Mechanics - MOONSTALKERS: ONLINE

The Cycle

Wake up in your vessel. Check tide forecast. Review contracts. Check your last save state. Gear up from secured inventory.
Drop to the surface. One-way pod insertion. Land in your chosen zone. Immediate priorities: locate shelter, assess resources, plan your route.
Work. Gather resources. Complete contracts. Explore ruins. Encounter other Moonstalkers. Help or be helped.
Survive floods. Shelter in underground hatches. Share space with other players. Emerge when the water recedes.
Decide: stay or extract? Do you have enough resources to pay the teleportation fee? Is there more to gather? How much are you risking by staying? How long since your last save?
Extract or die. Reach a teleportation pad, pay the fee, secure your progress. OR: push too far, die, wake up in your clone bay having lost everything since your last extraction.
Progress. Extracted resources become permanent. Upgrade your vessel. Unlock new capabilities. Prepare for the next drop. Save your current state.
Repeat. Each cycle builds on the last. Each risk weighs against potential reward. Each extraction is relief. Each death is loss.

The Key Distinction

The psychological heart of MOONSTALKERS is the distinction between progress that's saved (secured in your vessel) and progress that's at-risk (on your person on the surface).

Status	Your Stuff	If You Die	If You Logout
Just dropped	Loadout gear (from vessel)	Lose it all, respawn from last save	Character remains on surface, vulnerable
Gathering on surface	Loadout + gathered loot	Lose everything, respawn from last save	Character remains on surface, vulnerable
Survived a flood in hatch	Still holding everything	Still lose it if you die later	Character remains on surface, vulnerable
Extracted to vessel	Everything secured	Respawn from THIS point with gear intact	Safe — progress is saved

Surviving floods lets you accumulate more before extracting. But the longer you stay, the more you're risking. That tension — "do I extract now or push for one more cycle?" — is the core gameplay loop.

First-Time Spawn

New players wake up in their Clone Bay with fragmented memories — a side effect of resurrection technology. A brief tutorial establishes the basics: tide mechanics, Selenite Corp's "employment" structure, how teleportation pads work. Your vessel AI (damaged, glitchy, but functional) guides you through your first drop.

Regular Spawn (Returning Players)

You wake in your vessel. You check:

Tide forecast — When's the next flood? Which zones are accessible?
Contract board — What's Selenite Corp paying for today?
Inventory status — What gear survived your last extraction?
Clone save state — How much progress is locked in?

Then you gear up from your personal locker (equipped with items you've previously extracted and saved) and choose when/where to drop.

The Drop Itself

You descend via Drop Pod — a single-use, one-way orbital insertion vehicle launched from your vessel. You select a drop zone on the map (limited by current tide levels and atmospheric conditions). The pod burns through atmosphere, impacts hard, and you emerge on the surface.

Drop pods are one-way tickets. Once you're down, the only ways back up are:

Selenite Teleportation Pad (costs resources)
Death (respawn in your vessel, lose everything)

Drop Zone Selection

Resource density indicators — some zones show higher concentrations of valuable materials
Hazard warnings — wildlife activity, unstable structures, radiation levels
Tide predictions — which areas are underwater, which are about to flood
Shelter locations — visible markers for known underground hatches
You can see general activity heat maps (where other Moonstalkers have been active recently) but not exact player positions

Riding Out Floods (Temporary Safety)

When a flood approaches, you can shelter in Underground Hatches.

What hatches are:

Abandoned Selenite infrastructure, pre-collapse bunkers, or hastily dug survival shelters
Scattered across the map, some obvious, some hidden
Varying conditions: some intact, some damaged, some barely functional
Shared spaces — other Moonstalkers can use the same hatch

What sheltering gives you:

You survive the flood
You keep everything on your person
You stay on the surface for the next low-tide window
BUT: Nothing is "banked" — if you die before extracting, you lose what you gathered

Why you'd shelter instead of extract:

You don't have enough resources to pay the teleportation fee yet
You're mid-contract and not done
You've found a lucrative area and want to keep working it
The nearest teleportation pad is too far or too dangerous to reach
Extraction pads are currently offline (tide interference, technical failure)

The risk:

Your progress isn't saved. Death means losing everything since your last vessel save.
Other Moonstalkers might be in the same hatch (potential for cooperation or tension)
Hatches can fail — structural damage, flooding, equipment malfunction
You can't safely log out

The Clone Bay System

Your vessel contains a Clone Bay with your genetic backup and memory imprint technology. It's Selenite Corp tech, widely distributed before the collapse (possibly for reasons beyond simple convenience).

How it works:

When you extract to your vessel, your current state is saved — inventory, experience, memories
If you die on the surface, you respawn in your vessel from your last save point
Everything you gathered after that save is lost
Your body remains on the surface briefly, but there's no one to loot it — it simply degrades

The psychological cost:

Each death means losing all progress since your last extraction
You wake up with memory discontinuity — you remember dropping, but not what killed you
Your vessel AI can sometimes piece together what happened from recovered data fragments
Frequent deaths cause clone degradation — minor glitches, personality drift, unsettling déjà vu

The strategic layer:

How long do you risk staying on the surface before saving?
Is it worth pushing for one more high-value resource, or extracting now to secure what you have?
If you die, how much real-time progress did you just lose?

Core Gameplay Mechanics

The Core Loop