Wishray Wiki

Most of the world details assume that the game bears a lot of resemblance to Minecraft. Hopefully better looking, and with smaller workable chunks, but those are secondary to the below requirements.

Not only would you as a player be able to change things here and there, but the entire world would be constructable/destructable as in Minecraft.

Biomes should be no smaller than an order of magnitude smaller than in real life. Micro-biomes can occur inside of larger biomes. If NPC peoples exist, then some biomes should reflect the duration of these peoples upon them. (When colonists came to the new world they were astounded to find that there were large clear areas very suitable for planting… not realizing that these areas had been cleared for exactly that purpose by Native Americans cultures that had died off from smallpox).

Resources would be relatively difficult to come by (as compared to Minecraft), in order to create scarcity, so that no player could play a character as an island, and be grandly successful. A player might be able to play a character as a hermit and barely survive, but even that would be difficult, often necessitating interacting with other players at times to avoid going without some basic needs. To create this rate of availability requires several things.

Many resources, such as valuable minerals need to be set apart in distance/time, such that one can't find everything one needs within a short walking distance. Many such resources should be in pockets where they are relatively less rare, but then pockets should be rare.

There may be clues as to where to find these sorts of resources, such as them occurring more in one terrain type than another.

Renewable resources, such as crops, should take a considerable time to cycle through their renewal periods, such that overabundance becomes more rare. The renewal processes should be faulty so that a proportion of attempts to renew fail. This can be based on effort at tending to the renewal process to some extent, or in taking extra preparations, but any effort will never be 100% successful.

Eventually the base resource, such as soil for crops, will become depleted, requiring something like fertilizer in order to keep the renewable process viable. The only actual perpetually provided resources are sunlight, air, and water. And even these might have shortages at times (volcanic eruption blocks sunlight, drought leaves little water).

Trees, and other such real world renewables should take an extremely long amount of game time, and thus not be renewable in any practical sense for the one using the resource. Any renewal efforts of such resources should only be beneficial in posterity. So while trees may be a common and abundant resource in an area, the area can soon be cleared out, leaving players to have to go further and further to get the resource in question. Really no different than any other non-renewable.

Most importantly extraction of resources takes considerable effort. Both in terms of time and energy. There are ways (see below) that the time element would be made to be non-boring.

Characters would require basic needs to be met in order to survive and thrive. This begins with being able to breathe, needing food and water, and a variety of foods, lest the character get dysfunctions like scurvy. They would also need shelter from the elements, or face injury or death from exposure. Medicines would exist, without which common diseases might become debilitating or even fatal.

Again, it may be possible to survive with limited amounts of all of these, but this would make the character relatively ineffective (see energy below).