Combat and items¶

Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own design docs.

The base layer of combat: real-world weapons, a damage model where the right hit kills outright, the five attributes, and what fuels each attack. This is the "vanilla base for Earth" that everything else is meant to build on.

Status: the founder's direction from the third pass (2026-10-26). The five attributes are law. Most numbers here are the assistant's first tuning, not final. The list of starting professions is still a proposal. Combat stays out of the server and client until player and AI controllers are discussed.

How it got here¶

Combat went through three passes in one day, and the change in direction is itself useful to know.

• Pass 1: a wide range of realistic firearms in generic forms, with a semi-realistic damage system loosely modelled on the shooter Insurgency ("just a wild ass guess for a starting point"). Variants of those would become spells and abilities, giving "the illusion of infinite variety" while tuning everything to one standard power system. The founder's example: a magic missile and a submachine gun both fire three-round bursts; they look different, but one game system can define both.
• Pass 2: real-world gear has no levels or rarity ("there are no levels to a shotgun"). Race and class abilities modify how a character performs with it instead. The founder wanted the game to lean into "flavor over function": pulling off a move only a handful of people on the server can do is the cool part, not finding another box of ammunition.
• Pass 3 (current): keep the real-world weapons exactly as defined, name them Earth Weaponry, and scrap everything else from passes 1–2 (flavours, special moves, rarity, affixes, the power budget, elemental damage types). That work is kept on a separate code branch, not deleted.

Decided¶

Earth Weaponry and humans¶

• E1. Earth Weaponry is 18 real-world weapons: revolver, pistol, submachine gun, three shotguns (pump, double-barrel, semi-auto), four rifles (bolt-action, lever-action, marksman, assault), bow, crossbow, throwing knives, grenade launcher, knife, sword, axe and spear. They're standard items: no levels, no rarity, no random stats.
• E2. Every human can use all Earth Weaponry.
• E3. Earth Weaponry turns up on the early floors, or as a reward.
• E4. Every new character is human by default.
• E5. Human classes are gamified professions, each with special abilities. The founder's two examples are the Engineer, who manipulates resources in the environment to fit their needs, and the Future Olympian, who excels at virtually every physical skill.
• E6. Earth Weaponry and the human professions are the vanilla base for Earth. They establish the attributes that drive all the combat and death systems.

E7. The [Lethal] flag¶

The founder's rule (2026-10-26): a headshot kills in one shot because it destroys the brain. When it doesn't destroy the brain, it stops being a one-shot kill. Constitution should raise hit points, and brain-, heart- and neck-destroying hits should still kill instantly. The founder asked for a [Lethal] flag evaluated at runtime.

• Vitals: a hit that destroys a vital kills outright, whatever the target's health. The vitals are the brain, the heart, and the neck by decapitation (edged weapons only).
• Checked after armour: the force left after armour must reach the vital's threshold. The first numbers: brain 10, heart 20, decapitation 50.
• So armour decides. A heavy helmet stops a shotgun pellet from destroying the brain but not a rifle round; a heavy vest stops a pistol round at the heart but not a rifle round.
• Abilities can carry the flag outright, killing whatever they hit.
• Constitution raises health (100, plus 5 per point over 10, minimum 25). Body shots take longer on a hardy character, but a destroyed brain is still destroyed.
• Earth Weaponry gains one property, edged: knife, sword, axe and throwing knives have it; the spear (a thrust) and all firearms don't.

Attributes (law)¶

The founder adopted the five-attribute system the assistant suggested ("Oh yeah keep the five attribute system you've suggested"). The books use the same five, and they're generic enough to use freely.

So far Constitution, Strength and Intelligence have formulas wired in. The rest arrive with the systems they drive.

Strength and weight¶

The founder: Strength should affect the heaviest single item you can handle and melee damage, and "all objects should have a weight attribute", not just weapons.

