Chapter 3.5 Ecology Influence

Resource Stats
Deities determine the stats of items from resources in their ecosystem. Stats are used to create the base stats of resources and creatures in the wild. These uncollected, living, resources, adds favor to the deity's favor strength. The deity will spread the strength of their favor evenly throughout all the living resources, and base stats of creature shards in the wild. Rare resources will spread a deity's power less, increasing the crafting worth in a condensed manner. Players can further add stats using their traits, skills, and other claim strategies.

Player Influence on Deity Favor
Wildlife claims, faith based mechanics, and NPC can burn resources and crafts to add to a deity's favor, or express disfavor to combat a deity's influence. Players may want to strategize their methods based on which resources they seek and land types they want to preserve. Send favor to ecosystems that provide resources you need, and skills you desire, and disfavor towards encroaching influences like monsters or other deities.

Offering Favor/disfavor

• Wildlife Claims

  • Burn tinder at your creature's lightsource to send to its ecological deity

  • Feed/buff creatures

  • Spread/evolve/heal resources

• Faith Based Players

  • Say prayers or burn tinder at shrines, altars, and churches to send prayers/offerings to the deity type linked to it

  • Players can choose between deities, or micro managing by selecting specific creatures to apply prayer/offerings to

  • Can perform rituals for higher affects

    • Are only effective after cooldowns

• NPC

  • Can engage in either cultivating resources, feeding creatures, or send prayers/offerings/rituals to deities

  • The effectiveness depends on an NPC's stats, traits, and age

  • NPC can increase effectiveness if they have a land claim that has unlocked faith based culture skills/controls

Increasing Resource Stats in Land Claims
Players can also increase the stats of items through cultivation, by planting resources into their claimed land. They can use utilities, tools, and methods to increase the stats of the farmed resources.

Keystone Creatures
Within an ecology theme, there are creatures that are key to basic resources (lumber, materials) are tagged as keystone creatures (these tags are unseen by players). These beings also spread or alter other resources into non-matching ecologies. Creature shards that appear and drop from resources are important. They allow deities increased flexibility to restore populations. During a replenishment cycle, if there is a great need, shards with keystone animals will drop more frequently, and animals may duplicate more often. Wildlife claims, faith based mechanics, and NPC can also alter the their effectiveness.

Terrain Ecology and Visual and Stat Values
In a grid space, the terrain color will be based on the ecology that a majority of the ecology comes from. This is called a dominant radius. Resources that match the terrain will get stat boosts. Non-dominant resources will have weaker base stats and will color shift to the dominating grid's terrain color.

Cluster Dominant Radius
There are some instances, such as monster influence, or world events, that can trigger resources to retain their deity's base stats in a specific cluster of resources. In these instances, they will shift the tiles underneath them to their ecology despite the larger grid space's value. For example, a fire based tree will typically shift green on forest ecology terrain. But during a world fire event, or monster presence, it can retain the full red colors, full fire stats, and the tiles in around their cluster radius will now be fire based.

Domesticated and Affected Resources
Resources planted within claimed land is still subject to the total grid space's values. However, players can unlock controls later that allow more control, like allowing cluster dominant radiuses. This allows players to have fenced/walled areas, or specific resources to remain in a specific ecology, allowing more precise control.

Domesticated and Affected Creatures
By default, fenced areas will group creatures together (forcing them into a herd/pack.) Which can cause conflict if they are not compatible together. There is no control utility that can be unlocked to keep this from happening. Players will need to strategize their enclosures to avoid conflict, or intentionally group them together for sport. Players will also need to give the creatures access to their cluster needs, either by placing a cluster in their enclosure, or by offering crafted resources that are sufficient.

Outer Land, Vehicle, and Wildlife Claim Influence
Players can use their land, vehicle, and wildlife claim utilities to create a radial affect outwards projecting favor/disfavor, stat buffs/debuffs, traits, or other affects on resources and creatures. For mobile influences, players will need to be parked or atleast move slow enough in the area for the affects to take hold.

Combine All Influence for Final Favor Values
Final values for resources are based on a final percent of a mix of all affected buffs and debuffs, using their base value as a starting point. Tinder burning, prayers, offerings, rituals, add to a piled value queue. During a replenishment cycle, the deity will take on their previous favor value as a base, and add the difference of increased stat buffed resources and creatures. The player adjusted favor is then counted and added to a deity's favor for that cycle. Lesser crafts, and lower skills will lessen the effective value of tinder given, but can increase with better construction and skills. Clusters of resources or resources with traits, and groups of creatures, or solo-creatures with traits, can function to multiply separate from a deity's influence for self-sustaining measures.