Answers from the Developers
January 2022
The Bitcraft developers are active on the official BitCraft Discord server and often answer community questions. To join the conversation and to read new answers first, join https://discord.gg/bitcraft
Will we be able to open our own shops, so let’s say I want to become a blacksmith I can do that?
We believe player to player trade is an essential component of a player run economy. While the need for further testing means we can’t share the exact details on player owned shops yet, what I can say is that what you’re asking for is very much in the spirit of what we want to achieve. Player owned shops don’t cause issues in a small village, but becomes more difficult in high population towns where you don’t want people to have to walk through rows and rows of shops to get where they’re going. There are a few ways to address this, but again it’s difficult to say exactly what form it will take at this time. With regards to the second part of your question about becoming a blacksmith. Yes, you will be able to become specialized in a single skill if you practice diligently. So specialized that others may seek out your services in your part of the world.
Will the Game be localized into languages other than English?
We would of course like to localize the game into many languages so that it can be accessible to as many people as possible. That said, we are currently focused on making BitCraft the best game it can be in English. There’s no point in translating a bad game after all! We will communicate to the community if/when we begin localizing into other languages.
How many Servers” (game worlds) will there be?
“BitCraft is a single massive world hosting all players.” This seems literally physically impossible w/ current technology, if you’re expecting one server to host hundreds of thousands of people at once, let alone it being infinite.
How exactly will it work? There was once a go-fund-me scam page with something which had a similar idea when it comes to the playerbase.
There has been a fair amount of justified confusion over what is meant by words like “worlds”, “servers”, “instances” in the context of BitCraft. Over time the technical terms “servers” and “instances” have come to have to mean slightly different things in the context of game design, which makes it really quite difficult to be precise about what we mean since it can be interpreted multiple ways. To clarify, in BitCraft there will be a single game world that all players will join. This does not mean that the entire game will run on a single machine. It means that there will be one logical world and you won’t have to choose which world to join when starting the game. The world of BitCraft will be spatially partitioned with different machines servicing different regions of the logical world. This should all be as seamless as possible to the player. This kind of server architecture is more challenging to engineer, but is within the capabilities of current distributed systems technology. It’s similar in principle to why you don’t have to log into a specific “Facebook server”. There’s just one Facebook. The reason it’s not common in MMOs is that it’s a non-trivial distributed systems engineering challenge which isn’t necessary for gameplay. In a traditional MMORPG, since the world isn’t editable by players the devs can just shard the world and stick players in one of many identical copies of the same world to balance player populations without any negative impact on gameplay.
What perspective will the game be played in?
Currently the game is in top down, third person perspective. The player can free rotate the came around their character and zoom in both very close to inspect their player, or zoom out quite far to see the entire surroundings. The most similar example to point to would be Runescape. While the game is likely to stay third person, we are likely to iterate on the camera and player movement systems as we get feedback from the community.
Will there be magic and/or skills? Is there going to be magic/magic using in this game??
There is no traditional high-fantasy magic in BitCraft (Fireballs, DnD-like magic, etc). We’re very much interested in writing our own story rather than relying on too many tropes, tried and tested though they may be. So if you go hunting, for example, you are limited to using the skills associated with your hunting weapon and you will not be able to throw fireballs at unexpecting wild boars. That doesn’t however mean that there aren’t magic-like things in the world of BitCraft, though. There is of course the mysterious Hexite which enables feats not easily possible in our world.
Will there be cold during nights and in freezing climates?
There is already! There is a system in-game which requires players to dress for the climate/temperature they are in or suffer the consequences. We have plans to expand this system even more as development continues.
Will there be a civilization development? such as one empire has reached an era of modern technology to build vehicles and planes for travel, other empires are still in an early development, etc
As players build up their civilizations, their technology will inevitably advance, however technology in BitCraft doesn’t work quite the same way as it does in our modern world, so you shouldn’t expect people to be flying around in planes or driving cars. That doesn’t mean the technology in BitCraft isn’t powerful, it’s just thematically different than the modern world. The models of buildings and equipment we have shown you so far are quite primitive (i.e. craftable very early) but as characters and civilizations progress more options will become available. The exact implementation is still in development but we have no plans to lock players out of content purely based on their location in the world.
How much character customization is currently planned? Will we be able to customize our characters with certain outfits?
Everyone will be starting the BitCraft journey by waking up as one of the mysterious beings presented in our trailer. So there will be no races or similar. We plan however to implement some character creation choices like different faces and other customization options. Players will start looking similar, but then will be able to customize their appearance with the help of the mysterious travelers that can be found throughout the world. If you help them out, they may use their knowledge of ancient technologies to alter your appearance. Character customization via costumes, on the other hand, will also be a big part of BitCraft with a wide range of craftable outfits to match your fashion sense and play-style.
Regarding Territory and Land: If it’s all One Big World, what’s to stop Mr Big Streamer from just Taking all of it Simply cause they’re Popular Outside of the Game?
We are not designing the game so that large portions of the world will be claimable in a way that no other people can use it. Obviously, land occupied by a town can’t be used for another purpose, but towns will only take up a tiny fraction of the world.
Id love to know if there will be proximity chat in the game.
There is not currently proximity chat in the game, so we haven’t tested it, but it is definitely on our list and something we’d like to add!
Will there be any sort of writing system, will we be able to write letters if we’re willing to deliver them to other towns/cities?
This is a super cool idea. I’d love to do something like this in the game. I’m not sure what that would mean for other forms of long-distance communication though. As a practical matter, we would need players to be able to communicate over large distances within the game, otherwise they’ll just use chat applications outside the game (e.g. Discord) as a workaround. It does remind me of an idea we had about players leaving Cairn stones around the world with messages for future players to find!
How far will survival be enforced, will we need to eat and drink?
These are mechanics that we are always tweaking. Currently you do not need to eat and drink to survive, but you do want to eat and drink since it will improve your capacity to do things like run and collect resources in the game. The system that we’re currently testing is similar in principle to Valheim’s, but more forgiving and more focused on long-term play.
