Basements & Cellars
While we know there's more than enough land for everyone in Elyria, we also know that you can't always purchase the land you want to within a specific area. Sometimes you buy a parcel of land and then before you can expand out to the neighboring parcels they're snapped up by other interested homesteaders.
As a result, we decided to add a mechanic for building cellars and basements. This gives players the opportunity to not only build out above ground, but also to build out below ground (soil allowing).
This has a ton of uses. First, as alluded to in the last section, if you've got a basement or cellar and your village is ever destroyed, you can feel confident whatever you had underground will remain intact.
In addition, building down instead of building out makes it that much harder for keen observers to recognize there's a hidden room from the exterior of your home. You can buy a plot of land, put a small house on it, and then build an entire labyrinth underneath with nobody the wiser. While you may have to put up the occasional structural support, there's virtually no limit to how far out you can tunnel so long as you use good, sturdy resources. It should be understood that this allows you to dig tunnels even underneath parcels which are not your own. But be careful, you never know who - or what - may also be digging tunnels.
The Making of a Dungeon
At long last we've come to the conclusion of this design journal. Rather than use this opportunity to talk about another game mechanic or feature, I wanted to use this opportunity to provide you with a narrative which will, if the rest of the journal hasn't already, lead you to an ultimate realization.
You've just started playing Chronicles of Elyria and are at first frustrated with the limited inventory allowed by the survival mechanics. But before long you realize that you can mitigate the problem by storing the majority of your stuff in a bank box.
However, at some point during your time playing CoE you gain access to something so valuable that you no longer trust it in the hands of a bank. For example, let's say you're one of the rare few who discover the secret to becoming a Lich, and you've trapped your soul in a phylactery.
You wouldn't want to keep your phylactery in a bank box. The owners of the bank could recognize you as a Lich, illegally go into your bank box, find your phylactery, and destroy it. No, that won't do.
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Figure 6 – In-game screenshot of an underground lair
So instead, probably in preparation for your transformation, you buy a plot of land and put a house on it. However, you don't want it to be destroyed by fire, so you make sure to build it out of a nice hard stone. But since your castle is on the outskirts of town, so as not to draw too much attention to it, it could become a target of invading kingdoms. Even having your castle attacked by catapults could put your precious phylactery in danger.
So you build your castle, and then build a basement underneath to make sure it can never be destroyed. Once you dig your basement you realize that the more rooms and hidden areas that are down there the more difficult it will be for people to find your phylactery. Next, you realize that having multiple storage containers would make it difficult for players to determine which chest actually has your phylactery in it - especially if the basement and chests have traps of varying types.
Next, you realize that a good rogue could work their way through your traps and so you decide to either tame, or hire someone to tame some wild beasts for you. Next, since you know those can be bypassed, you hire a gang of thugs to defend your basement, working in shifts to make sure it's protected around the clock.
Finally, since you know nobody can protect your phylactery better than you can, you create a sleeping chamber with a large locked chest somewhere in the basement-maze.
At night, when you're offline, you make sure to log out in the special room, lost in the basement only you fully know the map for, surrounded by traps that only you and a few others know are there, guarded by sell-swords and wild beasts, inside the basement you created so as to avoid being destroyed during a siege, beneath the stone castle you created so as not to have it burned down, on the outskirts of town so as not to draw attention to yourself.
Congratulations, you just created the first dungeon, and you are, for better or worse, the game's first raid boss! This is just one of the many ways Chronicles of Elyria brings player-created content to a whole new level.
