The design hub

All design docs

• Blacksmith Ladder (building template)
• Building ladders
• Class Roster & Skill Schools
• Encampments as instanced sites
• Engineer Ladder (short-ladder example)
• Inn Ladder (service-building example)
• The Mayor (governance system)
• Morale (city mood system)
• Outgoing Raids (rival cities)
• Raid System (both directions)
• Recruits, friends and markets
• The stats doctrine
• World Structure

Eric's concept, captured 2026-08-09; progression model expanded 2026-08-30. Not part of Aether Shard — a future project. Empty repo created at ~/git/aether-shard-survival. Reuses the existing character sheets' extra animation frames (attack, hurt, death poses) that the turn-based game never needed.

Core loop

• Action RPG combat (real-time, not turn-based — a deliberate break from Aether Shard's guard rails; those rules apply to that project only).
• Killing animals yields meat; defeated humanoid NPCs leave lootable remains where they fall.
• Player builds and grows their own city from nothing.

Survival systems

• Hunger bar — players need food. Eating restores some health.
• Stamina — abilities cost stamina; stamina recovers only by resting.
• Rest — recovers stamina and some health.
• Chapel restores health; Inn recovers stamina (division of duties).

The city

• Build buildings → unlock additional buildings (tiered tech tree).
• Building, upgrading, and repairing all cost materials + time.
• Recruitable NPCs discovered while roaming — hired or rescued — and installed to manage buildings. Roles: fisherman, miller, priest, blacksmith, weaver, shopkeeper, innkeeper, farmer, lumberjack, stone worker, alchemist (potions), and a mayor (reports to the player, grants bonuses — full governance system designed 2026-08-30: The Mayor (governance system), "the mayor is the city's class").
• NPCs cost money and food as upkeep. City mood: Morale (city mood system) (designed 2026-08-30 — one city-wide stat, anchor + shocks, modifier never gate).
• Once a building tier unlocks it, the city can gather / grow / refine resources at the city level — players can still gather by hand, but the town takes over some of the economy.

Raids and rival cities

Full system designed 2026-08-30: Raid System (both directions) (escalation via Prosperity + Heat, telegraphed defense, siege/stealth offense, kidnap-not-kill NPCs, loot/cripple/raze consequences dial).

• The city can be raided by humanoid NPCs; buildings can be damaged or destroyed (repair = materials + time).
• Other cities exist and are not friendly. The player can raid them, or sneak in to loot.
• Walls: the player can build one to blunt raids. Enemy cities with walls demand either a series of puzzles and timings to slip through — or brute force during a raid.

Progression model (settled 2026-08-30)

No player level — gear is power

• No XP, no character levels. Killing pays out in meat, loot, and materials — never levels. XP farming is designed out.
• 20+ gear levels per slot, built as a grid, not a hand-authored list: ~5 material eras (copper → iron → steel → mithril → aetherite) × 4 quality steps per era. Data-driven from a stat curve; one sprite look per era, quality steps are stat bumps/tints.
• Material era gates on world exploration (what the mine can extract); quality step gates on blacksmith/building tier (same recipe, better forge, better result).
• Found vs crafted vs enchanted: crafted gear is the deterministic backbone (motivates the city); found gear (raid loot, rescue rewards) carries unique/weird effects you can't craft; enchanting personalizes. Found = different, crafted = stronger, enchanted = yours.
• Durability = "dulled", never destroyed. Gear degrades to a dulled state and is always repairable at the blacksmith. Progression is never deleted.

Compounding layers (additive within a layer, small multiplier across)

1. Gear grid (the big number) 2. Enchants — bound to the item (Enchanter) 3. Socketed gems — transferable between items (Jewelcrafter) 4. Food buff — long, passive, out-of-combat (Inn / Farmer / Fisherman) 5. Potion buff — short, active, in-combat (Alchemist / Herbalist)

Food AND potions stack with each other; limit is one active buff per category, each modest. Raid prep ritual: eat, drink, gear up — full readiness is the reward for a complete town. Possible high-tier alchemist unlock: a flask-style third buff that persists through death.

Balance rule: write a target "total power at tier N" formula early and measure every enemy against it.

Tuning model built 2026-08-31: future-survival-tuning.xlsx (same folder) — Levers sheet drives gear grid, power curve, enemy HP/damage targets, building costs, pacing, and a Prototype Check tab that flags drift vs the arena code.

Class system — a lens, not a stat block

Full roster designed 2026-08-30: Class Roster & Skill Schools — 6-school hexagon, 6 classes as adjacent pairs, chapel-t1 = class selection, respec fee scales with ring distance.

• Gear owns stats; class owns the ability kit and gear affinities (e.g. Berserker: axe skills + low-stamina bonus; Warden: shield skills + wall-defense bonus during raids).
• Respec at the Chapel for a fee (thematic descendant of Aether Shard church promotions). Fee scales with gear era — cheap to experiment early, a real decision late.
• Skill tomes (Scribe/Sage) teach specific abilities within the schools your class allows. Only 4 active skills equipped at a time (carried forward from Aether Shard). Skills are lootable/craftable content; no skill XP.

