Seed

Klang’s persistent online sim sets out to reboot humanity

PC

With its rolling felt plains and creamy, retro-futuristic habitats, Seed’s garden world isn’t an obvious setting for bloodshed, but earthly paradises have a way of self-combusting, and developer Klang anticipates plenty of conflict once its persistent online simulation goes live. “There will be a lot of chaos, I think, to begin with,” CEO Mundi Vondi says. “But I hope to see emerge from that chaos a level of sophistication. I think gamers are inherently competitive in the sense that they want structure, power and wealth, and those things are not going to come easily – they’ll have to create all of that.”

It’s to spur such ingenuity that Klang has opted not to police the game’s players, beyond instances of abuse or hate speech, though the studio may create some kind of safe area for newcomers if the competition grows too fierce. “People often ask me: what are you going to do about griefers?” Vondi continues. “I’m not going to do anything about griefers. Players have to come up with systems to defend themselves.”

Powered by Improbable’s SpatialOS networking technology, Seed is about building civilisation from scratch on an unspoilt exoplanet, shared by thousands of users. If survival of the fittest proves the rule to begin with, the key term is collaboration. Each player assumes top-down custody of between two and ten settlers (the exact number has yet to be decided), each with customisable traits that are passed onto their offspring. Basic material requirements aside, Seedlings have less quantifiable needs such as a desire for beauty, and a range of possible, more circumstance-specific conditions such as hedonism or alcoholism. As in The Sims, all

have a strong degree of autonomy: they’ll eat, sleep, get together, fall out and breed without your say-so or, indeed, your awareness. Seed’s networking tech allows inhabitants to carry on with their lives while players are offline. Its world will never feel empty, and anything might happen to a Seedling in your absence.

The game’s managerial mechanics appear slick but hardly exotic: you select building templates, resources and tasks, and your Seedlings will do the work providing they’re in the mood. Grander projects such as hospitals will take a lot of time and thought, but players can lend or hire out their characters to speed things up. It’s in such arrangements that Seed’s real fascination lies, as budding terraformers move beyond mere cohabitation to the creation of fledgling polities with their own bespoke institutions and core values.

The relevant tools are still in development, but will ultimately allow you to elect or appoint leaders and create a hierarchy of roles beneath them. Players will be able to write laws, deciding everything from where their civilisation’s borders lie to what kinds of clothing residents should wear. And of course, player societies will be able to wage war on each other, though this probably isn’t an experience for fans of the military RTS. Battle in Seed takes a toll that games seldom care to represent: soldiers or their relatives may be left with serious trauma, critical resources and structures obliterated. As Vondi suggests, the game’s depth as a strategy sim may lie in the measures players take to avoid conflict as much as conflict itself.

Again, Klang wants to leave things open as to the kinds of society players form, but nothing comes from nothing, and inevitably, there is an element of predefinition at work in the pre-alpha build. Seed has a preset technology tree, for example, whereby players unlock blueprints by studying objects, from stone processors to hydroponic gardens. The implication is that while each community may be distinct in terms of its institutions, all are somewhat in thrall to the idea of technology as the key measure of progress. This is a very specific idea of society that risks being treated, here, as ‘just the way the world works’.

Seed’s great test will be whether players can take it in directions its creators never intended. Will there be nomad groups who purposefully keep their numbers low, for example, or groups that prosper without scaling the technology ladder? For all his dire prophecies about the world at launch, Vondi is confident that the community will surprise him on this count. “I do think that players will come up with beautiful, amazingly sophisticated forms of government and society, that will be unique and maybe teach us something about our world.”

“People ask me: what are you going to do about griefers? I’m not going to do anything”

The game wears its wealth of statistics lightly. Seedling work/rest routines are manifest, for example, as a stretchable coloured graph

Developer/publisher Klang Games Format PC Origin Germany Release TBA

ABOVE Seed’s player societies will be strongly shaped by proximity to resources like wood and iron, but it remains to be seen how the game will approach resource exhaustion

ABOVE The game’s character traits range from casual labels like insensitivity to specific medical classifications like depression. Some are inherent, others arise from lifestyle

TOP LEFT Currently you can only place buildings as one complete module, but when the game is finished it will let you choose and arrange walls, floors and fixtures individually.

LEFT The limited character headcount per player means that if you want to perform a military coup, you’ll probably need to enlist a few fellow conspirators

The dreamy lowlands aside, you can expect desert regions and mountains, though it looks like the game will eschew complex terrain geometry to avoid confusing its NPCs