Spielerando

World and lore

Find the rooms nobody can enter and check each has a way to be found

A hand-drawn dungeon often hides a room by accident, and a secret room is only fun if one thin wall gives it away. Here is a check that lists every sealed room and the wall pieces where a secret door could go, and warns where the wall is too thick for that.

Find which story places a rising flood drowns or cuts off, and on which day

The water rises a little each day, and the village on the hill is still dry when its only road is long gone, so the quest to reach it cannot be finished. Here is how to see, for each day, which places are drowned and which are only cut off from where the player is.

Reveal the map around the player, but not through solid walls

A simple circle of light shows the treasure room on the other side of a wall and spoils every dungeon. Here is how to uncover only what the player could really see, remember what was seen, and leave the walls themselves visible.

Show foreign speech as scrambled words that clear up as the player learns

A traveller meets people who speak another tongue, and the text should be gibberish at first and understandable word by word later. Here is a way that never flickers between frames, keeps punctuation and lengths, and makes every new word learned stay learned.

Warn of a coming disaster with signs the player is likely to meet

The volcano erupts on the day the story says, and the player who spent the week fishing never saw a thing and feels cheated. Here is how to space the omens so they come faster toward the day, and to check against where the player really was whether any warning reached them early enough.

Let players decorate a house without walling themselves in

A player who may put a wardrobe anywhere will, sooner or later, put it in front of the door or cut the room in two. Here is a check that looks at the room after each placement and refuses the ones that leave a corner unreachable, saying how much would be cut off.

Generate a huge ruin that crosses chunk borders without seams or doubles

A world built in pieces as the player walks shows half of the great wall, and the other half is missing or appears twice with a different shape. Here is how to decide where each giant landmark stands from the map seed alone, so every piece agrees whichever one is built first.

Check that fresh goods in a shop could really have reached it in time

The inland market sells fresh fish, and a player who counts the days on the road finds it would be rotten twice over. Here is a check that follows each good from where it is made to where it is sold along the quickest road and flags the shops that cannot stock it.

Tell when the herds are at the river, including the stretch over new year

The elder says the herds come to the river from late autumn to early spring, and the check that should confirm it says they never come at all. Here is how to describe a stay that wraps around the end of the year and count how many days of it fall inside a journey or a quest.

Build a calendar for your world with odd months and a leap day

Your world has eight months of forty-five days and a week of six days, and the AI keeps quietly using ordinary months. Here is a tiny calendar that turns dates into day numbers and back, keeps the weekday running across the leap day, and finds festivals.

Find inventions in your world's history that predate the things they need

The history says the sword was forged in year ten, the history of smelting says bronze arrived later, and nobody caught it. Here is how to check a world's list of inventions against what each one depends on, including those with no stated date, and to learn the earliest year each could have come.

Write "last night" and "yesterday" in the journal for a day that starts at dawn

The journal says something happened "today" at one in the morning although the player has already slept, or "yesterday" for something a few hours old. Here is how to word elapsed time from the number of ticks so that the night belongs to the day it began in.