Professions belong to the city, not the player

No player-side profession grinding — that would reintroduce XP farming through the side door. A profession's tier = building tier × NPC quality. NPCs themselves have tiers (Apprentice → Journeyman → Master); high-tier NPCs are rare finds/rescues — recruitment is loot. Player hand-gathering stays as the bootstrap and emergency option, not a skill.

Gatherer roles (miner, herbalist, lumberjack, farmer, fisherman) are the input side — every crafter has a gatherer feeding it. The engineer is the raid profession: brute-forcing a wall costs engineering materials, making sneak-vs-siege partly an economic choice.

Four progression tracks, all fed by playing, none by grinding

1. Gear grid 2. Enchant/gem levels 3. Building tiers 4. NPC quality

Building progression & pacing (settled 2026-08-30)

Goal: no building can be maxed quickly; every ladder is gated on multiple different currencies of effort so no single grind shortcuts the curve.

• Building tiers ride the material eras: upgrading any building to tier N requires refined era-N materials. Maxing a building means first reaching the final era in the world — exploration gates the city.
• Four stacked gates per upgrade: 1. Refined materials (bars/planks/cut stone), never raw — production throughput is a per-tier pacing dial; rushing requires scaling the whole chain. 2. Cross-building goods (e.g. blacksmith t3 needs stone worker's cut stone + engineer's glass; alchemist t4 needs mithril instruments) — creates soft build order, prevents beelines. 3. NPC quality caps: tiers 1–3 any recruit, t4 = Journeyman, t5 = Master. Final tiers gate on rare finds/rescues (ARPG loop). 4. Construction time measured in active play, not wall-clock — staggers completion without idle-game waiting. Seasoning, not gate.
• Staggered unlocks across eras (each era = new buildings at t1 + old buildings reaching new tiers):
• Era 1 Copper: Town Hall, Blacksmith, Farm, Inn, Chapel, Mine, Lumber Camp
• Era 2 Iron: Weaver, Herbalist + Alchemist, Walls (palisade), Mason's Yard, Fishery, Mill, Trading Post
• Era 3 Steel: Engineer, Jewelcrafter, Walls t2 (raid game opens)
• Era 4 Mithril: Enchanter, Scribe (deep layers arrive late, once gear is worth enchanting)
• Era 5 Aetherite: capstones — flask unlock, Walls t5, Master-tier production
• At any point the player has both something new to build and something old to upgrade.

Three layers of progression per building (rule: construction buys the shell + ONE basic function; a building never launches with its catalog): 1. Tier (the era ladder) — gates capability categories. Blacksmith t1 = repair bench + basic copper weapons only; t2 unlocks iron AND armor-smithing as a category; t3 adds alloy smelting; etc. 2. Modules — each tier allows 2–3 purchasable sub-upgrades (armory annex, second forge…), each costing materials + time. Tier is a door; modules are behind it. Late-unlocked buildings (e.g. Scribe in era 4) climb fewer tiers but each tier carries its own module set, so they still have a full ladder. 3. Recipes — the catalog is collected, not granted: some come with modules, the good ones are bought from wandering traders, looted from rival cities, or known by high-quality NPCs on arrival (a Master blacksmith arrives knowing things — recruitment is loot, again).

Building ladders drafted: Blacksmith Ladder (building template) (the template), Engineer Ladder (short-ladder example) (short-ladder example), Inn Ladder (service-building example) (service-building example), and Building ladders (ALL remaining buildings + Walls, compact grid — the full 16-track roster).

Rushing tiers without recipes = infrastructure with nothing to make; great recipes without tiers/modules = a catalog you can't produce. No building is ever "done" at creation, nor even at max tier — recipes keep trickling in from the ARPG loop.

• Cadence math: ~15 buildings × (tiers + modules + recipes), on top of gear/enchant/gem levels — dense enough that individual steps should be chunky and satisfying, not frequent and thin.

Open questions

• Enchant level count; are enchant slots limited per item?
• Class roster and which skill schools each unlocks.
• NPC quality: fixed at recruitment, or trainable?
• Enchanter input material ("essences" from raids?) — what exactly?
• Do imbue schools conflict (fire vs lifesteal exclusivity)?
• Raid mechanics, rival-city growth, failure states, mayor bonuses, world structure (from earlier session — still open).

World structure

Designed 2026-08-30: World Structure — home valley + 4 era wedges, zone access as infrastructure projects, era-banded rival cities, roads/waypoints, fog-of-war + rumor-board intel. Built 2026-09-12 (v0.1.63): the wilds are ONE VAST VALLEY (~150 tiles) under FOG OF WAR (persisted per save); camps and Ironhold stay phased; keepers work INSIDE their building once it stands (marker on the roof, TALK TO them from the door). Details in the world-structure doc.

