World
Kalnik is a mountain in Europe, covered in mighty forests, full of inspiring nature and history.
Mighty Forests story takes place somewhere deep in Kalnik forests. Unexpected events brought you and your group of 5 people here, and the best course of action for you is to build yourself a sturdy place to live. Even though you used to live nearby these same woods, noises you can hear around you are not familiar. These woods have certain something which kept them unconquered all these years, and you can just hope you’ll be able to survive and prosper there.
World generator
Map is endless. In all directions. You can mine and mine and you’ll never reach bottom. You can finally build the tallest tower in the world. Or walls which would shame Great wall to tears.
Road
Road runs through the whole map, generates tunnels if mountains are too high, creates bridges if it goes over lake. Since you’ve red the Game story, you know that the road is as straight as possible, so the path through the forests of Kalnik would be as short as possible. That is why road goes over lakes, and not because I, at that moment, didn’t know how to create road which goes around a lake and it was easier for me to build a bridge across. With pillars and all.
When you connect your settlement, road travellers might visit your settlement if they find you relevant to them. You’ll be relevant to passing traders if you do a lot of trading. People in need will more often knock on your doo… hmm.. castle gate if you are famous for helping others.
Not building connection to the road won’t spare you occasional visits by friendly bandits who just want your metal, or a trader running from the wolves. It’ll just greatly reduce travellers coming from the road, and not all creatures in Kalnik forests use the road.
Fame
There are few fame categories, Inn keeping, Trading, Crafting, Military, Helpfulness
Yes, this means you’ll be able to receive guests, feed them and rent them rooms. And, if you want to be the best host, trying to fulfil their every wish.
Yes, also, there will be trading. Not just ingame NPC trading. No, no, you’ll also be able to trade with other players on other maps via this site’s Forum.
And yes, there will be crafting, helping creatures in need and occasional battle. If nothing, then just to scare wolves away.
Blueprints
Did it ever happen to you that you finish a nice and advanced north city wall, and then you realized you have to do the same thing three more times? Or you keep looking at the beauty of that tower and wishing you can easily build the same one, rotated, on few more places?
Well, worry no more, we are adding blueprints. You can mark any 3D area and create blueprint of whatever is inside, which you can rotate, mirror (left right mirror, not upside down so the roof goes down, but I’m willing to add that feature if you push me). You can share your blueprints between your games AND on the Forums via in game menu.
Be aware though, I’ll look at the best published blueprints and I WILL teach bad guys how to build those quickly and use them on your map against you.
Creatures
Settlers
You start with 5 + 1 settlers. Your settlers have skills and knowledge how to build, mine, farm, hunt, fight. They work is assigned via our Tasks engine. You create tasks (dig a hole here, farm there, craft hammers), define which storage to use, choose which settlers are best suited for the task and assign them.
Settlers need to eat and sleep. They can die, and for now they cannot get sick. Every now and then, you’ll encounter other humans, and some will be willing to join you. Your clan, if treated right will grow. We calculate that current Game engine will support 150-200 settlers on the same map.
+ 1 settler
Depending on which of the 3 game scenarios you choose, you’ll get one “different” settler. But more about that later.
Animals
Animals are using the same task engine as Settlers do. Why? First, it was smarter to code it that way. Second, it allows animals to do things, not just stand around and attack/flee on sight. For instance, Mighty Forests deer can and will sneak in on your fields and eat your crops.
There will be wolves, deer, rabbits straight away. And we plan to add a dozen more.
Other “civilized” creatures
Other intelligent creatures also live in the Forest. They have their own place to live, they run their own tasks (assigned to them by Clan Narrator AI) as your settlers run theirs. They will chop wood, work on farms, mine and build, craft. And maybe they’ll be nice to you.
Most of creatures in Kalnik Forests are from Slavic mythology. Some will build their own towns, some will try to steal from you and hide in their lair. Some will roam free and react on encountering you, maybe attack on sight, or ask for help. There will be giants. And siege engines. Castle building game without giants and siege engines is not a good castle building game.
Clans
Your settlers belong to one clan. Every herd of deer, wolfs belong to different clans. Clans have relationship status towards one another, depending on the creature type and past events. So deer will avoid your settlers and wolves, wolves will hunt deer, lone settler and even steal your food in wintertime, or fight other wolves clan for game.
