The Age of Survival

also The Age of Omens — one age, seen from two sides.

Stay alive, feed yourself, and build the first shelter. Stone, fire, and what the land gives.

The Age of Survival

Playable nowthe material half

An age is not a difficulty setting or a tech tier. It is a question the world is asking you, and survival asks the plainest one: can you still be here tomorrow?

Everything in this age answers it materially. You are cold, so you make fire. You are hungry, so you learn what the land gives and then learn to make it give more. You are exposed, so you build. Nothing here is decorative — a Campfire is warmth before it is a cooking station, and a wall is a wall before it is architecture.

That plainness is deliberate. The systems you meet first should be ones whose purpose you can see by looking at them, so that the later ones — which are not plain at all — have something to be strange against.

Systems this age introduced

Crafting and stations — A recipe names a capability rather than a block, and any block declaring that word provides it, so a station is data alone. Reached by building Crafting Block.
Cooking — A fire burns fuel and turns what is in it into something else; a spit, a smoking rack or a cooking pot set on it adds roasting, smoking or boiling, a hearth is the same fire in stone, and a drying rack beside either works with no fire at all. Reached by building Campfire.
Hunger, health and the night — Hunger falls, food restores it, and what comes out after dark is what the dark is for.
Breath and drowning — A head under water spends fifteen seconds of breath and then a point of health a second, for a player and for anything that walks; the bubbles show only once there is something to say.
The sea and what lives in it — A seabed that grows weed, coral, anemones and shells; little fish that cannot be touched; sight that reaches as far as the light does and no further; and one shell that gives light of its own.
Farming — Tilled soil, seeds, growth on a random tick, and a harvest. Reached by building Stone Hoe.
Animals and husbandry — An animal follows what you hold, and one that feels safe where it is lays and gives.
Encounters — Something other than the terrain made it, or the place is uncanny: a grave, a ring of standing stones, a spring, a fairy ring, an ancient oak, a bear's den in a cave.
Caves and what grows in them — Caves are cut by noise and then grown in: a table says what stands on a cave floor, how often, and between which depths.