Answers from the Developers

August 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

Hi, was wondering if there are going to be secret skills you can get by doing specific tasks?

Proficiency in any skill in BitCraft is acquired by repeatedly performing tasks related to said skill, for example, picking up mushrooms increases your Foraging Skill. There are currently no “secret skills” in BitCraft in that all skills are available to you at the start of the game. However, that being said, crafting recipes are discovered as you play the game and recipes could certainly be secret. Gathering or refining a new material will often lead to the discovery of new craftable items.

Varu modifies the body of the player, are her modifications going to alter stats or give any buffs/upgrades to the player?

When you first start BitCraft your character wakes up as a being without memory and a body like all the other similar beings awakening around you. It is Travelers like Varu who will help you get in the shape which is right for you. It is our current plan to keep these visual character customization options separate from buffs or upgrades which affect the character’s performance.

What will be the in-game currency? 3 types of coins (gold silver bronze) or gold in general?

We have been thinking about a stylish and lore-fitting currency name like Hex Coins. There are however open questions regarding copyright and unintended associations with the crypto world. So the last word about BitCraft’s currency has not been spoken yet.

I’ve been wondering how sharing access to buildings or things will work. For example, if someone builds a tent near the center of your land claim, and then by the time you want to expand, they are inactive. I understand that buildings will decay, but that would take time. If you wanted to remove that tent to place something else, how would that work? Would a person who didn’t build it be able to destroy it manually? Or would there have to be a system that incentivizes one person to make all buildings and then share access in some way?

Only people who have explicit permission can build or remove buildings inside claimed land, but it is not necessarily restricted to the one person, who claimed the area or placed a building. The finer details on how exactly a group of people can organize permissions inside a land claim are part of BitCraft’s social features and are still in development. Problems like the mentioned abandoned building in the center of a settlement are part of our considerations for the design of claim permissions.

While a majority of the map will be Randomly Generated, will there be any areas deliberately designed i.e. Tallest Mountain in the World, the biggest canyon, etc?

Due to the size and scope of the BitCraft world, we need to make heavy use of procedural generation to create the world. However, BitCraft is only one single world. This means that although the amount of terrain that we need to create is huge, we are able to use procedural generation followed up with hand design terrain-generation tools. Broadly speaking we will use whichever tool allows us to create the most interesting world, but we do find that incorporating a human touch does help to create a better and more interesting world!

How much is hand created vs procedural is also a function of how sophisticated our procedural generation is as well. As we continue to develop the quality of the procedural generation we can delegate more of the generation to be procedural and put more care into the hand-designed details.

Currently, the placement and size of land masses, biomes, and tall mountain peaks are hand placed, whereas the placement of resources and the general land mass shape are procedurally created based on manually tuned values and instructions. This is particularly helpful during the pre-alpha, where we want to ensure that players have a certain kind of experience.

Is there going to be a chat system in-game? Like a typing chat or voice chat of any kind? Or is all the communication via body language?

There will be text chat, however, some details still need to be worked out. In a single-world game, having everyone talk over each other in a global chat would be a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, certain players could need to communicate with players who are very far away in the world. No conclusion has been reached about voice chat, because the potential problems of text chat are multiplied here, including moderation of potentially every language spoken on our beautiful planet.

Can you pet dogs?

Since the conceptional phase of BitCraft, it has been part of our vision to implement pets. Pets have made it unfortunately not yet into the pre-alpha version, but it’s something we want to change, once we have all the basic systems ready. Having an animal companion and not being able to pet it, would obviously be inappropriate as every pet owner knows, so we have to make sure, we are getting this right.

How does time work? Is it like animal crossing where it follows real life, or is it just a couple minutes IRL? Does farming take multiple real-life days or in-game days?

We have not finally decided how long individual processing or crafting actions will exactly take. The general idea is, that most active crafting will be very fast, while other products are processed passively which can take considerable time, dependent on the tier of the items, but it will leave players free to do something else. Naturally, for a persistent game world, progress will be based on server time and will not depend on players to be online.

How player-driven will Bitcraft be? Will players have to do everything or will there be NPCs to do some stuff if not many players are playing? What would happen if not many people are playing at a certain time?

The advancement and progress of civilization in BitCraft will be fully player-driven. Settlements, the roads to connect them, and the goods to trade following those roads will all be created by players.
We will implement systems that help deal with the fact that players can obviously not always be online. For example, if you offer goods on your market stall, you will not need to be online if someone comes around to purchase something from your offers. Ancient creatures will also be available to provide you with some services, if you can find them.

Will the inventory be infinite, or it will be limited?

In order to have a game with a localized economy, there must be limitations on how much inventory can be moved at once. A player with infinite inventory could simply move a massive amount of a given resource to another town and instantly remove supply and demand disparity. That said there will be ways to upgrade your portable inventory (vehicles) and ways to build huge static storage in towns.

In the ‘Ancient journal part 1’ it stated something about libraries and people like scholars. So I was wondering if stuff like a librarian or astronomer or stuff like that would be a role/job in the game and how would it work in the game.

The authors of the “Ancient Journals” are unfortunately all deceased and much of their knowledge has died with them. Unearthing details of the past and discovering higher-tier technology will be part of most players’ journey and we plan to have lots of content for players who want to specialize in an “explorer playstyle”. It is fair to say that an accomplished explorer will become a scholar in their own right and a what is a librarian if not a collector of knowledge.

What biomes are included in the game?

For the initial game release, we plan to have around 10 original biomes. Some are unique like oceans, grasslands, swamps, mountains, and deserts. BitCraft features, in addition, a variety of woodlands. Different forest types will have specific and distinct properties. There are also unannounced biomes currently in development and we plan to add more biomes after release.

So what is the NPC mob content like? are there any environmental mobs that will cause hindrance? like wolves attacking your base or goblins trying to raid your town etc. etc..? Because I think a guard-type job would be cool to have to defend the town or even like caves or dungeons to explore for these “Lost artifacts”?

There are already hostile creatures in the world and combat is an option in the untamed wilderness — at least if you don’t feel like running from everything with teeth or horns. We want the wilderness to be a contrast to settlements and the initial dangers to be an incentive to build safe and cozy places.

We are not strictly against the idea of roaming monster packs that attack buildings or even lairs full of monsters, but it would likely be restricted to certain biomes and it is outside our current scope for the initial game release.

We’ve heard a lot about interacting with the world but not as much about interacting with other players. What can you share about social features in the game beyond text chatting, and how do you see your approach to player expression and communication and building a sense of community in the context of what other MMOs/online games have tried?

In BitCraft players are tasked with creating a civilization from scratch. There are no NPC-run cities with all the amenities you find in many other MMORPGs. This means players need to have the game systems and tools to effectively communicate and organize the founding and development of settlements.

Building and operating a fully player-driven city will require very robust systems for player interactions. Maybe most important will be immersive yet secure trade between players. Also important will be systems that allow the harmonious governing of a city population by players and the means to cooperate with other settlements, like building roads for better trade. Players who aspire to build truly large organizations of people on the empire scale will have to coordinate and manage governmental systems. (which means being politically talented)

We have a clear vision of how to achieve all this but it will require extensive testing and fine-tuning based on player feedback to get it right.

Will there be an underground in Bitcraft? Like caves, dungeons, caverns with glowing gems and mushrooms?

The BitCraft game world is technically one surface, with elevated and lowered areas to create mountains and valleys. This is different from a real 3D game world like Minecraft. This means just digging holes and building caves will not work. We could however add additional layers in the future to create subterranean areas. So to answer your question; it is possible to have caves, dungeons, and caverns in BitCraft in the future but for now we are focused on getting the surface level right.