#41 – MAGIC ENERGY

This week’s blog is powered by a tea called “大益七子饼茶” (according to the package, it comes from the Menghai Tea Factory in the province of Yunnan, China). It’s a pu-erh tea that’s surprisingly gentle. Someone must have given it to me as a gift a while ago – and I forgot about it until this morning, when I raided the studio’s kitchen for anything other than the cardamom tea, in which I already overindulged for the last few days.

When I was a teenager, I read about French writers working from cafes in Paris, drinking copious amounts of coffee and cognac (and probably smoking their heads off between these drinks). Nothing like this is even remotely possible if you develop games! One extra coffee makes your gears run faster than the rest of the team (not good for meetings!), and even half a glass of cognac slows you down so much as to be useless for any sort of teamwork. So, friends, let me drink this cup of tea to games development – the occupation that keeps you sober and focused at all times!






Today we’ll talk about Magic Energy – the most flexible resource in the game. Magic Energy is like money, only better. With money (pre-Empire, or the modern, Rund variety) you can purchase things like books and equipment, but you still need to send a party to the nearest trading point (be it a village or a town). With Magic Energy, you can simply create stuff – as long as you have enough of it to spare.

Magic Energy is generated in two ways: by the Sources (places of power) and by characters with magic talent. Your Spire is erected on top of such a Source, and each day generates a certain amount of energy that is then merged with the energy generated by your own Mage character. That’s what you can control and spend. As to the energy of your disciples, it’s their own resource which they can use as they see fit.

The symbol that we use for Magic Energy in the current version of the game.

There are three objects out there in the world of Rund, that can give you more energy:

• Sources
  
• Idols
  
• Monoliths
  

The best thing that you can do is finding another Source. With some skill (and a costly ritual), you can place a new Source under your Spire’s control, immediately increasing daily income of energy.

The second-best option is finding Idols and Monoliths of the past, each of which contains a certain amount of energy locked in them. With an appropriate ritual, you can unlock such energy, which immediately – without waiting for the party to return to the Spire – sends such energy back to the Spire.

An Idol.

A Monolith.

Magic energy of individual characters is restored daily, and if you want to accelerate the restoration rate, characters can engage in meditation or just get more sleep (though nobody will sleep for the whole day, there are clear physical limits).



Your Spire and your Mage character can store up to a certain amount of energy, and once full, will not take any more. The good news is: later in the game, you can upgrade such capacity. This happens in the same Magic Energy Storage Room as where you control how it’s spent.



Just like with obtaining the energy, which can happen as a one-off event or an increase in income, spending the energy is possible in two ways: on specific, singular spells as well as on the on-going rituals, that require a certain amount of energy to be spent every day.

Whenever you accept a new disciple into the Spire, such new person requires a certain amount of energy to be spent each day. So, the more disciples you have in the Spire, the more energy you need to spend every day in order to retain them.

Another core item on the expense list is the Call of the Spire: every day, some of your energy is spent on trying to reach people with magic talent who may be in the position of hearing you and responding to you bidding to come to the Spire.

Here, you have full control over the expenditure: the more you spend on the Call, the further away it reaches. And please keep in mind that the world of Rund is a living simulation, thus if your Call remains limited to a certain area, such area’s potential to yield new disciples will eventually get exhausted.

Outside of retaining disciples and broadcasting the Call, you will spend Magic Energy mostly on rituals that improve certain rooms in the Spire as well as on spells that allow to substitute missing resources with magic energy. Say, you require some wood to craft an item, but no wood is available – not to worry, you can use magic energy in its place!

While being very convenient to avoid dead-ends, such mechanics also means that magic energy becomes an extremely versatile – and thus extremely valuable – resource.



Each disciple has a different capacity for producing magic energy. If you know their Concentration skill (and it’s more than zero), you will also know how much energy they currently have and how much energy they can access on a daily basis.

When your disciples need to cast a spell that requires more energy than a particular character has, they can still do so – at the cost of damaging their current HEALTH stat. While being generally bad for disciples (who will recover their HEALTH after some time), this is much worse for your own mage character (who cannot recover lost HEALTH, and so you’ll just speed up his/her demise in this way).

Finally, when characters fall sick, certain conditions may impair their ability to access magic energy. Weakened by an illness, whether known or unknown, a character may struggle to retain their full magic potential. And what’s a mage without magic? A potential prey for all the dangers that lurk in the Wild Lands, that’s what.

One of the concepts for the Global Map that we currently update.

That’s it for today! If you have any questions, or suggestions on which tea to try next, please let us know in the comments! A few hours after I finish writing this blog today, we’ll be meeting a possible new member of our development team, whose focus will be on scripting hundreds of in-game events. Fingers crossed, both our team and he will like each other, and we’ll move towards release in Early Access a little bit faster!

See you next week!

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