Nights
On some peaceful nights your settlers will fall into deep sleep in which they’ll suddenly take control over existing nearby clan (herd of animals, or any other clan). They’ll be able to do tasks which those creatures can. And you can use this new transformation to enjoy the night out, or to help your settlers in some way. You could use one clan of wolves against the other, or to scare and drive deer into your bows range. Or use molls to find iron vein quickly.
It’s a new feature in RTS gaming (AFAIK), sounds great and should fit into early game boring nights really well. Why look at your settlers sleep, when you can run through the hills as a wolf?
Tasks
Priority tasks, normal tasks, idle tasks
Creatures can have priority task. Like “move here” when you right click them somewhere. They should leave all they are doing at the moment and listen to your command. Or “Eat” priority task. Eat task doesn’t interrupt the creature in current work. After creature is done with current errand (like finish harvesting plant, or mine a block), they’ll stop current task and go fetch some food and eat.
There can be only one priority task per creature.
On the other hand, creature can have more normal tasks. Every time creature finished current errand, it’ll check all normal tasks which ones have work to do, and creature will take over that task. Example: John the blacksmith has Craft sword task and Farming task. If there are not enough materials for him to craft a sword, or weapon crafting station is occupied, he’ll go and farm the field. If, in the middle of his farming, enough resources for a sword is collected, he’ll stop farming and go back to blacksmithing.
If he has really nothing to do, no swords to craft and no farms to work on, creature will get Idle task. Idle task can be “wander around”, or “plant flowers”, or “if nothing else to do, go and train your swings”. Creature will stay in Idle task forever, or until you finally find him something to do (workable task).
Farm Task
Farming has 3 basic errands: Plant, cultivate and harvest. Depending on the dirt type, farm level (higher levels will add irrigation, permaculture) and farmer skill, each crop plant will yield certain amount of crops. And if you additionally cultivate (work on farm between planting and harvesting, like weeding), plants will yield bigger amounts.
There is no limit on number of farm plots, or size. More than one creature can work on the same farm plot (same task).
Mine Task
Mining wasn’t easy to do. Especially when player selects half of the mountain for mining. Sometimes there are more than 5k blocks in selection. And to choose the closest workable block for creature to mine is a lot of CPU cycles.
So far, the best results are accomplished when miners mine from top to bottom, where possible. Works great in mining tunnels too.
Currently, no limit on number of mines or mine area selected. If your CPU starts overheating, unmark part of the mine.
Build Task
The most important task in the game. We all want to build and we all want that our builders behave like smart men, not like lemmings.
That being said, I still didn’t solve that problem, builders getting stuck on top of built objects, without path down. Haven’t decided if they should use rope to go down, or somebody has to come bellow to catch them when they jump, or use scaffolding, or use primitive elevator.
Currently game supports just square blocks, but we have plans to have half blocks and diagonal blocks pretty soon. And we’ll continue with round blocks and ability to actually create round tower which is round, not squared.
Main build materials are stone, bricks and wood, with lots of variations and even some combinations. You’ll also be able to place dirt blocks, sand and similar materials, but don’t expect to be able to build a sand house. Sand is not a good building material, so game’s Structural Integrity manager will most probably collapse that sand house.
Yes, we are calculating structural integrity of every building, while it’s being built, and if your architect made any errors …. BOOM.. it’ll collapse. Almost like real. Same goes for mining and deconstructing blocks.
Craft Task
Hunt Task
Fish Task
Haul Task
Chop Task
Gather Task
Build furniture Task
Idle Task
Eat Task
Sleep Task
Move Task
Skills and research
You learn and research by working
We want our armour smith to level up their armour crafting skill while crafting armour. It’s the way most games function today. And that’s great. But when it comes to research, even stone age research, it’s usually done by “scientists” standing in front of the table and discovering better ways to farm or better armour designs.
It wasn’t like that back then. There were no “scientists” in those villages and castles. There were hard working men who had good ideas. Who were not just working, they were also learning and experimenting and researching while working. Who is better to discover or reproduce some advanced armour design, then the person who actually spends days producing armours.
For most of the tasks we have 100% work points which we can divide in three areas: work, learn, research; with minimum of 5% (maybe 10%). How does that work?
While creating task, you set up 10% to learn, 10% on research and 80% on work (changeable anytime). And you’ll get a task where you produce a lot of swords in the short time. But weapon smith didn’t learn a lot, and he didn’t do much experimenting while working, thus just a few research points are created. And once you have enough swords, you put the bright weapon smith on 45% Learn / 45% Research / 10% Work, and he’ll research and train while slowly crafting and experimenting with the sword. It won’t be finished quickly, but a lot will be discovered and learned.
