother character (she should be explicitly set, as there can be other female players around) can now:
Each night the baby may cry loud, attracting some special set of monsters or just invasions.
Some special actions at this phase may provide permanent defense boost to the baby. Ask Nurse and Clothier.
This phase may end by itself after a few in-game days or after certain action.
Phase 3: Childhood
At this point it becomes an NPC that occupies the house with the Baby Bed. Each day he may ask you questions like "What is %item%?", after which you should go and find (or craft) the said item to show it to the child.
When players are away, the child may do some mischiefs:
After 10-20 found items, next phase is initiated.
Phase 4: Adolescence/Adulthood
This time he is an NPC that you can take with you as a Pet (may or may not need a separate slot). Not sure if this will be possible at all: in the worst case the child occupies the Pet slot and mother character can't unmount or disable him.
The guy can act as a light source (has Mining Helmet) and attack enemies with Bow. His spawn point is always his Baby Bed. If he dies, the player has to return to the house to get him active again.
The mother character now must defeat some set (if not all) of bosses while having the child near her. Each defeated boss drops a special trophy.
Some special actions at this point may provide permanent attack boost to the baby. Ask Nurse, Guide and Angler.
Phase 5: Bequest
The child is now is just an NPC that occupies a house. He gives you a Mother Figurine as a memento, with mother character's name carved in it.
After that, you can take any chest and fill it with items, along with the said figurine.
Talk with the Guide, and tell him you are ready to depart for another adventure. After that, several things happen:
Next: Castling/Aftermath
Now the player who controlled a mother character ends up with a new character and a new world accessible from the main menu.
How this may be useful:
My final point of how this may be useful:
This can be a natural way to continue the progress through the worlds - allow the player to breed their own generations of characters. I'm not sure if majority of players prefer starting new world with fresh empty-handed character, or with their most powerful one with tons of unique weapons. Maybe allow the blessed child to start a fresh world only empty-handed, but if that's appealing to anyone, perhaps make some option to randomly give the blessed character some cool equipment to make their next fresh world progress faster? Maybe I'm very wrong here and there is no need in any new world...
...or maybe anything about this next iteration of the world is a whole different thing that needs a separate discussion. Heh.
To conclude, everything here is, of course, just options of how things may work. For example, we could skip the whole phases 1-2 with some Cabbage Seeds sold by Dryad.
UPDATED. See page 3 for updated description. You can ignore this whole post.
---
This may be a rather wild thing and a very long shot. I don't even like anything similar to The Sims but the more I think about it, the more exciting it looks to me.
Basic explanation:
At some point, after your world becomes a better place to live in (certain bosses killed, certain corruption rate achieved), you may decide to make a child. Not necessary a family. Just a being who will live in your world after your demise. An NPC that you will raise and teach. Eventually you can leave it with a bequest and take control of it afterwards.
Examples of how it can work: Phase 0
You may need to invite other player to make a baby (your partner may need some Gender Change Potion too). How the actual process of conceiving may work in the game and what items or crafting stations it may require (it can be very different depending on someone's imagination) is not important. There is a Nurse, she'll tell you. But first, you need to craft a Baby Bed and select it as a spawn point.
Phase 1: Pregnancy
A debuff applied to female character. Lasts from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Female character needs to have Well Fed buff to maintain HP, otherwise it gets silently drained at 1/sec to 5/sec speed. Movement speed is noticeably decreased, jump height is seriously decreased.
Additionally, monsters' spawn rate is increased and they always try to target character with this debuff first. Each night the Blood Moon or Goblin Invasion happens. Alternatively to this, some special set of monsters starts spawning everywhere regardless of current biome and NPC presence.
Some special actions at this phase may provide permanent mana boost to the baby. Ask Nurse and Wizard.
(the boost may be random and unknown to the player, may require overcoming some tough challenges)
If female character dies during this period, the pregnancy is aborted and everything gets back to normal.
To successfully give a birth, you need to be at Nurse's house, or have her around. When debuff is faded, the baby gets spawned at the Baby Bed and players get notified about this.
Phase 2: Newborn/Infancy
At this point the Baby Bed gets occupied by the baby. Mother character (she should be explicitly set, as there can be other female players around) can now:
- set the name by checking the Baby Bed. If the name is same, add roman numbers like "II", "IV", "XXL" etc.
- craft Bottled Milk with Bottle, anywhere, but only limited amount per day.
- give Bottled Milk to baby, as it requires 5 of it per day. Less if it gets enhanced with some Herbs.
- give Bottled Milk to Nurse, or just pay 50 gold to take full care of the baby without any milk.
Each night the baby may cry loud, attracting some special set of monsters or just invasions.
