From Here To Eternaland

Of all the open world survival games, single player, co-op or massively multiple, that I've played over the past couple of years - and it's been a few - Once Human is certainly the one that takes the most explaining. The genre is supposed to be very straightforward: you start in with nothing, punch some trees, pick up some rocks and start building yourself a house, Then you work your way up the tech ladder until eventually you're the apex predator and ruler of all you survey. 

Starry Studio, the developer of Once Human, decided to change that up a little. It doesn't look like they had a problem with survival game tropes per se, more as though someone reckoned if it was fun to do it all once, it would be even more fun to do it over and over again. Like, how about every six weeks?

When the concept of Seasons was revealed back in beta there was a lot of pushback. There still is. The original seasonal concept was a lot more radical, offering almost no sense of permanence and continuity at all. Very quickly the devs realized that wasn't going to fly, which is when the idea of Eternaland first appeared:

"... we’ve received lots of helpful feedback about the seasonal gameplay, such as how entering a new season could result in major item loss, how some felt disappointed when homes they’d built got destroyed, or how some felt it was too abrupt to go straight from one season to the next.  

We’ve taken your feedback to heart, and are working to optimize our seasonal content. On top of this, we’re unveiling Eternaland, which will also function as a transition between seasons and a unique world for each Meta-Human.  "

As far as I know, the changeover of season were never tested in beta so pretty much everyone is waiting to see how it all works out. I wish I had the popcorn concession for the first reset.

Eternaland was tested, to some extent, and it's certainly in the game now. I went there for the first time a couple of days ago and let me tell you, it is idyllic. It feels almost like a snapshot from the afterlife, an impression that may not be entirely unintentional.

First, how to get there? I thought I'd have to do a quest because that's what several sources told me when I googled. That turned out not to be true, although I noticed today it still says it is on the first login screen. The Eternaland option shows as Locked until I select a server and if I click it, it tells me I need to do a Main Story quest in Iron River to unlock the option. Once Human may only have been Live for a couple of weeks but the data-trail has already begun to decay, both in and out of the game.

Because of that, I am not going to try and list the ways you can get to Eternaland. There may be several for all I know but I'm going to stick with the one I used, which also has to be the simplest. All I had to do was get to Level 20. Everything else followed automatically from there.

I had been pushing on to twenty, thinking that would let me pick up the aforementioned quest. I assumed I'd need to complete it before I could use some portal to get to the promised land. That may well still be an option but for me it wasn't necessary.

What happened was much more prosaic. The moment I dinged, a notice popped up on my screen, inviting me to go to Eternaland. I followed the prompts and there I was. As simple as that. It seems once you're tall enough, you can take the ride to Eternaland right from the UI, any time you like. Just press Escape to open the main menu, click on the Eternaland icon in the row along the top and off you go.

V, the firehawk who used to be a Mayfly but now acts as my personal assistant, wasn't impressed when we arrived but I was. Eternaland is beautiful, providing you derive your aesthetics of beauty from the Western Romantic tradition. My first thought was that we'd been translocated to the Aegean but a tour around the island suggested, based on the rock formations and the flora, that we'd arrived somewhere much further north, albeit in the midst of an unexpectedly glorious, Mediterranean summer.

The island is very large for a personal domain. You can build anywhere, with even fewer restrictions than those on the already-lenient mainland. In Eternaland, there's no requirement for structures to follow the normal physics of weight and mass, meaning you can build without concern for support. Take away the walls and the ceilings won't fall down

You also don't need materials other than one. Rendering the entire building trade redundant at a stroke, Astral Sand does everything. This magical resource replaces all other building materials, looking and acting exactly like wood or stone or glass when put to use. You don't even have to go dig it up. It's not just a material, it's a currency. You can trade for it and with it.

This is the strange part. Well, one of the strange parts. Given the reason Eternaland exists is to mitigate the impact of losing everything at the end of each Season, it would have been easy enough just to give players an island and infinite resources to build what they wanted; a sop to those who couldn't handle change. But that's not what Starry have chosen to do. They've tried to make Eternaland into a bona fide game all of its own.

