Until October 8 a new world handed you a pickaxe and a rack of tools, the glider and the bow among them. A start with only a knife and the dog had been built in September and kept switched off. That day the project went further: a new player has empty hands, the clothes they stand in, and the dog.
Empty hands only work if everything the first night needs can be found or made from the ground, and several pieces had to change for that to be true. Fire was the first. With no flint and steel, the first fire comes from friction: lay sticks and plant fiber or tinder, keep one stick in the pack, and hold R at the lay for about forty seconds of drilling, or about fifteen once you have cord.
The levels had to agree with the start. Earlier the same day the field book’s skills had been reworked so that a stone axe made on the first night raises Crafting to 2, which opens the stone spear the same night, and so that each skill names the next thing it opens. Level gates became part of the world, and a new world keeps them on for everyone in it. A hen began to give a small bone, so gorge hooks and a fishing pole are possible on the first day, and anyone can take meat from a wolf.
Nobody tells a new player the keys, so they went into the book. The Notes pages, blank since the field book arrived in September, now list them, and so does Settings. One more gap showed that afternoon: many plants and low bushes gave nothing when pulled, which matters when tinder and fiber are all you have. Now bear clover and moss give tinder, meadow flowers and dune plants give fiber, and cholla and small desert shrubs give sticks.
Whether a first night from nothing is hard in a good way is a question for playtests. The pieces are there; how they feel back to back is not known yet.
