Region idea

[EternityTide]

I was hoping for a thickly forested area in the new maps? I know you likely have plans for what regions you are going to introduce, but I was wondering if a more intensive hunting environment could be introduced, A forest would be ideal for this. I'm drawing a concept map for this idea, but I thought of creating caves (that you enter like a house, with the loading scene being a quicktime event of scrambling over a rocky ledge into a cave system). Inside these caves you would find either abandoned camp outs (left by other survivors) with potentially some equipment left behind, alternatively you would find a pack of starved wolves (Amongst them, Fluffy's less civilised cousin, Scruffy) who would attack you upon venturing too deep into the cave system.

Another place would be the Ranger's outlook, similar in style to the lookouts, but on shorter stilts, with a medium amount of supplies inside.

The crown jewel of the map would be 'The Old-timers Cabin', a small log cabin quite out of the way along a snowed in path, in the midst of dense forest with a reasonably high deer population. There would be a high reserve of firewood in the locale, an old rifle, and I was hopint to add to the ambience by adding a mechanical grandfather clock ticking in the background, showing you the current time (I know that would be a nightmare to implement, but I like the idea of some old fashioned tech surviving, plus it has only been a few weeks or so since the disaster, and I've witnessed grandfather clocks that go over six months between windings), the old timer himself sadly would have frozen in his bed, having had no help to collect enough firewood to stay warm. Amongst his belongings, you can find the old-timer's journal, which you could read to get his account of the events leading up to and past the geomagnetic event, or you could harvest it for 5 tinder plugs (It's a morality/necessity/backstory mechanic). A drawn map will be up soonish, so you can see what I am waffling about.

[Burning Bridges]

You should really do that. No matter if it influences the game it sounds like a swell map.

Let me add that for me the map should also be large enough so that someone can get lost. If it was placed between two of the normal maps it would form the sort of wilderness that you have to cross every time, and that would make the thing very interesting to me.

From gameplay perspective what makes most sense to me is that you have the choice between a long route, and a short and dangerous route. Let's say there is a short route through a mountain area that you can cross, but which has avalances, falling rocks, low temperatures and requires mountaineering.

[CoureurDeBois]

I really wish they'd release community mapmaking tools, so we could make maps like this ourselves. An idle fancy, of course, because the game is still in alpha...

[Amy]

I like Eternity's idea about the caves and the quicktime event to replace loading screen (or at least a short first-person cutscene). I also like the whole idea of the cabin and such.