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For Minetest 5.5 and above

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Exile

Created by Dokimi

For Minetest 5.5 through 5.8

Release 0.3.15

  • Bones of previous exiles, with various items
  • Sun hat and sandals
  • Fires more likely to die out than burn forever
  • SkinsDB support for folks who want that
  • /ping command to reveal your location to players out of range for nametags
  • Comfort and rest improvements
  • UI improvements
  • Fixed hair colors
  • /restart will fix bugged players who closed the death formspec

Gameplay

Challenging, at times brutal, wilderness survival with simple technology. Use your wits to find food, water, and shelter before succumbing to the elements, while exploring the mysterious world, and developing your capacities to endure your exile.

Features: Player health effects: hypothermia, exhaustion, disease... Dynamic nature: Seasonal weather, erosion, water flows through soil... Building matters: make shelters from the rain, kilns, smelters,...

CAUTION: some people may find parts of this game difficult or disturbing.

Gameplay Guide

Check out doc > walkthrough for a more detailed guide.

Many different strategies might work, and part of the fun is figuring out what does, and catastrophically does not, work.

Here are some early steps you might pass though:

  1. Make basic tools. Find a suitable camp site soon before you get tired.
  2. Build a bed to rest in, shelter, and maybe fire for warmth.
  3. Make a kiln, and make pots. Harvest wild foods while you wait.
  4. Collect water with pots, and build up a water supply.
  5. Farm food, drugs, and fibre to build up supplies.
  6. Explore and gather resources for more advanced tools.

You start in spring. Soon the hot dry weather of summer will arrive. Running out of water, or getting exhausted by the heat is a real risk. After that will come the sub-zero conditions of winter. Starvation and freezing are hard to avoid without preparation.

Some tips and tricks:

  • Beds are important. If you're exhausted you get hypothermia/heat stroke. Get under shelter in a nice temperature.
  • Do your crafting, organizing, planning while you rest.
  • Weather: extremes sap your energy. Like real life, walking around in a snowstorm is a bad idea!
  • Temperature: Build a shelter, with a fire place or lots of torches. You can also go underground, caves are safe from weather.
  • Water: you can drink cave drips (click them). Water pots collect rain water. Some plants, and food quench your thirst. If you're desperate, you can try to melt ice, or dig a seepage pit in wet ground and wait for water to flow into it
  • Food: eat stuff and see if you live! You can catch animals with clubs (right click)
  • Clothing: Simple grass clothing can be woven quickly, and can be a lifesaver. Better clothes can be made by soaking bundles of the right kind of plants.
  • Farming: digging tools also can till soil. Punching depleted farm soil with fertilizers will restore it.
  • Keep an eye on "health effects". You may have eaten something bad, or have a terrible disease.
  • Drugs: some plants have useful medicinal effects. Be careful not to overdose, however.
  • Go deep enough underground and you might find something....
  • Hardwood trees are more difficult to cut than soft wood, you will need better tools.
  • Build stairs and shelters around your base, this will save you energy and protect you from extremes.
  • You can use sticks to build a ladder, or a pole to shimmy up, to get to high places, or descend if you're careful.
  • Not every step in crafting can be done at a work station. Some things need to be fired, or soaked in water etc.
  • Ovens, kilns, furnaces: build them like you would for real. A fire with access to air, and a sealed chamber that gets heated up.
  • Fires. Blocks are hotter. Charcoal is hotter than wood. Fires can be temporarily extinguished by punching them holding sediment.
  • Charcoal. Make it like you would for real: a wood fire sealed up with no air.
  • Glassmaking: Sand and wood ash can be made into green glass; the ash must be soaked, dried, and roasted to make clear glass. Glass can be melted onto iron trays to make panes for real windows!
  • Iron smelting. This is hard. It needs plenty of charcoal, and a space below the iron mixture for slag to drain out.

Development

Exile is free software - that means it is as good as you choose to make it. It also means development can be erratic and haphazard at times, so be patient!

See the git repository at https://codeberg.org/Mantar/Exile/ for known bugs, and to report new ones.

Credit

Thanks is due to all those whose mods have been adapted for use in Exile (see mod folders for details).

Reviews

Review

Do you recommend this game?

  • Savage, yet original and interesting

    You are left alone in nature. Some say nature is generous, this game says nature is brutal. Everytime you try something you may ask yourself "what could possibly go wrong?", well, everything. One day things may seem okay, the next day things become critical.

