Campfires
Players may end up just wandering off by themselves to explore and not bother to interact with each other, or would like to interact but not have many opportunities where they can encounter everyone else at the same place at the same time, to chat, trade items, craft, strategize, and have a bit of downtime to take a break (toilet, smoke, make a cup of tea, let the dog out, etc.), due to people ideally having their own assigned roles and may be off elsewhere looking for something (i.e. an assigned miner exploring looking for ores to gather).
Periodically players should be encouraged to regroup around a main communal point, to facilitate these group interactions.
Any player can establish a campfire on any (non-water) tile on the map.
This is intended to give players the option of whether to have a main grouping point on the map to keep coming back to (and just keep making campfires there), or to allow them to move their grouping point (where ever they place their campfire) as they progress further throughout the map (Exploration). If instead campfires were always at static/fixed locations (like in many Soulslikes), players would have to keep backtracking to them, which aren't as easy to remember for a procedurally generated world.
This creates an object that any player can stand next to and interact with to open the campfire menu.
The campfire menu has the following sub-menus:
- Feats: View available feats and spend feat points to unlock them.
- Crafting: View available items to craft and craft them.
The feats menu and crafting menu being only accessible from a campfire is intended to prevent player's from diving into menus to try to assign feat points and craft items during combat. When in combat, their attention should be focused on what they are doing right now.
- A campfire can be placed by pressing the campfire button on the GUI.
- Placing a campfire doesn't require using any items or other resources (i.e. logs of any kind). They just spawn out of nowhere when activated.
- A campfire cannot be placed while in combat.
- A campfire cannot be interacted with while in combat.
- Entering combat (i.e. taking damage from a creature) while interacting with a campfire should close all open menus.
- A campfire cannot be placed by a player who has recently placed a campfire.
- There is a minimum timer/cooldown before being able to place another one. If a player really wants to use a campfire, they will need to ask another player to place one instead and go meet them. (Dependency)
- This cooldown is the main thing bringing players together, as otherwise they could just make their own campfire when ever they want which defeats the purpose of the campfire.
- A campfire has no HP and cannot be actively damaged/destroyed.
- When placed, a campfire lasts for a short duration (long enough for a quick break), after which it will attempt to disappear.
- Campfires don't disappear if there are still any players nearby (within a given tile range), to avoid the problem where a player might be crafting or have a UI panel open and spending their feat points, etc. If the campfire just immediately disappeared when its timer is up, it would be extra work to figure out what should happen to anyone currently interacting with that campfire and potentially be annoying for the players if they were in the middle of crafting multiple items. If there are still players around after the timer is up, it will just check again periodically until it can safely disappear.