Stoneshard - Survival Abilities

Ink Stains Games presented the survival ability tree in Stoneshard.

Devlog: Survival

Hello everyone!

Over the last couple months, we've received a lot of feedback and justified criticism about drastically increased travel times and long distances between Points of Interest.

We'd like to assure you that the current version of the global map is far from final. In addition to obvious tweaks to distances between locations, which will happen in the next major update along with the saves wipe, we also plan to implement a number of systems and mechanics focused on making the open world exploration less time-consuming and tedious. One of these additions is the Survival tree that will soon be introduced to the game.

The main purpose of this ability tree is to help your character weather the hardships of mercenary life, giving them a better chance of surviving the wilderness without a sizable stash of supplies. It's worth mentioning that over the course of development Survival and Medicine ability trees were merged together, allowing us to remove unnecessary fluff and fully focus on the synergy between some of their skills.

Let's start with the ability tree's overall structure. It consists of 6 active and 5 passive skills:

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More information.

I'm looking forward to playing this one when it's done…I have played some of the early access and it is well done.

Yup, this is another game I've got slated on the acquire list at some point, when all the cooking is done.

I vaguely remember playing a demo for this awhile back and thinking it seemed decent enough. I didn't realize it was still in EA.

I see a lot of user-reviews complaining about the save system. You have to sleep in a bed to save your game, and you only get 1 save slot per character. Seems like a questionable design choice by the devs.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I vaguely remember playing a demo for this awhile back and thinking it seemed decent enough. I didn't realize it was still in EA.

I see a lot of user-reviews complaining about the save system. You have to sleep in a bed to save your game, and you only get 1 save slot per character. Seems like a questionable design choice by the devs.

I'm pretty sure that has changed, but not 100% sure….

They were implementing a caravan you could visit as a save system I think. I put a good 20 hours into the prerelease and thought it was great. It needed a save system indeed

There were several features hinted as possible new additions for the updated Caravan system:

Ability to quickly traverse the new World Map that will be added with the City of Gold update
Ability to use Caravan as a "mobile home", offering a saving point in the wilderness
Ability to hire certain trainers and take them with you as followers
Ability to store items in the Caravan
Ability to (somehow) upgrade your Caravan

https://stoneshard.fandom.com/wiki/C…_%26_Followers

Oh man, hadn't read up on that save system, that does indeed sound pretty awful. That could make it a no purchase for me.

Well it’s a rest based save system. Trouble is if you range too far out in the wilderness you can get ganked trying to return to a distant town and lose everything since the rest. Hence the wilderness caravan system. That would be a big help.

You save on quit now, wherever you are.

Regarding the Survival skill tree, I dunno. IMO, a game should never be tedious to play, period. It should never punish the player by taking his real world time to accomplish in-game goals.

That said, sometimes a bit of tedium is unavoidable, but no way should we have to spend skill points to avoid tedium, for example having to walk across six empty screens to reach town.

That's good to read about the save system, I can work with that.