🌴Nature

An unpredictable and unavoidable force to test your character

Weather 🌪️

The weather in the WORLD varies hour to hour, and from parcel to parcel. Different weather conditions have implications on:

• Farming

• Building

• Resource regeneration

Most of the time, they simply increase or decrease the efficiency at which the aforementioned activities are performed. However, in rare cases, the weather can become so extreme that it ruins crops, damages buildings, and even hurts NPCs.

Disease 😷

Players may never experience this, but there is always a looming probability that disease will spread between Cities. Note that for the sake of simplicity at this stage of the game, the mechanics of pandemics are limited to:

• A City is infected by an adjacent City

• A City is infected when it attacks an infected City

A few important features of pandemics in the WORLD, are that:

1. They start randomly - any City can be the first infected

2. They are of random fatality - they can have no effect on NPCs, just like they can kill almost any NPC it infects

3. They are of random imminence - if it kills an NPC, it can do so soon after the infection happens, or much longer after

4. They are of random contagiousness

5. They can be of random duration

We quantify and apply the effects of any disease by setting probabilities for features 1, 2, and 3, and a duration in hours to 4. For 1, independent probability refreshes every day. For 2, a 50% fatality rate means the disease will kill half the people it infects. For 3, a disease could kill NPCs at a fatality ranging between 3 hours and 6 days. For 4, every NPC infected could have a 10% chance of contaminating another NPC. For 5, notice that we use the phrase “can be.” It is true in our real world that the most fatal and imminent diseases don’t last for long because no one infected can stay alive long enough to spread it. We are implementing the logic behind this phenomenon in the WORLD. Based on features 1 to 4, one could calculate how long a disease would last and how many casualties it will inflict. While it is extremely unlikely that the randomly generated probabilities of the features 1 to 4 create the most deadly plague ever seen, we still have a cap on the duration and number of fatalities inflicted by any single disease in-game. After a disease reaches either cap - duration or number of victims - it just disappears from the WORLD.