    The game mechanics are very hard to grasp and the walkthrough is somehow mandatory and pretty much insuffiscient (I had to look for the code for extracting water into puddles. This is a game-killer, but water is so scarce and necessary to live more than two days). You'll have to repeatedly die before having a bit of understanding about how things work, about watery, what is eadible and/or toxic, thermal regulation and such. And then you'll still be constantly balancing a discomfort to an other while trying to just have barely acceptable living conditions. Forget about your castle, a small dry and warm hut is already luxuous.

    Very interesting, challenging and frustrating at the same time (at least if you are playing without respawning).

    0 comments
  • Pinnacle of the survival genre in Minetest

    I have been playing this game for a long time, and it is definetely my favourite Minetest game. This game is actually challenging, and finally figuring out how to do something is extremely rewarding. Exile also features some very smart design choices: for example, sticks here are not just an item used in crafts that clogs up your inventory like in MTG - they are also an important traversal tool that you might want to have on you most of the time. I could provide many more examples of such decision.

    That said, it is not perfect - some mechanics could use to be more clear, and there is not much to do after you have acquired everything - the game stops feeling like a challenge. Performance is also not that great on weaker computers due to all the dynamic nature. However, this game is in active development, and many things probably will improve.

    Overall, this is an extremely good game, among the best in Minetest.

    0 comments
  • My kingdom for a pickaxe!

    This is an amazing game! It's very different from a typical minetest game. Expect to die frequently at first, but as you get to understand how things work, you'll be able to make it a few days before dying! :)

    The weather is your biggest enemy. Find shelter and resources to build a fire and cloths so you can survive the first night. Next you'll need food and water or you'll discover what the second biggest cause of death in the game is. Exhaustion is a serious problem that'll leave you unable to move if you don't take time to rest. The most serious threat you'll find on the surface is the male duck which are very aggressive. Easy enough to avoid, but expect to add a few bodies to the graveyard looking for a quick meal.

    I've progressed far enough that basic survival isn't my concern. I have plenty of clay pots and know how to get water from multiple sources. I've farmed most of the editable plants and learned how to make flour and mashed Anperla. Cooking is a challenge of it's own but once figured out, you're risk of death is greatly reduced. You could happily live out your days at this point; farming and living in caves.

    Learning to make bricks changes everything! Being able to create blocks that don't fall, absorb water or erode make creating permenant structures possible. You can now build a home to live out your days in style! Next is the challenge of Iron smelting. That's where I'm at now. I have my first Iron Ingot , but am still trying to perfect the process. Can't wait to see where the game takes me once I enter the iron age! Do I finally get a pickaxe?

    The game is well worth the effort. Frustrating at times, brutally unforgiving, and highly addictive! I haven't had this much fun since I first discovered Minecraft back before Notch sold it.

    1 comments
  • This has my approval ;-)

    Mantar and other contributers are doing an awesome job of fixing up and expanding my original version. A huge amount of coding work has been done under the hood. Most of that is invisible to players but trust me, it's there. This project is moving well beyond proof of concept and is gaining a solid foundation. More and more that will start being noticeable to your average player. Watch this space!

    0 comments
  • Good but Confusing

    The game is probably very well developed, but I just can't get into it. We played almost 10 hours as a group of 4 and only managed to get a spear, beds, and woven clothing.

    No idea how to cook, fire clay, find food and water - so we keep on dying. Suggestions from the wiki like water puddle holes don't work. The wiki in general is rather chaotic and has little useful information. Beds apparently skip the night in Minetest original, is this possible here? Mobs don't seem to move properly.

    It reminded me somewhat of TerraFirmaPunk, a Minecraft TerraFirmaCraft modpack. Maybe you could take some inspiration from its Quest Book and mechanisms as well.

    What helped me a bit was this playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzSAal8RyICa73tdJOI5iR1m9hNyu_Sxy

    2 comments
  • Its simple but addictive, give it a opportunity, be patient and you will be compensated

    Its a challenging game, yes, but also interesting, I've reach to live many days with only one life, is satisfactory.

    The only problem is I can't get enough food to survive as long a want, and farming takes so long (like in real world), I realize that the hunger is very hard to satisfy, eating a plenty amount of coocked animals every day is a hard goal because there is a very shrot plenty of food here, I have a lot to learn.

    Make some bags to carry is a good idea if you want to play as a nomad, to recolect resources before make a base, its so useful to find the better place to stablish yourself.

    Yes, the game is hard and will kick your ass... at the begining, but if you are middle-smart, you can domita it step by step, and each achievement that you reach is very satisfying.

