burying chests and stuff.

[Judock Harald]

I've the idea to import the possibility of burying chests. By this, you can store your stuff, when:
- you dont have a building or car
- you are far from home
- you are afraid of thieves
- you are playing to be a pirate, burying a treasure!!!
- you want to clean up the mess made by others. or yourselfs.

tools needed:
- bare hands,
- shovel,
- or shovelmachine.

How this works:
- first you can create an "object" with the shovel, the object is named "hole". Instead of an "amount", you can enter a number, standing for the exact location. (how can you otherwise find your stuff back?)
- When the hole is ready, you can put a maximun of stuff in it. When it is done, you have te possibility of the project of closing the hole. When it is closed, the hole disappears from the objectlist. Untill then, the locationnumber is still vissible by everybody.
- Later, when you (or anyone else) come back and start making a hole at that exact location, when the hole is finished, you get a message of the stuff finded in the hole. And you can take it out.

Example:
- You are hunted by some bandits. Afraid of loosing it all, you decide to bury your gold. You pick the spot 10045(number know by your friends) Withing 3 minutes you created an smal hole, put the gold in it, and close it. Fast you write an message to your friends, and you describe the location, and send it away with a carrier pigeon (dont be confused; another idea, if it doesnt already exist) or just drop it on the ground. Then you hear a voice behind you, and all is become black....
Later, when your friends find your body, plundered, they spot the message, and they can recover your gold. giving them some solace of your dead.

Extra options:
- Maybe some extra option is the optional depth you can bury. Of course, it takes more time digging, but is also more safely.
- this can replace the way of burying dead body's. now first you have to make a hole, put someone in, and then close it (costing the same time of course)
- And when you are digging, you can find an horific dead body... But only if you dig that spot within a year of burying, otherwise the body is gone. Of course, you can also al large amount of gold and treasure!
- sameway by burying stuff, slowly its getting older end in the end its broke or gone. This is giving great possiblilities of cleaning up your town! just gave someone the order to bury all the trash.


Thats it! i am curious of your comment!

[Piscator]

I like the idea. From an economic point of view it could be very positive since it would allow items to be forgotten and actually decay. It would also solve the note problem since people could get rid of them without actually destroying them. It would also extend the use of the quite rarely applied burying skill.

I would limit the number of possible locations to about 100 though. I think it would be nice if there would be a reasonable chance to find a stash without knowing exactly where it was buried.

edit: Another positive aspect would be that there would be a reason to not kill a character right away. Keys and items can be dropped, but information can not (unless you write it down). If you are to trigger-happy you might never find the hidden treasure.

[SekoETC]

Awesome arguments, Piscator. Sounds like there are several good reasons for why this should be accepted. The main problem would come from the current limitation of not allowing items in containers, but as far as I can remember, the only thing why that hasn't been implemented was wanting to take dimensions of items into account and not just weight. If the idea of using dimensions was scrapped or replaced by some sort of a slot based system (Betrayal at Krondor has a good example of a slot based system that roughly takes sizes of items into account), at least that limitation wouldn't be holding back this suggestion.

It would be nice if burying treasure took depth into account, that would bring in a third dimension if there was a limited number of slots in a town. A person digging could dedicate anything from one to X hours in digging a hole to put a chest (or another container) in, and the depth would be defined by the time and tool used. Then if someone was digging up all the slots to try one's luck, they might miss a treasure if they only spent an hour or two per spot when the actual treasure was buried six feet under. It would also be interesting if burying corpses used the same slots as burying treasure, so people could argue about recycling burial spots, or bury lovers side by side and so on. I think it would contribute a lot to the game.

[Fieger]

Awesome idea...I want to get map with big, black X xD

[Andu]

maybe a grind system would make this possible?

[SekoETC]

Grid? Yeah, that would probably be the most logical way to do it. Although instead of having a visual representation where you could click a square to start digging, Cantr would be more likely to ask you to enter a number between 1 and 10 (or 1 and 100 if a grid of 10000 wouldn't make random searching too hopeless) for x and y.

If you'd always pick a spot and then define the desired depth (or hours you're willing to spend on it, and calculate the depth based on the time and tool), it wouldn't matter if you were intending to bury something or just searching for something to loot, because in the end you would have a hole, and if you had exposed an item, the item would be inside the hole, which would serve as a container in itself. You could insert what ever you like (some size restrictions might apply) and then fill up the hole. If the project was paused halfway, the hole should appear as a half-covered hole and you shouldn't be able to see what's inside, and you could dig it up again. Having a way to contribute negatively on the filling project would be most convenient.

