Metaverse: Origins

Build

Place a building as a ghost, haul materials to it, and watch it go up stage by stage. Change your mind and cancel, and you get the materials back.

Craft and progress

Recipes, a crafting queue, and work stations. Tool gates and craft times, plus skills and knowledge that decide what you can make yet.

Dig the caves

Procedural caves with real bedrock and ore bodies underneath. Dig time depends on the rock, and what you pull out depends on how deep you went for it.

Run a colony

Recruit survivor pawns, hand them jobs, and keep a small settlement fed and running. Predators and prey share the map and act on their own.

Play solo or co-op

Host or join over Steam or LAN. Every machine builds the same terrain from one shared seed, so everyone is standing in the same world.

Drink from a lake or a river and maybe get sick, or boil the water first. Twirl a dry stick in a notch until it smokes, carry fire on a torch, forage roots and berries, and get a lean-to up before dark.

Knap flint into flakes, knives and hand axes. Strip bark and twist it into cord, weave baskets, haft a spear, string a simple bow. Scrape and tan hides, set a splint, cook birch-bark tar. Arrows are waiting on birds, because no birds means no feathers.

Rive planks with an axe and a hammer, build a workbench, burn out a dugout canoe. Leather clothing, pottery fired in the campfire, cooking pots, storage jars, charcoal, snares, deadfalls, the bow drill.

Looms, hoes, sickles, schools and storage are in. Farming is not: no seeds, crops or fields yet, no flax or sheep, so no cloth, and no lime kiln. This era is the biggest hole in the tree right now.

Hammer native copper cold first. Then paint a pot with ground malachite and fire it: sometimes it leaves little copper beads, and looking at them is how your survivor works out smelting. Bellows, a forge, cast copper, lead glaze, glass.

Tin from granite veins, melted into copper. Cast bronze axes, knives, spearheads, swords, helmets, shields and scale armour.

Hematite from the cave walls and bog iron from the wetlands go into a bloomery. What comes out is a spongy bloom, not iron yet; you hammer it at welding heat until it is. Then nails, tongs, an anvil, iron tools and chain mail.

Iron packed in glowing charcoal and quenched comes out as steel, and that is in. Cast iron, the blast furnace and everything past the Iron Age come later.

• A generated world: biomes, mountains, coasts, rivers, lakes, caves with real rock and ore in them
• Weather and a day/night clock over all of it
• A body that gets hurt, sick, thirsty and cold, and wounds that need treating
• Crafting from knapped flint to steel, about 130 recipes, learned by studying what you find
• Buildings you plan as a ghost and then actually build
• Survivors you recruit and give jobs
• Co-op over Steam and LAN

• The look of the world: big rock formations and cliffs you can see kilometres out, highland crags, granite summits
• The start: waking up beside the clone egg you grew in
• Building feel: dimmer ghosts, nothing solid until it is finished
• A creative mode where building and crafting cost nothing
• Fixing what players report

• Farming: seeds, fields, crops and seasons
• Animals to keep: sheep for wool, horses to pull a cart, birds for feathers (and arrows)
• Cloth, a kiln for lime and better pottery, real furnace temperatures
• A proper colony screen for running your survivors
• Combat that feels better, and ranged weapons

• Villages that grow: houses, workplaces, schools, families
• Settlements that trade, ally or go to war with each other
• Medieval engineering, then the eras after it
• Mod support