Prototype status (2026-09-02)

Arena prototype v0.1.10 now covers: real-time combat, survival clocks, hunting, gear grid slice + dulling, 6 skills w/ cooldowns + loadout, stealth, bandit camp, loot sacks, tabbed inventory + full doll + STATS, NPC quests (2 recruits, 6 quests), and hand-gathering (7 node kinds). v0.1.11–13 add the first BUILDINGS (Copper Forge + Grindstone module, Roadside Rest + Kitchen, quest-taught recipes, the food buff layer). v0.1.14 (2026-09-02) builds THE TOWN: a separate Town scene on the city site (authored plots, recruits, whetstone, road east) with the arena demoted to the hunting grounds; World (static class) holds THE CITY AS DATA + the persistent hero, and the "Game" autoload clock ticks building/craft timers wherever the hero is — orders finish while you're out hunting. Travel = walk the road. This is the save-file / friend- snapshot / raid-target blob from Recruits, friends and markets, live. v0.1.15 adds the Chapel + the class system (ordination, 6 passives, Reliquary respec by ring distance; tome school-gating deferred). v0.1.36 builds the stealth path (sentries, grapple, lockpicks, bag-only). v0.1.35 builds the Ironhold slice of Outgoing Raids (rival cities). Designed 2026-09-04: Outgoing Raids (rival cities) (rival cities, siege/stealth, Heat, the Ironhold slice). v0.1.34 adds the Scribe — every designed building now stands. v0.1.33 adds the Enchanter (raid essence, bound enchants, disenchant). v0.1.32: controller first (every menu on the pad). v0.1.31 adds the Engineer (fittings, gate traps, a ballista, smoke). v0.1.29 adds the Jewelcrafter (gems, ring/amulet slots, sockets that travel). v0.1.28 adds the Fishery (the valley's first water; Era 2 complete → Era 3 charter). v0.1.27 adds the Mill (grain → flour → bread → Shepherd's Pie). v0.1.26 adds the Weaver (cloth, tannery, three crafted armors). v0.1.25 adds the Herbalist + Alchemist (sunroot, potions, the potion buff layer stacking with food). v0.1.24 adds the Mason's Yard + Palisade (first Era-2 building, era-gated; a gate raiders must break; watchtower). v0.1.23 adds raids (defense): earned by prosperity, telegraphed, theft-and-run raiders, wrecked/repair, away resolution. v0.1.22 adds save-to-disk (one JSON: hero + city + scene + pos; autosave 20s / gates / death / focus loss; resume where you were). v0.1.21 adds the Town Hall (ledger, bounties, mayor styles, the Era-2 charter) — every Era-1 shell now stands. v0.1.20 adds the Farm (greens + fowl, the Inn's second meal). v0.1.19 adds the Storehouse + haulers (shared stockpile with a capacity lever; a rescued captive walks the yards). v0.1.18 adds the Lumber Camp (timber + charcoal; Storehouse + haulers decided next, see Building ladders). v0.1.17 adds the Mine (first producer: a capped yard fills on the city clock, Cart Rails/Lamp Room). v0.1.16 adds the Trading Post (buy era-capped stock, sell anything, Ledger Desk; loot shown as gold). Every building is prototyped; still paper-only:

world wedges, outgoing raids.

Stats & social layer

Stats doctrine locked 2026-09-01: The stats doctrine — 4 primary (Power/Protection/Health/Stamina), 6 secondary named modifiers, per-skill cooldowns for pacing, no passive stamina regen ever. Older concept adapted 2026-09-01: Recruits, friends and markets — NPC quests (adopt now), friend cities + ghost-raid PvP + player market (later, Cloudflare backend), "the city is data" principle.

Asset notes

• Character sheets already on hand carry unused action-frames — the ARPG combat is designed around finally using them.
• Sibling prototype: jiujitsu-game-project (Groundstrike, ~/jiujitsu) proves out the non-Aether-Shard project pipeline.

Playtest 2026-09-05 (first Android report) — decisions

• Action button. Talking, opening buildings and gathering happen on a press (A / E / ACT), never by walking into things; a prompt names the action. On the pad A doubles as attack when nothing is in reach (Zelda's context A). Shipped v0.1.37.
• No fighting in town unless raiders are inside the walls. Training arena parked.
• Menus at 32 px m5x7, crisp import; HUD is a full-width strip; quest tracker three lines + a QUESTS page; CONTROLS page; big quest markers (! offer, faded ? progress, bright ? ready).
• Abilities describe themselves; ABILITIES board in the Aether Shard style with a PASSIVES row. Passives are taught at the new Drill Yard (Era 2), two active.
• Movement is cheap: Leap Slam 15 SP, dodge 12 SP.
• Harder: bandit 40 hp / 12 dmg / faster.
• Music + SFX borrowed from Aether Shard; drawn ability effects.
• Encampments become instanced sites — see Encampments as instanced sites (design only; next build candidate).