X-Survivor

Your ship capsized in a terrible storm but you managed to swim ashore. Exhausted, bruised, and alone, you stand up on the beach, feeling the cold wind against your drenched clothes. How long can you survive?

Building a shelter and acquiring water are your top priorities. To avoid parasites, boiling the water is the sensible thing to do. However, getting a fire started without lighter or matches will be a challenge.

Hunger will be your next problem. Forage for plants and fruits, craft bow and arrows to hunt the local wildlife or focus on trapping or fishing. Bears, wolves and other predators may roam the island so be careful that you do not end up on their menu!

Make sure your diet is varied or you will eventually suffer from nutrient deficiencies.

Loneliness will be your worst enemy long-term. Challenging yourself mentally will be important to avoid descending into insanity.

Scenarios

The above is the "Shipwrecked" scenario. Other scenarios include:

• Volcanic eruption: While monitoring a volcano as part of a research mission, your plane suddenly malfunctions, forcing you to parachute. With your plane crashed somewhere in the ocean, you manage to land safely in the caldera formed from the previous volcanic eruption. While everything seems quiet at the moment, your last scientific reading gave a high likelihood that a major eruption will occur in 40 hours! Can you escape the island before it is too late?
• The descent: You finally managed to rappel to the bottom of a ravine. Suddenly you notice your long rope on the ground. Did someone at the top cut it? The steep cliffside makes escape impossible. How long can you survive down here?
  
• More scenarios will be added.

Realism

X-Survivor attempts to create a survival experience that is as realistic as possible in a world of ASCII symbols. Here are some examples of realism:

• All wildlife on the island and in the ocean is simulated in real time - this includes herbivores foraging and carnivores hunting prey. Animals can both see, hear and smell.
• The scents of animals and of your character are simulated and are dispersed by the wind. Hunting an animal is therefore better done with the wind against you.
• Plants and trees are affected by the seasons - for instance, blackberries can only be harvested during autumn.
• Bacterial growth in foods, in water etc. is simulated and depends on various factors including temperature.
• Tissue growth and infections in wounds are simulated as is healing of bone fractures.
• Accurate food composition data are used and nutrients include a range of vitamins, minerals, protein and carbohydrates; lacking any of these will have actual effects on your health, such as scurvy when lacking vitamin C.
• Weather changes dynamically and includes rain, snow, cloudy weather, clear skies and varying wind speeds following a realistic distribution.
• Accurate moon and sun positions in the sky, depending on the date, time of day and latitude.
• Tidal effects are calculated from the current positions of the moon and the sun.
• The ambient temperature is not only affected by the latitude, time of year and day and the weather but also by your height above sea level, nearby fires and whether you are outside or in a shelter or underground cave.
• Rivers are formed during world generation by simulating millions of years of erosion from rainfall.

Customize your world

Each world is randomly generated but you can control a number of parameters:

• Island size
• Island type: single island, multiple islands, volcano, ravine
• Humidity
• Terrain type: flat to mountainous
• Tidal effects: height difference between low and high tide
• Latitude: play anywhere from a tropical environment to the extreme freezing cold of Antarctica or the Arctic

How to play the game

The game interface (and the game in general) is heavily inspired by the fantastic (and free!) game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. In-game, press H to access the "Survivorpedia" which gives basic information about how to play the game. Press Shift+H to get a one-page overview of all the keyboard shortcuts in the game. The Settings menu allows you to reconfigure key bindings to suit your needs.

You are always welcome to get in touch if you have questions about how to play the game. If you are already familiar with a game like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, you should not have any major problems playing X-Survivor.

Issues with the game

As the game is still under development, a number of features are still missing or not fully implemented, and be aware that game crashes may occur; in case this locks up your computer, make sure you do not have any important software running in the background.

One common issue I have seen is that the game has the wrong resolution the very first time it is run. Usually, this is resolved by simply running the game again. If the problem persists, try changing your screen resolution or (if you use Windows) change scaling to 100%. You can also try to change the default resolution under Settings from the main menu.

Game development

X-Survivor is a spare time project that I have been working on since late 2019. It will likely always be under development but I have decided to release it as I find it mature enough to be playable. Unless otherwise stated, new releases and devlog messages will appear frequently.

Feedback

If you experience a crash, I would be very grateful if you would contact me with a description of how the crash occurred.

Also, feel free to contact me if you would like to see a particular feature in the game. Although I cannot promise that I will add it, I will definitely take it into consideration, and feedback is always useful to me.

I am not a bushcraft or survivalist expert and I get my information and inspiration in part from reading and in part from watching survival shows like Alone and Survivorman. I would love to hear stories from you if you tried bushcraft/survival living yourself since such stories could give me inspiration for the game. Also, let me know if you find some survival trick in the game to be inaccurate.

You can get in touch with me by e-mail: cwulnil@gmail.com

Technical details

For those who are interested, the game is being developed in C++ on an Ubuntu Linux machine and uses SDL2 for graphics, sound and keyboard input, Boost for serialization and RapidJSON for JSON parsing.

Except for the main menu and a few line segments in the in-game menus, all graphics are from the Codepage 437 character set, also known as "extended ASCII".

Data about items, animals, plants, crafting recipes etc. are specified in JSON files, making it fairly easy to mod parts of the game.

Cross compilation to Windows is done with MXE and to Mac with osxcross.