    The game its simple but addictive, if you give it a opportunity and have some patient... and passion. The game still in alpha versiono, yet so, is amusing and inmersive.

    *If someona knows a wiki with the crafting guide, please, can contact me by email. I am very interesting on it.... *

    I almost forget, thanks a lot to the team for giving us this great alternative, I spend many hours in this game and thats mean that all of you are making great. Cheers.

    0 comments
  • Very complex, confusing and fun game .

    I love the game. Its realy hard too. Could you pls add a guide for it because when i join a world and do whatever i need to i end up only living for in 15 mins max.

    otherwise its great

    Riptide

    0 comments
  • Possibly the best planned-out MT game

    Yes, granted. … the game is hard to get into. But not as hard as many others where there is no beginners' info or walkthrough provided. Besides MC has -sold- more than a million copies before a proper instruction for beginners was implemented.

    That being said, there is nothing more to add in terms of criticism. This is by far the best and most concise work I have seen and played so far within Minetest as a single player. Everything is planned out and integrated neatly with the goals of the survival gameplay in mind. The game is highly complex with the simulation of environment physics such as erosion and temperature affecting the character and their surroundings. It has its very own collection of unique items and blocks as well as modifying MT's features like stack size and inventory capacity effectively. It is challenging , even frustrating at times and still allows for a learning curve that provides enough progress to make the game highly addictive.

    The look and feel reminds me of the non-voxel, commercial game "Force of Nature". But gameplay is a lot better than that, IMO.

    A prime example of open-source gaming and a crystal-clear recommendation for all fans of survival games. Thanks to Minetest's and Exile's developers!

    0 comments
  • Very challenging, unusual and deep game mechanics

    I have encountered no other Minetest game yet that felt so much like a survival challenge.

    In Exile, simply not dying all the time means that a player is doing something right.

    Building an actual house is a challenge – I managed to live in a tiny cave.

    Survival tip: Stay warm and make sure you have drinking water.

    0 comments
  • Nice mod

    Nice mod, but the temperatures don't make much sense, why is one block 40°C, the one next to it -2°C, then next one 12°C

    1 comments
  • Best Boeing Simulator ever

    Piloting the character is fun, you need to have everything within normal range, just running around is a game of it's own, sometimes paralysis hits and you die, and that is fun too. Very nice textures and ambience

    0 comments
  • Charcoal

    I've barely gotten into this tbh but the description has taught me how you would go about making charcoal in real life, and while I hope that info is never useful it's still fun to know

    0 comments
  • Very original gameplay

    I really enjoy this game for it's complex heat and survival simulations, and the quality gameplay it provides.

    0 comments
  • crazy hard, frustrating, super addictive

    because i would only be repeating a lot of the great things already said in the reviews here, i wanna focus more on the critique and criticisms without hopefully spoiling the game and discoveries for new players. if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review now, this is not for you.

    the technology of the other civilization(s) which have been on this planet before, it's too cryptic. maybe i just haven't played enough, but like, wth do i want or need a temp probe for if i can already see the temp on my HUD, and other such things like that. i've collected a number of things from the ancients, but, other than maybe decorations, i can't figure out what they're for and how to use them.

    3 comments
  • its the best game

    this game is so realistic and detailed, while not being full of little things important to know. playing with friends is so much fun too, this game is just the best

    0 comments
  • One of the Best Long-Form Minetest Games

    Your homeland dosen't care what you did, just that you're gone. It may be an execution in all but name, but if you can find shelter for your first night, water for your first season, and food for your first year, you'll soon find the badlands can be a half-decent place to live. Now, if only there was a little more color.

    0 comments
  • Why?

    This amount of work undoubtably deserves a like from me and from literally anyone else visiting this page. Well done, I love survival that involves technology, even if it's simple.

    0 comments
  • Challenging but original

    its fun but also frustrating. The tiku and alcohol seems like an odd thing to add to an otherwise good game.

    3 comments
  • Too many spawns with absolutely no resources.

    I like hardcore games but this is nearly impossible. After 147 games all I spawn in at the beginning is massive deserts with zero resources. We're talking no grass, trees, anything. Makes it unplayable when you can't get resources at all after that many times trying.

    It would probably be better if they stuck to the way mtg works. This is just way too convoluted and confusing to even be fun as a brutal game.

    5 comments
  • based in ugly MTG

    Its textures and interactions are based on the ugly MTG, I would like it if it looked more like MineClone or MineClonia. It is also very difficult.

    0 comments

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