Explore the world, invent technologies, develop products and services and become Minetest Tycoon, selling them to the natives of the world and, possibly, other players as well.
You are an interdimensional explorer with a team of scientists you hired to help you with your quest. One day you and your group of scientists were doing an experiment with a new type of exploratory base hull which aimed at exploring worlds with "strange physics" (as some folks in your team used to call it) more safely than with the way used until now. The idea was that your base will maintain a tether to your homeworld so you can evacuate you and your team if things go south while exploring.
The experiment went horribly wrong and the tether connection to your homeworld was lost. What made the matter worse is that even the data uplink leading back to your homeworld was also lost. As a result, you and your scientists ended up trapped in one of these worlds with this "strange physics", without a way to reach your homeworld. Additionally, you know that no one in your homeworld knows your location or whether you are alive or not, so you are on your own. Fortunately, you with your team already had a few avatars for the world that was your destination (and you actually ended up there), so you have a chance to start exploring the world, which (at least for now) became your new home.
So, now you are only with some basic equipment to allow you to connect to an avatar and begin exploring. And with a large group of your scientific friends, all waiting in hibernation to conserve the resources of the base (food and energy). You are now on your own. Can you find a way to survive, thrive and, possibly, find a way to bring your people and all the lost teams of scientists home?
The world you ended up in was on the radar of the scientific community of Arepol for a long while. Rumor has it that dozens of science teams were lost in this world as they tried to explore it. As a matter of fact, one of the goals of your base hull project was to create a base facility that would allow you to find these lost teams and bring them back home. All that is known about them for now is that they are not dead, they are hibernated as all the base hulls they used are designed to hibernate them when they run out of resources needed to sustain themselves in the unhibernated state. Additionally, some little information about the world discovered by these lost scientists was obtained by a remote datalink. This datalink also allowed you to obtain an approximate location of some of them but the accuracy of that data is rather limited. The rest of these teams did not have a locator in their equipment so their location could not be determined but you do know that they all are alive.
From the data the previous expeditions collected you know that this world has its troubles too. Something is trying to take it over, kill all the inhabitants of the land and sea and pollute and corrupt everything. One of the reasons why you chose to come here and bring your extensive kit here is to liberate this poor world from the clutches of this monstrosity. After all, your experience at the Big Bad Research Company tells you enough about slavery and opression that you can feel with the creatures of your new homeworld.
Your first task is to find food, water and fuel for your base. Your avatar is equipped with information system that can be used to obtain information about known things as soon as you point at them. Once you find enough food
The world is what is scientifically accurately called "large scale quantum grid space" world. All the matter inside the world exists in "chunks", each of which has fixed composition and fixed mass. Most of these chunks also have fixed size and shape. Therefore these "chunks" are called "crystals" even though some of them don't have a fixed shape and most of them don't resemble what is commonly known as a crystal at all.
These quantum crystals can be in three states:
- "static matter" which forms the quite static elements in the world, positioned within a quantum grid with cells of 1x1x1 metre (hence "large scale quantum grid")
- "free matter" which are freely moving objects ("freely" as in "positioning not restricted by a grid")
- "vapor", which exists in some sort of parallel plane with a much sparse grid of 2kmx2kmx2km.
Each piece of the static matter exists within cells of a grid of 1x1x1 metre cubes and each cell of this grid contains exactly one piece of static matter, which has a fixed shape. Even flowing liquids are subject to this bizzare behavior, making them extremely volatile in the flowing state.
Some crystals have holding space which can hold other crystals. Some
(contained inside another crystal with a holding space). The fixed matter
Dictionary:
node static crystal object free crystal (none) vapor inventory holding space stack multicrystal
This is a role playing game for the Minetest Engine, with limited lives and semipermanent death. The semipermanent death is administered by respawning at a different starting point and revoking ownership of constructions you did with your "previous life". The death is semipermanent because if you manage to find your old site, you can revive the people there and recruit them into your team.
One of the interesting mechanics is that you have two stomachs, one is the stomach of your avatar