Roadmap

Roadmap and known limitations

Matriochka is an alpha, at 0.4.0. The whole story can be played from the Surface to the third ending: the ten worlds with their moving rules, World 0, the three endings and the New Cycle, and since 0.4.0 the Trials, world events and talents give it a life after the story. This page lists what is in the game now, and honestly what is still missing or simpler than the design.

Done in 0.4.0

Replay and progression

• Trials after an ending: a rush per world and the Gauntlet of the eleven bosses, against the clock, with best times per player and group, a server board of the ten best groups, Trophy Dolls and titles.
• World events: invasions led by a warlord, a surge of each world's rule, a travelling merchant per world.
• Talents: three branches of four talents per class at the Class Table, bought with souls and Shell Shards.
• New gear: the Spore Bow, Magma Flail, Key Chain Whip, Storm Javelin, Lantern Shield, Tide Harpoon and Quake Pick.
• New structures: an eleventh structure in every world.
• A balance pass checked by tools/balance.py: stronger Berserker weapons, 3 Shell Shards per boss, six creatures retuned.

Systems

• Station automation: hoppers feed a kept recipe, the result comes out below, comparators read the station, and every station keeps its condition.
• Shaking the World Block on purpose from outside, to help (stun the creatures, open the boss) or hinder (quake, falling blocks) the group inside.
• The Doll of Life layer at the Soul Altar costs 50 souls and 4 rare resources of the current world; structure chests keep Soul Shards and Soul Vessels, about 100 souls per world (see Souls and karma).
• Every quest checks what its description says: deliveries to the peoples, places reached, stations used, kills under a condition.
• The Unfinished fights on the shortest timing tier, on every shell.
• Server options: karma on or off, a soul gain multiplier, limits on active groups and parcels, world event frequency (see Configuration).

Presentation

• Comfort options: screen shake, flashes, soft effects instead of Nausea and Darkness, cinematics, large attack subtitles, fewer particles, colour-blind gauge patterns, HUD plaque size and corner, a volume per kind of music.
• Boss introductions, world title cards, phase freeze-frames and camera shakes; adaptive music with a danger theme, heartbeat and stings.
• A hand-made animation for every boss attack, phase change and fall.
• Visuals: hand-painted textures in the vanilla style, emissive station faces, the light and fog of every world, eighteen particles, the optional Matriochka HD pack, Iris through vanilla light.
• A first-steps card that guides a new player up to World 1 (see Getting started).
• Translations into Spanish, German and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Compatibility checked with Sodium, Iris, Xaero's maps, JourneyMap, VoxelMap and Traveler's Backpack; a Mod Menu entry; the Matriochka Pack modpack, normal and hard.
• Check runs: automation, a full playthrough in real ticks, visuals, boss moves.

In the game since before 0.4.0

Story and endgame

• World 0, opened by the ten hidden dolls nested in order, with its Obsession rule and the Artisan's Shadow.
• The three endings (Sealed, Absorbed, Set Down the Tools), each with a crawl on the Scroll, the credits and an advancement, and the New Cycle with stronger worlds.
• The fifty Journal pages, in all five languages, with the coded pages in the Artisan's cipher (see The Artisan's Journal).
• World variants chosen while a Seed or rite site hatches, the karma variants at +100 and -100, and boss mutations from World 6.

Worlds

• World 3 halls really move, World 5 lights burn out, World 6 gravity changes by zone, World 9 ground zones rise, sink, slide and close.
• World 7 is entirely under water, with snorkel helmets, a diving chamber and sea wildlife.
• World 10 at doll scale, with the giant props and the Maquette of your base on the Titanic Workbench.
• The miniature of its world over every World Block, and the effects between the scales in both directions.

Systems

• The Refuge Doll, nesting chests and layered armor.
• The Drill's 3 x 3 mining and fuel, Storm Essence for the Lightning Forge, the Spore Vat's fermentation yields, the Inverter's property swap.
• Karma on the Surface, black markets and the Karma Paths quests (see Souls and karma).
• Reaper soul gain, Prowler dodge, Shell Shards for class upgrades (see Equipment classes).
• Boss attack speed that grows with the players, the "take part in the last boss" rule, group leader commands (see Multiplayer and groups).
• Administrator commands to list, repair, move and reset worlds and to reset bosses (see Commands).
• The story and hardcore difficulty modes (see Configuration).
• Villager diamond trades held back until World 5.
• The mod's own sounds and music, synthesized from seeded recipes.
• Recipe pages in Just Enough Items (optional). EMI has no build for Minecraft 26.3, so there is no EMI support.

Art

• Every creature and boss has its own model, built part by part in tools/mobs_hd and tools/bosses_hd.py, with its own animations and one animation per attack. The GeckoLib files in src/main/resources/assets/matriochka/geckolib open directly in Blockbench.
• The items and blocks you see most are hand-painted by code in the vanilla style (tools/craft.py); the rest of the textures and the interface sprites are painted by tools/paint.py and tools/gui.py.

Still to do

• Tune the new numbers. The Trials (boss health and damage, par times, soul rewards), the talents (costs and effects) and the world events (chance, cooldown, weights, invasion size, warlord strength, merchant prices) are first values from the design, not yet checked by tools/balance.py nor by playtests.
• Boss fight length. Solo boss fights last 1 to 2 minutes up to World 9 and about 3.5 minutes for the Unfinished; the design asks for long fights in the expertise tier (see Balance). Left to playtests.
• World gauges. The rates of toxin, heat, oxygen and noise live in the Java rules and are outside the balance check.
• Translation review. The Spanish, German and Brazilian Portuguese texts need a review by native speakers, above all the names of the 0.4.0 content (trials, titles, talents, surges, merchants, new gear and structures) and the glossary.
• Shader packs. Iris works through vanilla light, but has not been tried in game with every shader pack; packs that tag emissive blocks by name do not know the mod's blocks.
• Modpack listings. The Matriochka Pack is attached to the GitHub releases but has no Modrinth or CurseForge project yet (see Modpack).

Known issues

No known bug is open. Report anything odd on the issue tracker.

Release plan (from the design)

1. Private alpha on worlds 1 to 3.
2. Closed beta up to World 10.
3. Public 1.0 with the ten worlds, published on Modrinth and CurseForge for Fabric, tested on Lunar Client, with a trailer, this wiki and a Discord.

The design's priorities: P0 proves the concept on World 1, P1 builds the reusable systems (attack system, stations, gates, classes, karma), P2 finishes the game (World 0, endings, variants, mutations, layered armor, nesting chests, miniature preview, New Cycle, difficulty modes, accessibility, music). P0, P1 and P2 are done since 0.4.0 (accessibility, station automation and cinematics were the last). Modrinth and CurseForge listings of the mod are still in review.