Hey guys, In Dev Stream #210 I asked Stephanie about caves. She said I should bug Albert about working on it. So as a good and dutiful community member I promptly bugged Albert about it.
He responded by saying [quote=“Albert, post:2, topic:24865, full:true”]
Hi Turtlesquish,
Are you wanting caves that are encounters you can expose when mining the earth? If you can get enough interest on the forum we can move this higher on the priority list.
Albert
[/quote]
So here I am, promoting the idea of caves.
The first and most obvious pro is that it would make the underground more interesting. Currently mining is only a method of resource collecting. It is in my opinion the most dull part of the game right now.
Adding caves also increases mining risk. In the current version, there is almost zero risk tied to mining. Considering that mining is the number one method of increasing a settlements wealth, it seems logical to tie in a risk with mining.
Caves will also add an exploration aspect to the game, a feature that is currently lacking. Indeed even the fog of war doesn’t add any exploration, since you know what the landscape looks like and since the landscape itself is the only “defining” feature of a map there is no real point to exploring. With caves that changes.
I’ve been peppering my requests for procedural cave/loot/critter generation for about a year now, but the game had many other, legitimately higher priorities for a while. I raised this again as recently as this post, when Steph asked about gameplay improvements that would help to improve the atmosphere of the game.
I definitely support this, and eagerly through my hat in the ring of people who want it.
Cave generation is quite a bit more tricky than plain surface generation. But in general, I would like this as long as they don’t generate them like minecraft does (which looks terrible!).
I vote caves at a later date. Maybe 2-3 Alphas from now? Not sure. I want them and think they’d be cool. Little secret dungeon. Ooh! Maybe you could have a door hidden in a cliff wall somewhere that you can’t see until the fog is cleared by it, that leads to an underground dungeon, that you can’t slice view into until you’ve sent people inside? That seems cool.
Genies and Ifrits for Rayya.
Scrub this lamp and make a wish.
(In case of Ifrits it can be the last wish in your life)
NONONO joking they are perfectly safe.
(they are not)
oh so much of the yes! Caves and Dungeons would be an incredible addition and would really add some strategy too underground bases for Hardmode or even Normal
Since there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of ores on the lower lands, be nice to find some artifact among all the clay and rocks, like digging for older civilizations
I would love to see caves, maybe a surprise while you are mining and monsters such as imps or skeletons/mummies can spawn out of the dungeon/cave until you clear it out!
and possibly even dungeons…