Age of Mending

Formerly Parity of the Minor Bearing

A game about worldbuilding, homeliness and exploration.

⠀WARNING

This game is in development. Expect sporadic, game-breaking, world corrupting updates to happen indiscriminately and at random. Assume that updating to the next version will corrupt all worlds irreversably. The entire design and structure of the game may change without notice. You have been warned.

Until it reaches a releasable state, you can readily assume any individual part of the game is a placeholder and many things will be unpolished and jank. See the issues on the repo for more info.

Changelog: https://codeberg.org/Age_of_Mending/Age_of_Mending/releases

Q and A

⠀What kind of game is it?

It is a sandbox, mechanics-over-content world building game. The style or setting is early gunpowder era with low fantasy elements (think LoTR level magic at most). The focus is on the player building, exploring and defending their own home and world. World building and creating a place for yourself is what it should be best at. It is not about mining for materials or grinding for better gear, it is about constructing an immersive and meaningful place in a world.

⠀Is this server-ready?

No, but you're welcome to try, just post your crash reports in the issue tracker.

⠀Is it ever going to be finished?

Yesn't.

⠀Is it actually playable as a game?

Yes, but it's super limited. If you liked playing M*******t in infdev, you might find it playable.

⠀How buggy is it?

Crashes are somewhat rare usually, and things mostly work, but the problems are less crashes and more "why are all the caves so cramped" or "why can I sneak on ladders" or "why am I inside the ground now" and so on. Not catastrophic, but certainly very jank.

⠀Is it stable?

No. It is not stable. Fundamental concepts like tool durability, inventories, tool tiers, and more are all completely up in the air and may be removed at any time. I can't and won't be nice about back compatability, and I won't compromise on that since it would grind development to even more of a halt than my procrastination does.

⠀Is development active?

You should assume not. I go through periods obsessively working 12 hours on it and then go months without even looking at it. Hey, don't judge me like that.

⠀Why release it now?

People ask about it a fair bit, and so I figured I would just throw it on here and forget about it. This package will likely be replaced when entering stable / beta, and become the continuing unstable version. Then there would be a new package and new page for the stable version.

What would it look like when 'complete'?

This is all unlikely to be achieved any time soon or possibly at all, but it's the direction the game is heading in.

The game would have an evolving world with many different natural features, with spirits and magic power being an ever present yet almost entirely invisible force in the world, with deep lore and backstory that can be explored through artifacts, structures and items left by ancient cultures. There is no direct progression, and most features are either easy to find and use or are not more powerful than another. You don't just get more powerful, you get different powerful. Magic items have specific and limited use cases, gear is mostly all the same and not arbitrarily more powerful because it's of a certain material.

Building will be easy, getting blocks for building will be simple and easy to automate (possibly using villagers / colonists or some machine). There will be mobility enhancing features that allow for building to be much more enjoyable even to make huge structures. The emphasis will be on making your home and freely exploring, so building and transport will be easy and accessible. Teleportation will be a normal thing, with both items and structures able to teleport the player. Both will have costs, delays etc, but be easy to use and set up to encourage being able to explore without fear of losing your way.

Getting materials, mining, building etc. will be very easy, tools will all be so similar and fast digging that it's not worth upgrading other than for bragging rights and a boost in durability, there will be no reward for anything except the act of going about your business in this world. Weapons will not be tiered to be arbitrarily more powerful, but there will be a vast array of ways to use them and special features to them, such as shields that actually work, spears that have long reach but can't block, and certain weapons being more effective in certain situations, but nothing will be "just a better version" of something before it. The game will be intentionally fairly easy unless you go looking for trouble, and when you do, you will be met with challenging and strategically interesting battles.

Actual combat will eventually be very simple but in-depth, with every mob telegraphing its attacks, and blocking and parrying being timed but easy. Enemies might have parrying or blocking too, and this will be a set chance, to make combat more prolonged and captivating but not harder. Most mobs will have mobility 'skills' or behavior states that make them more challenging and also to promote footwork and thinking about your environment so you don't get cornered. To avoid exploitable combat mechanics, things like blocking will be a simple "you pressed block, so you don't get hit by one attack for the next 0.5 seconds or so" even if you're not facing them etc. PVP should be based on strategy and environmental awareness rather than tempo and physics exploits like in games like Mount and Blade, M******ft etc. Blocking will likely cause a cooldown, encouraging again, footwork and environmental awareness, and to keep the fight at tempo.

Magic will be extremely specific and not all that useful generally or otherwise common, such as a ring that spawns temporary barriers under the player for a couple of seconds if they walk off an edge, or a staff that shoots orbs that light up your surroundings, or a structure that slows down projectiles, etc. This makes magic more than just "it's an arrow, but glowing", and it also means magic items are not all-powerful, but are situation dependent and utility focused rather than just being another weapon.

World and lore

In the world there will be a few main types of creatures:

• dwarves and humans
• spirits
• animals
• demonkin
• half-demon half-animal magic beings

There is some lore to the world (secret), but no story or purpose beyond just "play the game and do what you want". There is no end or completion.

Cheatsheet

This obviously contains spoilers. Read at your own risk: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AnVzK9VIWa0uqQ6E9vq5Cc85B_E154CC_ZFP-NS9qOw/

Compatible with mte 5.6+. Other versions unknown. Definitely doesn't work on 4.x

Always using the newest version, assume no backwards compatibility.

Features missing as of version a5

These are some things you might assume to be part of a game like this, but are not implemented yet!

1. combat system and actual weapons such as spears and swords
2. mobs - there are some, but nowhere near the level that would be in the final game
3. any actual crafting guide to tell you how to play the game - instead it has a Terraria-like crafting system, but you're still a bit blind as to what can be made if you got more materials
4. structures - there are small schematic structures and ruins, but not any dungeons and villages etc
5. spawn setting, spawning in wide areas instead of one point, PVP settings (on by default)
6. several biomes not present, such as beaches, tundra mountains, arctic oceans / rivers

You can also see the issues tracker for more info on what to expect.

What does it have then?

• mapgen and biomes
• Terraria-like crafting system
• some mobs
• mob spawn inhibitors so you can have a safe home and peaceful builds
• ores, tools, and ore processing
• status effects for regen, featherfalling, poison etc
• crops and food
• cooking, furnaces, ovens
• pipes for item transport
• teleporters (hard to get for now)
• warpberries allowing the player to move between two locations easily
• bows
• wings and gliding, flight
• treefelling with axes
• ropes for climbing, ladders
• many many many building materials, types of bricks, shapes, colored terracotta, etc
• wrench which can bulk-build in a cube / wall / line etc
• the underworld, with its associated bricks and items
• a floating island defense gamemode (?windmills join) ... which may or may not work in multiplayer
• glowing mushroom biome (currently useless, but pretty)
• an airship
• lanterns, glow status effect for "dynamic" wearable lights, and a special item that allows for even better illumination ;)
• lots of bugs and I don't mean fireflies

The game is coded pretty much from the ground up, partially because there is the stipulation that it remains MIT licensed and avoids restrictive licensing, but also because of my predisposition to just make the thing rather than learn someone else's API. As a result, you can fully expect that just about no mods will work with it unless they've been very carefully and deliberately made to work agnostically.