This week I’ve been looking at add a bit more to exploration. At the moment the only exploration method is to forage, and that effect is hidden.
Today I added actions for explore in the four basic directions. I decided that for now these are locked behind finding the first herb path, so the first thing you see is only forage, but once you’ve discovered a few things explore becomes available. From a story perspective, this means I’m now making that discovery a major milestone – so I should definitely think about how I can add a message at that point. But that’s a future thing once I’ve had a think about story progression. I am tempted to lock these on a separate discovery to simplify things.
While I was at it I fixed a few issues along the way, such as the inability to gather herbs or flowers! It also made me realise it takes far too long to find a herb patch in the first place, so I’ve rebalanced the region generation a bit – now regions generate everything except the first herb patch 10 times further away. This means I can increase the amount of exploration for the first herbs. Note that because I use integer values for exploration distances, I couldn’t move the first patch 10 times closer instead!
Not a huge amount of work done here, but we can now actively explore. It’s not very productive as the world is quite small, and there’s a few display issues, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The next steps are either to make exploration state a bit more visible (an explore page) and also I want to apply an effect from the Ritual of Keen Sight to exploration; this means I have to rework my research a little bit so research can offer multiple modifiers.