The Long Cave

IN EARLY ALPHA

Explore endless, highly detailed islands, with unique mountains, cave systems, and critters in:
- The Long Cave -

~FULL FEATURE LIST~

The Long Cave is a co-op caving and survival game set on a remote island in a strange North Atlantic sea. Take contracts at the dock, gear up and head underground into cave systems that go deeper than anyone has mapped. Dig, blast, rope down and find your own way back out.

A world you can reshape

• Every island and cave system is generated from a seed, and the whole world can be dug up, mined, terraformed, and made your own.
• The rock is based real geology, with basalt, sandstone, shale, limestone and granite. Rocks fragment into pieces along stress lines as you mine through them.
• Realistic explosives, with dynamite, black powder, caps and fuse. There are traps, too, and don't be surprised if you steps on a bandit's landmine -- look out for wires and flashing lights as you walk through tunnels.
• Everything is. Rock you knock loose falls as real, heavy pieces you can carry, throw, break or haul away.
• If you dig a chamber too wide, the roof groans, trickles grit, then falls down, determined by a runtime roof-stress system.

Caving for real

• There’s no mini-map. You mark your own way out with reflective tape that flares in your headlamp and chalk arrows on the walls, and rely on survey maps that are updated in real-time as you walk through cave systems.
• Rig static ropes to pitons and grapnels, then rappel, ascend, belay a partner and tie real knots, utilizing a highly realistic rope physics system.
• Squeeze through tight crawls, wade and dive through flooded sumps (with multi-level bodies of water), and mantle up ledges.
• Bring your own light: an LED headlamp, lanterns, old carbide lamps, flares, glowsticks and magnesium ribbons. Nothing is pre-lit, and the daylight fades only a few meters into a cave.

Survive the dark

• Manage your warmth, wetness, stamina, food and water. In the caves the cold kills you faster than anything else.
• Smoke, dust and fumes drift through the passages as a simulated gas you can see in your lamp beam.
• The caves are alive: rockfall, tremors and sudden collapses, plus crickets, moths and bat colonies.
• Watch out for crawlers, light-shy pack hunters that stalk you from the dark, and pit lurkers waiting at the bottom of funnel pits.
• Bandit gangs hold camps and hideouts. They fight from cover, rob you and haul off your gear.

Tools of the trade

• Every item is a physical object. You carry everything on your body, in packs, pouches and crates.
• Old-fashioned instruments with real moving parts: a compass, altimeter, pocket and wrist watches, a gas detector and a find detector.
• Five heavy, loud, hard-to-aim period firearms with round-by-round reloads.

The expedition

• Each midnight the dock board posts new contracts to be completed for currency. The museum wants fossils, the coal company wants ore and the survey wants caves mapped. Other jobs ask you to recover the lost or clear out a bandit camp.
• Order supplies on paper forms in our diegetic book and paper system; the supply boat lands them in crates twice a day.
• Dig out ammonites, pyrite, crystals, buried caches and strange sealed artifacts from deep in the rock -- more hidden finds to come in future updates!

Better with friends

• Play solo or co-op: host a game, join friends over LAN or online, or run a dedicated server.
• Proximity voice chat carries through the caves, so you hear your partner around corners, muffled through rock and echoing down the passages.
• Tune a radio to real internet stations, YouTube, or Spotify and listen to it turn to static as you go deeper.

Scenarios

• Short one-off runs on fresh islands. You start sealed inside a cave with a note telling you what happened. Find the lost artifact, recover the crate, reach the bottom or map the unknown, then make it back out.

The Long Cave is in active development. Expect rough edges, and things will change.