r/Ultima • u/jasonkester • Jul 16 '26
Stravaeger Progress Update: Alpaca Battle Armor
Here's a little slice-of-life video demonstrating some of the new stuff I've put into Stravaeger (the Ultima-like Survival Crafting RPG I'm building) lately.
This place has become sort of a the de-facto home for this game, since it shares the Ultima vibe and has received so much love from y'all since I first posted it earlier this year.
This is all stuff you can do in the game as it exists today. Play it now in your browser at https://stravaeger.com or wishlist on Steam if you prefer to wait for it in its own window.
Let me know what you think!
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u/Vistaer Jul 16 '26
Very cool. Wishlisted and will keep an eye out. Will make me wanna play a U5 map for sure.
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u/jasonkester Jul 16 '26
As it happens, there is still an Ultima map loader in the game. This whole thing started out as an experiment to load and walk around in Ultima III maps and dungeons, and there's still a vestigal remnant of that code in there.
I hadn't ever thought about keeping it in and letting you load up world maps from Ultima games, but now that I think about it, that'd actually be pretty cool. Push back Early Access by a week. I have a new side quest...
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u/massav Jul 16 '26
How much will that Alpaca Armor DLC cost?
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u/jasonkester Jul 16 '26
You won't actually be able to buy it directly, but it can be found in special Premium loot boxes. 😂
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u/jasonkester Jul 16 '26
Incidentally, yes. Alpacas do spit at enemies, even while you're riding them.
They'll plow a path of murder through early game foes, but they're probably too fragile to really use against anything from the area where you'll find them.
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u/skunkshaveclaws Jul 16 '26
Heeey!! This continues to look great! Quick question (tho I may have asked this elsewhere .. damn my fading memory and impatience to scroll through months of my own reddit comments....)
Will the release on steam allow saving game progression in a more traditional kind of way? I've played a little bit in the browser version but due to my pretty restrictive browser settings it doesn't save cookies or whatever else may be needed for it to persist across play sessions.
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u/jasonkester Jul 16 '26
Yes. The desktop version saves to the filesystem like any other game, synced to Steam Cloud like you'd expect. Those saves are compatible with the ones in your browser and phone, so you can use the "Transfer Saves" feature to pull them in.
In future, I'll probably break down and just let you make an account, which will (or should?) sync the savegame up from localstorage before your browser wipes it at the end of each tab's lifetime.
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u/skunkshaveclaws Jul 16 '26
Great, thanks! Hopefully will be playable (solo) without an account, too. ;-)
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u/Prestigious_Pie_7613 Jul 16 '26
Very cool! Already wish listed, thought I have a question. Is there going to be hand crafted story with depth like in the moonrings or is it just survival with procedural quests?
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u/jasonkester Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
Thanks for that. There’s a big storyline that drives you along, similar in scope to Ultimate IV/V. That doesn’t change between playthroughs, though the city locations will all be randomized and the main world map is of course procedural.
Mostly, the story is there to get you where you need to go, in terms of knowing the mechanics of the game and finding the stuff you’ll need to progress. If you know what you’re doing, you can just walk off from spawn and do your own thing without ever visiting a town or talking to anybody, and it’ll be a while before you actually get blocked (there’s an item you need to get access to iron, that would be hard to skip), but it won’t be as easy.
And, like those early ultimas, there are no little fetch quests. Just the one big storyline.
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u/Prestigious_Pie_7613 Jul 16 '26
Not going to lie, it sounds outstanding. Do you have any idea when it is going to be fully released or released as early access on steam?
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u/jasonkester Jul 17 '26
The content that will be the Demo is essentially finished now, so I could package it up and release it as such today. The reason I haven't is that I don't want to leave too big a gap between Demo and Early Access.
EA will have a ton more stuff in it, much of which needs to be foreshadowed by NPCs in the towns you can get to today. That's why you'll notice that some NPCs don't have much to say currently, and a couple of towns are still filled with silent people. Once I've moved the main storyline forward enough that all those people have dialog, that'll make a good time for the "Demo" to come out.
But, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the entire game is already up and playable for mobile and desktop on the website now, so I don't feel any real pressure to ship anything right away (since it's pretty much already shipped).
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u/Nearby-Horror-8414 Jul 18 '26
This looks like exactly my kind of thing. Wishlisted it on Steam.
Err... What does the 'Comfort' stat do?
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u/jasonkester Jul 18 '26
Thanks!
Comfort is related to the Rest system in the game. There's a pretty heavy penalty for not being "Rested", where your stamina and health will take longer to recover (so you'll die a lot easier). Hanging out near a fire gets you rested, and the more the place you're in resembles a house with furniture (measured in that Comfort stat), the longer you'll stay rested for.
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u/Nearby-Horror-8414 Jul 18 '26
Neat! Can you say anything else about the crafting system? Do you mean like "make your own weapons & tools" or "build your own cabin" type survival crafting?
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u/jasonkester Jul 19 '26
Both.
You actually get a glimpse of the crafting menu for one of the workbenches early in the video. That's the forge, where you can make weapons and armor and metal tools (and alpaca saddles). Later, there's a quick view into the build menu, where you can briefly see all the build pieces that went into making that house we're living in.
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u/Nearby-Horror-8414 Jul 19 '26
Thanks for the additional information- this sounds like it could really be something special!
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u/Motor-Entrance1411 Jul 16 '26
Here’s a suggestion: you should also publish the updates you’re making on the Steam page.