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[DG]

The king is deathly ill with a mysterious malady that his physician cannot treat. The village witch claims that she can brew a magical potion to save him but she lacks a key ingredient. You agree to brave the haunted forest in search of the fabled golden amaranth. You spend the next hour randomly moving the look cursor over " symbols.


Saving the king shouldn't be easy. It's the haunted forest after all. But it needn't be tedious. Ok, you can't currently receive a clichéd quest as described above so this suggestion mostly applies to problems yet to exist. Disclaimer aside, the idea is to reduce the drudgery of searching by putting the responsibility for noticing a desired thing mostly on the adventurer (and their abilities) rather than the players repetitive application of the look command.

I envisage a feature that works something like how tracking in adventure mode does. If you're on the quest mentioned above, you'd set your adventurer to keep an eye out for a golden amaranth. If you move close enough to notice (depending on a range of factors), the square's otherwise nondescript tile changes in a way that grabs your attention and encourages a closer look investigation. The usefulness of such a feature needn't be limited to fetch quests.

Plant options

1. search by tag

• This will be useful as more and more skills migrate from fort to adventure mode. Running low on booze? Toggle to search only for brewable plants. Lost in the wilderness and out of supplies? Toggle for edible plants. Behind enemy lines and don't want to risk the light or smoke from a fire? Refine search to edible raw plants.

2. search for specific plant

• You're searching for the golden amaranth to save the king! Or more likely, you're searching for the specific plant to appease your adventurers food preference. Maybe you're an alchemist funding your research by selling golden salve so you're only interested in valley herb. It could also apply to trees. Let's imagine you specifically want to make the door to your cabin out of oaken planks because they are known to repel werebeaver. It would be nice to wander in the forest and have an oak tree highlighted rather than looking at random trunks.

3. option to exclude specific plants from current search tag

• Let's say you want to brew something and don't care what as long as it isn't sewer brew. Fisher berries and ropeweed are highlighted as you walk around but not the rat weed. Maybe your adventurer is sick of eating lettuce leaves so they aren't highlighted when looking for edible raw plants but bitter melons and garden cress are.

4. any unfamiliar plant

• This one is a more fanciful suggestion but still worthwhile, I think. If I was walking in the woods and noticed a golden amaranth I'd be intrigued, even if I wasn't on a quest to save a king. An option for unusual or curious plants to capture an adventurers attention could be a fun mechanic. Many plots can begin with noticing something unusual when you aren't necessarily searching for it. It could possibly tie nicely with things coming in the myth and magic arc. More mundanely, if you're playing a herbalist you probably would stop to inspect a plant that you are unfamiliar with. On the other hand, if you aren't familiar with anything much it'd be a good way to be spammed by highlights, so it may need a considered implementation.

The chance of noticing the desired plant(s), and at what distance, can depend on a range of mechanics. Herbalist skill, movement speed, light level, observer skill, concentration skill, focus skill, species, how many different things you are trying to notice at once, how tired you are. The mechanic that makes it easier to sneak in heavy foliage could make it harder to spot what you're after. That could simulate the difficulty of noticing specific plants crowded by others. It should be possible for false positives to show up, especially frequently at low skill levels or during unfavorable conditions.

Ideally every party members search chance would be calculated individually. If that is too cpu intensive it should default to using the individual with the best chance. Maybe you were tasked to brave the haunted forest because you are strong enough to survive it, but you can't tell a golden amaranth from a potato. So you bring the witches apprentice along to use their skill level for the search rather than yours. It would be great to have contingency options, too. If part of the purpose is, for example, to make it less tedious playing a vegetarian adventurer, it would somewhat defeat the purpose if many nested menus and key presses are required to turn on edible plant highlights (still useful, mind, building muscle memory key strokes isn't innately bad). It'd be really nice if some sort of "highlight edible plants when hungry" contingency were an option.

So that's plants. Maybe it's obvious that this entire suggestion was inspired by my own search for a specific plant in my current adventure, but I came up with non-plant applications, too.

Object options

I'm less sure about this. I haven't thought about it as much and there is more scope for the feature to spiral out of control. Let's say you've just smashed the night troll in his lair and you'd rather not pore over all the item piles because the only thing you'd be interested in is steel armor upgrades and they probably aren't there, anyway. Sure, it'd be convenient to have "only highlight steel armor" toggled on, but if the stuff is in messy piles shouldn't you actually have to sift through it? On the other hand, let's say you've been tasked with a quest to retrieve the stolen artifact lute. It would be nice to set your adventurer to keeping an eye out for any suspicious lutes in a merchant stall or an indication when they spot someone holding a lute, rather than relying on the player examining individual inventory.

People options

"Urist, I've just been robbed! Quick, you may still catch him! He had a big scar on his face!" You use the people toggle to specify highlighting facial scars, and as easily as that you are off happily harassing anyone in town unlucky enough to have a facial scar, or just mild acne because you suck at observation. Meanwhile the culprit escapes because they put on their face veil and you didn't think to add people suspiciously hiding their features in the search parameters. Ideally, if you accepted the merchants "quest" to search for the robber, the search toggles would update automatically, and with a message saying so. That way you'd know to turn it off if you decide to abandon the search. Or maybe you are the scar-faced thief and you use the people toggle to highlight anyone wearing expensive clothing which would indicate a good mark. It's pretty much like the object options. Think about it for five minutes and you can come up with a ridiculous number of applications for the future, but not as many useful things for the current game.

[therahedwig]

Yes, I like this idea very much, and it also coheres with the real world, or you know, even the steam graphics as human beings tend to be able to scan an area for the item they're looking for.