MinetestTycoon/README.md

# MinetestTycoon
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.

## The story

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](lore/disaster.md) 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?

### Your new 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

### Physics

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

## About this game

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