The first dressed map had grass tufts and rocks sprinkled evenly over the savanna, and it looked like what it was: a sprinkle. The note I got back, and the one I deserved, was that it had no love in it. That one landed. The environment has to be designed, not scattered. This is the direction that replaced it, and it is the first time the map has felt like a place to me rather than a level.
Field 41. Cinematic art, and the reference for the map dressing.Everything in the picture is also in the game
A wall that blocks units is a fallen Ring section: a huge curved hull plate with its ribs showing, lying across the land. A salvage field is an impact crater with debris heaped in it, and a rich field is a fresh crater with a bare, scorched rim. A Consortium base site is a cleared, levelled survey pad with floodlight masts and a beacon. A League base site is a settled yard with tin roofs, a wind pump, scrap fences and washing lines. Paths are where people actually walk, worn between yard and field, following the terrain.
Direction of the Fall
Debris came in along one line. So every crater gets a scorched streak and a throw of small debris on the same side, and the whole map agrees about where the sky came from. I like this rule more than almost anything else on the map, because nobody will ever read it and everybody will feel it. A few long gouges run across the land. Landmarks are few and each is unique: one crashed habitat module with a path trodden to it, one standing elevator-cable stub, one Ring rib arching out of a hillside like a rib cage. Players navigate by them and remember them.
Life where life would be
Grass and trees only where the design says: along a dry riverbed, in the lee of a crater rim, around a League yard. Acacia and baobab, some of them dead. Tyre tracks, old fire rings, a collapsed shed, a field of bleached plates. A dozen small stories per base, placed by hand. It is far slower than scattering. That is the point.
Colour with intent. Warm dry gold and red earth for the land, cold blue-grey steel for the Ring and the Consortium, rust and painted colour for the League. The eye finds steel first, always, which is what I want: steel is what everyone is fighting over.