Mapless

WARNING This mod is currently only used by a private server. It is unpolished, experimental, and may change at any time.

This is a collection of tools intended to create a nomap-lite experience. It adds three things to the base game:

• Compass Tells your current orientation in degrees. Doesn't include any pins or other information. It's an equipment item that has to be in your hand to read.

  • Requires Greydwarf Eyes, Wood Arrows, and Flint to construct at a level 3 Workbench.

• Walking Roller Tells your distance from a starting location. When you equip the roller, it sets the starting location and starts showing the distance. The distance is updated and shown only as long as you have the roller equipped.

  • Requires Fine Wood, Flint, and Neck Tail to construct at a level 3 Workbench.
  • The distance is calculated in a straight line and ignores the path you walked. This makes it easier to use in areas with lots of uneven ground or obstructions like trees and boulders that you have to walk around.
  • The distance doesn't count elevation changes.
  • The roller should work on ships too, though you need another player to hold the roller and act as navigator.

• Gentle Brazier A building piece that lets you forget the map terrain.

  • Requires Surtling Cores and Fine Wood to construct using the Hammer.

Rationale

Compass and Roller

The base nomap experience is pretty accessible, as long as you remain on one landmass. You can create paths with the hoe for fine-grained navigation, and the extended render distance on fires and similar base pieces makes them useful for long-ranged navigation using waypoints. Coasts, rivers, and other terrain features give you a path without having to construct one by hand.

Vegvisirs present the first complication:

• Using them in nomap orients your camera toward the nearest spawner, but you have to keep that orientation as you move from the dungeon to the overworld. The compass tells you that angle exactly.

• With two vegvisirs, you can estimate the spawner's location with some math, but only if you know the distance between them. The roller solves this as long as you can walk from one to the other without getting into combat.

The other difficulty is with sailing. Keeping to coasts is fine for a while, but eventually you have to search other continents to find biomes with enough raw materials to progress. The compass and roller give you enough information to make longer journeys via dead reckoning.

Gentle Brazier

This is a compromise for how our group does portals. We're fans of TargetPortal, where instead of portals being linked 1:1 by tags, you select a destination each time you step into a portal. The trick is that you do this by clicking on a map.

You can see how this would be awkward in a nomap game. Until we find another portal system we like, we keep one of these braziers around and use it periodically. It helps us stay honest and not abuse the portal map images.