Technology

Islands are generated on a relaxed irregular quad grid, in the lineage of Townscaper, but at archipelago scale and with rivers, cliffs, shore shelves and biomes on top. Deterministic from a seed, and audited on every single generate.

• Fifteen island archetypes and six coastal traits combine into 960 island patterns before the seed varies a single one.
• Rivers routed from headwater to sea with waterfalls, shore shelves and three cliff styles.
• Streaming in 250 m regions, an island in most of them, built around the player and released behind.
• Local edits with incremental rebuild, save and load, and an editor dock.
• A terrain report gives PASS, WARN or FAIL per rule. All eighteen recipes pass.

What it gives us: a hand-crafted look without hand-crafting. That is the whole reason a solo studio can ship a world this size.

Ships are not vehicles with a float value. They are rigid bodies welded out of the pieces the player placed, and they behave accordingly.

• A half-metre grid with twenty-four orientations; pieces weld by shared face area and split again when cut.
• Buoyancy computed per piece from sampled volume and centroid, plus sealed-air compartments.
• Flooding solved by breadth-first search through the real openings in the hull.
• Foil drag, apparent-wind sail, oars, hinged rudder and a slipway lift.
• Thirteen procedural shapes, with hull-start, hull-expand and curved-plank authoring tools.

What it gives us: a ship that is wrong floats wrong. The player can feel the mistake.

Thirty-one timber and stone parts on sockets, placed on terrain or on a moving ship deck, with footings that reach down to fit uneven ground. No terrain editing required.

• Doors that open, stairs, roofs, floors, walls and docks.
• The same catalogue works on land and at sea, so a deckhouse is just a house on a hull.

One wave function drives the shader, the ships and the swimmer.

• The sea you see, the sea that lifts your hull and the sea you fall into are the same sea.
• Coast foam, water effects and wakes read off the same surface.

A planning engine built as its own product: hierarchical task planning with behaviour trees, state machines, utility scoring and rules, written in Rust with no unsafe code.

• Twenty crates and around a hundred and fifty tests.
• Separate machines for events, economy, NPC behaviour, combat and dialogue.
• Measured at six hundred people across three towns at sixty frames per second, with an eighteen-thousand-person stress run on an earlier project.

It is not connected to Arventus yet. We would rather say so than imply the villagers are already alive.