Eternaland has an economy as well as some lore and a number of tasks you can do. It may lie outside of the game-world but it's still part of the game and therefore it needs gameplay, most of which revolves around acquiring Astral Sand and the other currency, Astrealite.

There are a few Journal entries to complete that reward Astral Sand but the quickest way to get some is to sell your unwanted stuff from the regular world through the Eternaland UI. Deviants sell for plenty, which suits me because I have plenty of spares I'm happy to dispose of.

And guess who's there to greet you when you arrive and explain how everything works? Good old Mitsuko! I was very suprised to find her waiting on the banks of the lake in the middle of the island. She has some dialog and a couple of tasks that mostly involve fixing up the big house across the lake. 

Although the island is all yours, someone must have owned it before you. There are several houses dotted around in various states of disrepair so if you're not into building you still have somewhere to sleep. 

Whoever was there before must have been a keen gardener. There are planting beds laid out and you can buy seeds from the shop - with Astral Sand naturally. I'm not a big fan of farming or gardening in games as a rule. It generally feels like a lot of busy-work to me. I'd rather someone else did it and sold me the produce. Consequently, I haven't bothered with it in Once Human so far, even though it's quite a well-developed part of the game.

In Eternaland, though, it's not like I have a choice. Not if I want to do any landscaping, anyway. It seems having one, universal currency isn't enough for eternity. There have to be at least two. The second is Asterealite, which you need to buy things like trees and rocks and whatever else gets added later. Furniture I bet, for a start.

Astrealite can only be had by filling Orders. Orders for whom is not clear, just as it's unclear who's buying and selling items in the Shop. The lore doesn't cover any of that. It's just there. Best not to think about it.

It may be that later there will be other options but currently all the orders are either for plants, fruit or fish. Fishing is always fun and there's no shortage of water, this being an island with a lake in the middle, but catching fish is both time-consuming and takes full attention, whereas gardening is pretty much fire-and-forget.

Well, in Eternaland it is, because not only are there already quite a few plant beds ready to be used but unlike on the mainland you don't need to worry about the weather. In the Bubble you are god. You can set a whole raft of conditions for your island, anything from who can visit and whether they can kill you to what the weather is going to be. If you make it sunny all day, every day, all you need to do is add fertilizer and water and your plants will grow fast.

Already there's plenty to be getting on with but also it's plain there's a foundation for much more. I haven't seen anything to suggest it's in the plans but self-evidently Eternaland could easily develop into something much more than a bolt-hole to hide from the six-weekly apocalypse.

Speaking of which, the fundemental purpose of the mechanic is to provide a means of storing and transferring items from one Season to the next. There's a list of things that can and cannot be carried across the seasonal divide, some of which would appear to be automatic, others that you have to insitgate and manage.

And that is where my personal experience ends and I'll have to stop describing and start guessing. There's an interface for transferring supplies but it's currently unuseable because it requires "Material Points". Those are allocated at the start of a new season, but that doesn't appear to include the very first one, since I currently have zero. Without trying it, I can't quite figure out just how the transfer system is going to work so that's yet another thing we'll have to wait for the first reset to discover.

All things considered, though, I'm impressed with Eternaland. It looks fantastic to the point where I feel a little uncomfortable building there. The background music is also very restful. It's just a lovely place to spend some downtime. Fortunately, the prefabricated houses are quite ugly so I feel entirely justified in tearing them down and building something more aesthetically pleasing.

I'd like to build in stone but one interesting design choice is that Eternaland only recognizes the building options already unlocked through the Mimetic system in the main game. I would have thought, given the emphasis on freedom to build, they might have unlocked everything automatically for Eternaland. I've unlocked stone now but I'm curious how it's going to work when all of my Memetics get reset to zero with the next season. Maybe that's one of the things I'll need to spend my Material Points on...

There should be plenty of time to figure out all of that when we get to the final Phase, A New Dawn. Apparently each Season ends with a coda, when you take time out to sort all your stuff and decide what you want to keep. Maybe I'll return with a follow-up post when I've seen how that goes.

Meanwhile, I'm off to see how my oranges are doing. I didn't get quite enough from the first planting to fill the order. I'm new at this gardening game...