• O1. Every object has a weight: rocks, doors, crates, bodies and weapons. A weapon is just an object that can also be wielded. Earth Weaponry carries real-world weights.
• S1. Heaviest single object: 5 kg per point of Strength (50 kg at an average 10), minimum 5 kg. Every human can still use every Earth weapon at Strength 1.
• S2. Melee damage: +5% per point of Strength above 10, −5% below (minimum ×0.25). Firearm damage ignores Strength. The extra force counts toward [Lethal]; the founder confirmed that at Strength 20 a knife can decapitate.
• S3. Recoil: each firearm adds spread per consecutive shot, and Strength reduces it on the same 5%-per-point scale. The first shot is the same for everyone.
• S4. Throwing: any object you can lift can be thrown. Distance falls with the square root of weight and rises with Strength, capped at 60 m. For an average human that's about 35 m for half a kilo and 6 m for 20 kg.
• S5. Carrying: an unencumbered load is 2.5 kg per point of Strength. Up to twice that, you move at three-quarter speed. Past twice that, you can't take on more.

What feeds each attack¶

The founder: stamina should be consumed by melee weapons and physical abilities, in place of ammunition or mana; the derivation of stamina and mana from the core attributes was left to the assistant.

• R1. Firearms, bows, crossbows, throwing knives and the grenade launcher use ammunition. Melee weapons and physical abilities use stamina. Spells use mana. Without enough of its resource, an attack doesn't happen.
• R2. Stamina: the pool comes from Constitution; it regenerates at the same rate for everyone after a short pause following any spend.
• R3. Effort cost comes from Strength: a base cost plus a cost per kilogram moved, reduced by Strength. An average human's knife swing costs about 6 stamina; an axe swing about 13.
• R4. Mana: the pool comes from Intelligence and regenerates slowly at the same rate for everyone. The pricing rule for spells: a full pool should equal one magazine of the spell's Earth equivalent. The founder's own example, a magic missile built on the submachine gun, gives 30 casts.
• R5. The balance this gives: melee burst damage is unchanged, but sustained melee damage falls because catching your breath works like a reload. Mana trades sustained damage for never needing pickups.
• R6. Ammunition is scarce by default. Classes may build around needing it. That makes R5's trade real: melee and spells never run dry, and firearms do.
• R7. Sprinting, jumping and dodging cost stamina, from the same pool as melee (the assistant's recommendation, accepted by the founder).
• Conditions can drain any pool, not just health. See Conditions and environment.

A cost the docs flag: Constitution now drives health, resilience and stamina, which makes it the strongest single attribute for a melee character. Watch it.

The damage model (first tuning)¶

The model is lethal and location-based, with numbers the assistant wrote, inspired by Insurgency but not taken from it.

• Health 100. Hit-zone multipliers: head ×3.5, thorax ×1.0, abdomen ×0.9, arms and legs ×0.6.
• Armour comes in classes 0–4 (vest and helmet separately), weighed against each round's penetration 0–5, up to 75% reduction.
• Wounds: a big enough wound bleeds until treated. A leg wound slows you by 25%, an arm wound widens your spread by 30%, until treated.
• Lethality targets (unarmoured target, enforced by tests): every Earth weapon kills with one shot to the head. Chest hits to kill range from 1 (bolt-action rifle, shotguns, grenade launcher) through 2 (most rifles, revolver, bow, crossbow, axe, spear, sword) to 3–4 (pistol, submachine gun, knives).

The combat library prints the full balance table (fire rate, capacity, range, penetration, time to kill and sustained damage) and has 38 tests, each shown to fail when its rule is broken on purpose.

Professions (proposal, not decided)¶

Only the first two are the founder's. The rest are the assistant's candidates in the same spirit.

Open¶

The assistant listed ten gaps in the Earth base. The founder answered most of them the same day as theory (see Characters and progression). Still open:

• Survival needs: hunger, thirst and sleep, yes or no. A Line Cook "feeding a party" implies food matters.
• Equipment slots and weapon swap time: how many weapons can be at the ready.
• Whether carrying a load drains stamina. Today encumbrance slows you but costs nothing.
• Numbers for Intelligence and Charisma. Charisma's wait on the show system.
• Being winded below zero. Right now you simply can't start an effort without enough stamina.
• The professions list above.

Deferred to the "pre-final" math: Dexterity's numbers and the movement baseline (walk, sprint and crouch speeds, jumping, dodging, climbing, falling). Armour, ammunition, bandages, medicine and food exist as rules but not yet as items with weights.