#3: It begins

I’m greeted by the title screen:

I get lost in the menus for a bit. Neither Escape or hitting Enter on “Return to Title Screen” seems to work. Hitting Space does. Yes, the game already defeated me by getting me lost in the menus. This is going to go well.

The first thing to do is to create a new world. The game simulates two hundreds of years of activity, after it generates a whole world first. It takes about 45 seconds to do this. During this time, some 20,000 historical figures come and go, and more than 150,000 events occured. A rich history and backstory of the world is created. Every region of terrain is uniquely and randomly named.

Dwarves like big mountains they can go and claim for themselves (or so I’m making up), so I roll a few maps looking for  one that I like. Of course, I have no real criteria by which to judge a map; purely aesthetics here.  For example, all that purple and all those roads seem unappealing to me (I have no idea what the purple represents, but there sure is a lot of it there).

I’m looking for some lush green lands near a big mountain with not too many roads or other civilizations around.   I can scroll around the world (it’s about a 5×5 grid of the section the size of the map you see above), but I have no idea the scale of things.  Is one of these tiles the size of region I’ll be journeying to, or a larger area?  No idea.

I switch to the Large size world (which I always prefer in other games, so why not this one), and now world generation takes about 10 times longer.  Surely in a huge world I can find a place I like.

I realize I can export the generated world as an image file.

It is unbelieveably large.  The world is titled “The Dimension of Prophecies” by the random name generator.

Northwest of the giant lake thing in the middle-right, northeast of the blue peaks in the center, I see a pocket of uninhabited grassland.

I’ve seen several of the game’s randomly chosen names.   Right here, in the Land of Quickness, we have the Forest of Good.  South is the mountains called The Geared Crest.  To the east are The Calm Fields and The Mirthful Plains.  To the southeast is The Enjoyable Jungle.  Such positively named places all in one place has to be an omen.

There’s some elves over the mountains to the south (fuck the elves), but otherwise it looks like I’m nice and isolated here.  Unless those red ring things, that don’t show up with a label, are bad.  Who knows.  I’m a little weary of all these rivers with my poor dwarves who surely can’t swim, but I’m sure we’ll find a way (perhaps we can tunnel underneath them!)

Into the Forest of Good we go.

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