Some special actions at this phase may provide permanent defense boost to the baby. Ask Nurse and Clothier.
This phase may end by itself after a few in-game days or after certain action.
Phase 3: Childhood
At this point it becomes an NPC that occupies the house with the Baby Bed. Each day he may ask you questions like "What is %item%?", after which you should go and find (or craft) the said item to show it to the child.
When players are away, the child may do some mischiefs:
- take some item from some Chest or Dresser and place it in another Chest or Dresser.
- take some item from some Chest or Dresser and don't give it back until a character bring him certain requested item (or a critter) from a wild biome.
- take some item from some NPC, so NPC won't talk with the player until you return the item.
- hide himself in some Chest or Dresser. player has to find him and put back on the Baby Bed.
- randomly turn on and off light sources and switches, open and close doors.
After 10-20 found items, next phase is initiated.
Phase 4: Adolescence/Adulthood
This time he is an NPC that you can take with you as a Pet (may or may not need a separate slot). Not sure if this will be possible at all: in the worst case the child occupies the Pet slot and mother character can't unmount or disable him.
The guy can act as a light source (has Mining Helmet) and attack enemies with Bow. His spawn point is always his Baby Bed. If he dies, the player has to return to the house to get him active again.
The mother character now must defeat some set (if not all) of bosses while having the child near her. Each defeated boss drops a special trophy.
Some special actions at this point may provide permanent attack boost to the baby. Ask Nurse, Guide and Angler.
Phase 5: Bequest
The child is now is just an NPC that occupies a house. He gives you a Mother Figurine as a memento, with mother character's name carved in it.
After that, you can take any chest and fill it with items, along with the said figurine.
Talk with the Guide, and tell him you are ready to depart for another adventure. After that, several things happen:
- a new character gets created, with the name given to the child, with stats changes provided by your actions.
- the chest with the figurine becomes a Bequest Chest and its contents get transferred to the new character.
- a new world gets created, copied from current world.
- a new world gets processed and prepared in a certain way (see below).
Next: Castling/Aftermath
Now the player who controlled a mother character ends up with a new character and a new world accessible from the main menu.
How this may be useful:
- This way, the player may re-visit his original world once more, with all the modifications, buildings, discovered caves etc., intact.
- This may motivate the player to leave some parts of the world untouched. Not only it may be bothersome for people to dig every single place in their world (because there is always an idea about how we will never get to see what our world hides in a fog, because it would require so much time), but it now may be useful for later iteration of this world.
- This may motivate the player to create a better and more useful set of houses. Because you get to play in this world not once but twice.
- The new iteration of the world may get enough interesting changes or stuff.
- New world gets infected by a whole new biome from the start. A rather trivial idea but it may be interesting.
- May include some mystical plot and strange things like:
- all NPCs are gone, player needs to discover what happened. (parallel worlds? alien abjuction?)
- a ghost or projection of Guide may be still present.
- must find everyone, but can only find Statues of NPCs.
- massive flood happened, may require new equipement to move freely.
- night never comes, the time has stopped (or the planet has stopped spinning). Player must fix this.
- A completely new set of bosses is of course unlikely since it'll require too much work.
- some alternative or "ghost" versions of existing bosses may be possible.
- there may be requirements for the original world to be (or to not be) created in Expert mode.
- There may be some additional challenges:
- start with just Bequest Chest contents, with every other chests in the world completely empty. Or locked and requiring keys.
- contents of Bequest Chest may get filtered to not allow certain items, if needed.
- maybe also remove all placed light sources from all the caves.
- a Mother Figurine may be missing and only serves as a final trophy in this world.
- player may choose to keep the Mother Figurine. This way, after several generations, a player may come up with a character who possesses several Mother Figurines... with less useful space in the inventory.
- or make the Mother Figurine consumable which blesses the child character and makes him available for use in other worlds. (Save your own world first, then you can go on your own adventure.)
My final point of how this may be useful:
This can be a natural way to continue the progress through the worlds - allow the player to breed their own generations of characters. I'm not sure if majority of players prefer starting new world with fresh empty-handed character, or with their most powerful one with tons of unique weapons. Maybe allow the blessed child to start a fresh world only empty-handed, but if that's appealing to anyone, perhaps make some option to randomly give the blessed character some cool equipment to make their next fresh world progress faster? Maybe I'm very wrong here and there is no need in any new world...
...or maybe anything about this next iteration of the world is a whole different thing that needs a separate discussion. Heh.
To conclude, everything here is, of course, just options of how things may work. For example, we could skip the whole phases 1-2 with some Cabbage Seeds sold by Dryad.
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