The farm made it into the plan

A farm for each town, with a kitchen NPC, is now on the roadmap. There isn’t a line of code yet, it’s only design, but it changed how we think about what to do between one fight and the next.

Why

Until now the game was town and room. It lacked a place without hurry, where you can spend time with friends without always being close to dying, and it lacked a reason for that place to matter in the fight.

The answer was food with effects. A dish and a drink before entering the boss room change the math: more health, more fire resistance, more elemental mastery for reactions. That way the farm stops being a separate minigame and becomes preparation.

How it will work

In town, a teleport takes you to the farm. It has a vegetable garden, an orchard, a wheat field, a chicken coop, cows, beehives and a lake. Chickens, cows and bees aren’t killed: they give eggs, milk and honey. At the edge of the woods there are rabbits, boars and deer, and those you hunt, with the same fight as the rooms, only weak, and with meat and leather drops.

Everyone walks around the same farm and sees each other, but each plot has its own regrowth time for each player, so nobody harvests anyone else’s tomatoes.

To start there are five dishes and five drinks. Only one dish and one drink are active at a time, half an hour each, applying to both characters in the team. The root stew gives health, the spicy skewer gives attack and fire resistance, and the farm coffee makes you faster. For now there’s no cooking level: harvesting gets you ingredients, not experience. Food can be traded, and whoever likes cooking can become the group’s cook.

There’s only one kitchen NPC, configured per town. When other towns exist, each will have its own farm with regional ingredients, its own recipes and its own dungeons, with no new code for that.

Next step

It stays in phase 2, together with the inventory, which the farm will be the first to really use.