Ashland: a systems overview
Ashland is a god-view colony survival sandbox I'm building in Unreal Engine 5.8. It's in development, and this post walks through the systems the design plans lock in for 1.0.
The frame
It's an endless sandbox with optional goals and no hard win. If your HQ is destroyed with nobody sheltered, you lose. In between, the struggle is softer: happiness, health, safety and supply.
Undead
- They overwhelm by numbers. Most shamble; a few sprint, and higher difficulty makes them all sprint.
- They react to sound first, then sight, then smell. A moan pulls others to a rough location.
- Thin crowds wander. Big ones flow together like liquid and can split, with nothing scripted.
- You never command them, but you can use them: noise, flares, bait and kiting. Every faction can do the same.
- The opening gives you at least two in-game days of quiet, unless you make noise.
People and knowledge
Every survivor is a named person, and knowledge lives only in people. Juniors train at Scholar libraries into specialists, and a maxed specialist earns the right to research. Lose your last specialist and you can't place that building again until you find or train another.
Factions
Wild survivors have a hidden alignment that drives what they do. They can found factions, join you, trade, refuse, raid, or collapse back into wild bands.
Economy and logistics
Scavenging and production run together from the start. Each base has its own resource pool and power grid, fuel moves by convoy, convoys can be looted or wiped, and emptied resource nodes stay gone.
Combat and possession
You can possess any controllable unit in first or third person, at any time, while the colony keeps running. A bite means 100% infection with no cure, and downed units die if nobody helps.
Camera, bunker, Workshop
The camera goes from street level to orbit. The HQ can evacuate into a bunker that runs on supplies. Workshop mods are limited to data and Blueprints, and native code is rejected for player safety.
All of this is still being built and tuned.