[*Wiro]

I think a 5x5 grid is big enough.

[Doug R.]

5x5 would only allow 25 possible places to dig, which seems limiting, especially if bodies take up spots. If we stick with the suggested 100, then that's 10x10. Another option is to limit available grid space based on the available resource slots.

My thoughts:

- Apply the "bury" button to anything lying on the ground. You could bury resources, items, or notes (and of course, bodies). When you click the bury button, you can choose the grid coordinates and the depth.

- Buried items decay at a highly accelerated rate (they have to, or bodies would just pile up). Unless, of course, they were stored in a container, which was then buried.

- Buried items can be dug up. This allows the exhumation of bodies, which is something that I know every one of us wishes we could have done at one point or another.

- There is the saying "six feet under" in regards to burying corpses. By hand, it typically takes 2 hours to bury a body (at least for me). Based on that, make each untooled hour equal 3 feet. Shovels at an accelerated rate, and digging machines at an even higher rate.

- Modify the rate by the terrain. Beach/Desert is 2X. Grassland, plains, hills are 1X, forest/jungle at .75X (roots), mountains/tundra at .5X (the ground is hard).

- Don't treat holes as containers. Instead, treat them as sublocations. This eliminates the no objects in containers problem. Burying something just transfers it from the parent location to the sublocation. Additionally, if we just had the ability to dig holes (instead of integrating the dig/fill like it is for bodies), this would allow characters to enter holes. Holes would really just be a new kind of building that could be hidden.

- Make the minimum required depth dependent on object weight. 60 kilos requires 6 feet. By doing it this way, you could bury anything. Coupled with the previous thought, holes would just be dynamically defined buildings with weight capacities based on depth.

[Piscator]

If you'd always pick a spot and then define the desired depth (or hours you're willing to spend on it, and calculate the depth based on the time and tool), it wouldn't matter if you were intending to bury something or just searching for something to loot, because in the end you would have a hole, and if you had exposed an item, the item would be inside the hole, which would serve as a container in itself. You could insert what ever you like (some size restrictions might apply) and then fill up the hole. If the project was paused halfway, the hole should appear as a half-covered hole and you shouldn't be able to see what's inside, and you could dig it up again. Having a way to contribute negatively on the filling project would be most convenient.

I wonder if it would be easier to just hide buried items on the objects screen instead of creating containers. Upon burying, a location number xy would be assigned to the object. The object would remain hidden (but would decay normally) until a "excavate xy" project is completed, in which case it would become visible again.

[Judock Harald]

thank you all for the positive reactions.

Some answers to sugestions,
- i think its easier to just work with the number 1-100 instead of xy. you can calculate by yourself that 10 and 11 are NOT together, and 15 and 25 are, if you use the 1-100 system.

- If you make a maximum to dept, for example 12 feet, you can dig 1 feet every 20 minutes (or how much in cantrtime?). smaller objects only need 1 layer. by doing this, you can bury 2 body's above each other, or bury a treasure under a dead body. you can bury 12 treasures above each other. that makes all the possible slots of one location on 100 square meter x 12 feet depth.

- normaly, all the bury-slots need to be unvissible when completely filled up.

Wow! i just had another REALY cool idea! a metaldetector!!!
cool.
but maybe first begin with this one.

- is it possible to dig a hole inside a building? (would be interesting) you can hide your stuf in home, or make a shrine, where you bury people. or bury them in the church.

- if you place the stuf in a special sack, you prefent it from decaying.

- you can make a coffin to bury someone in.

- maybe you can bury someone, with treasures and all, and then place a pyramid on it

[catpurr]

I like the idea.


But what about metal detectors? wouldn't be that the next logical suggestion?

[Fieger]

nope...IMO metal detectors aren't good idea...I prefer 6 days of digging than one hour with blimping-whistling thingie...

[Andu]

Should others see were you bury things? In the way of braking locks or just if you examine the persons project?

[Judock Harald]

of course can you see where someone is digging. You can just walk to him, and look in the pit to see him working. just remember the place and come back later, to find out what he buried.

in cantr-terms, must it be possible, that there is a (unfinished) hole at 46. But when it is complely closed, it is not longer vissible.

so by examine the persons project you can see, or examine the created hole, wich will be an object.

[SekoETC]

It would be cool if it was possible to make a building underground and cover the hatch when it's being unused, but then the weight capacity of the building should also be taken into account in the depth requirement for the hole, not just the weight of the building materials.