Loot and luck
Learning paths through this topic
Give found weapons and tools a worn condition, better ones for rarer finds
A pristine axe lying in a ruined cabin makes the crafting bench pointless. A broken one is a wasted find. The condition of loot needs a spread that mostly lands in the useful, slightly battered middle, and it should tell the player something about how rare the find was.
Give one and a half logs per swing without losing the half
Skills and tools that boost harvesting usually end up as fractions, and fractions cannot be handed over as items. Rounding every swing up makes the bonus too strong, rounding down makes it worthless. The leftover has to be kept somewhere, and where it lives matters.
Decide what happens to gear when a strength potion wears off
A heavy hammer needs more strength than the hero has, so the hero drinks a potion, equips it, and the potion wears off. Some games throw the hammer into a full bag, some keep it giving full power, and some let two rings hold each other up. This entry picks one answer that cannot be abused.
Make gear lose condition when you die, but not break and not wear twice on a corpse run
A small price for dying keeps the world serious without taking everything. The price should stay small for items already nearly worn out, never destroy anything on its own, and never charge twice when the player dies again on the way back to the corpse.
Make gold drops shrink as the player gets richer, with a floor
Gold that keeps pouring in at the same rate makes shops meaningless after a few hours. Cutting drops for the rich is the gentlest brake, but it can punish saving, reward hiding gold in the bank, or round small drops to nothing. This entry sets a curve and closes those holes.
Drop gold amounts that vary a little but rarely jump to extremes
Pure random gold between one and a hundred makes half the drops feel like junk and a few like jackpots. Players want a fair middle with an occasional surprise. This entry mixes several rolls into one amount that scales with level and stays predictable for planning.
Keep the world from clogging with dropped items without deleting what matters
Every dropped item is something the game has to keep track of, and a busy server ends up with thousands. Deleting the oldest sounds fair, but it destroys a freshly dropped sword before a worthless pebble. This entry shows which items should go first and which should be held back.
Let the way a creature dies change what it leaves behind
A deer killed by fire should not drop a perfect hide, and one that drowned should not come with fresh meat. Small rules like these make a survival world feel physical, but they can easily delete drops that should remain, or apply in the wrong order and produce items that make no sense.
Tell players honestly how many tries a rare drop may take
A drop that comes once in a hundred kills does not arrive after a hundred kills for everyone. Some wait three times as long. Knowing the real spread lets you promise sensible things in the game and understand why players complain. This entry computes it exactly.
Roll random bonuses on an item without contradictions or repeats
An axe with two kinds of fire damage and a bonus that only makes sense at higher levels looks broken. Random bonuses need rules about which can sit together and which need a minimum level. This entry picks them one by one and stops cleanly when nothing fits.
Build readable item names from the bonuses an item rolled
A name such as Sturdy Sword of the Bear tells a player at a glance what they found, until an item has five bonuses and the name becomes a sentence, or two bonuses want the same place. This entry decides which bonuses are named and fixes small grammar slips.
Share an item's power budget among its stats so the total stays exact
A sword of a given level should be worth the same as any other sword of that level, whichever bonuses it rolls. Splitting the strength into whole numbers by rounding each part quietly adds or loses points. This entry gives a split that always adds up.