Rooted Weekly Dev Log: Week 24, 2026

This week went mostly to two fronts: the enemy AI, with camps that live and patrols that march, and the city, with the procedural work moving to residential houses. Around those two: a tuning pass on weapon damage and feel with the first throwables, surface response (impacts, footsteps, weapon foley), wildlife that fights back, the first version of the electrical system, and a round of coop fixes. None of this is in the public build. It is all work in development.

Enemies: camps that live, patrols that march

A big share of the week went here, and I will keep it shorter than the work deserves. Enemy camps now install themselves in the world with their props (sandbags, tents, crates, a fire), assigned posts, and a garrisoned squad that fights with a real cover doctrine. Between fights the camps live: inhabitants rotate between the fire, the crates and the tents while a patroller walks the perimeter. When it turns into a fight, the defense organizes in rings, down to a last stand at the center. Squads also patrol between destinations in a loose marching column, react to gunfire along the way, and pick their route back up once the fight ends.

Above it all sits the director: camps wake when players come close, stay cleared on a cooldown once wiped, and the noise and kills you generate raise what wakes up, up to reinforcement waves. Roamers fill the space between camps. There is a first stealth tier (a glimpse makes a squad suspicious, not alerted), factions arm themselves per role, and the whole thing runs under scripted simulation scenarios that serve as regression tests, so a behavior that works keeps working.

Building the city: procedural houses

The other big push is the city itself. Rooted's world has a whole urban side, and hand-placing every building would take years I don't have, so I'm building the tools that generate them. This week the procedural research moved to residential houses. I extracted an assembly rulebook from a reference housing kit by measuring how the real houses are put together: how walls and corners add up, where windows and doors can live, how the roof system works (including the tricky L-shaped roofs and their valleys), and how interior plans are laid out.

On top of that rulebook, seeded layout generators now produce house plans: multi-storey rectangles, L-shapes with proper roof valleys, attached garages, porches. Generated layouts validate against the same checks as the reference houses, and the roofs scan watertight. All of it serves as the spec for the in-engine generator: the goal is streets of houses you can actually enter, generated, not painted.

Weapons: a damage and feel pass

Weapon damage got its first real tuning pass. Shots resolve against the body itself now: a headshot deals double, a limb hit less, and death lands on the lethal hit itself, so the ragdoll starts with no delay and bodies crumple in place instead of sliding. On top of that sits a balance baseline for the four firearms (rifle, SMG, pistol, bolt-action sniper): per-weapon damage, rate of fire, distance falloff, spread and recoil, derived from tactical-lethal time-to-kill targets. Spread runs through a proper cone, wider from the hip than when aiming, worse while moving, blooming over a held trigger, and every shot kicks the view. Melee weapons deal real damage now, and bladed ones make you bleed; firearm wounds default to piercing, which can bleed too.

The first throwables are in: grenades and molotovs. A discussion on Discord around them helped pin down what players expect from throwables and surfaced solid references of games that excel in this area, so this whole layer is very much subject to evolve. For now they are server-simulated projectiles that arc under gravity, detonate on fuse or on impact, and apply radial damage that falls off with distance. The molotov leaves a pool of fire that keeps burning whoever stands in it. While a throwable is in hand, an aim arc previews the trajectory, with a marker at the predicted impact point. And pulling the trigger on an empty magazine now answers with a click instead of nothing.

Surfaces: impacts, footsteps, and weapon foley

One shared piece of plumbing now answers a single question for everything: what surface did I just hit? Weapon impacts read from it: per-surface VFX, bullet-hole decals that scale with the caliber and live under a budget, and per-surface impact sounds with a concurrency cap, so full-auto no longer stacks a dozen overlapping sounds. Footsteps read from the exact same resolution, with a per-surface sound map authored as data; the data also carries slots for footprint decals and particles, with no assets assigned in them.

Reloads got their foley too: mag out, mag in, bolt close, each played at the exact animation frame, with the sounds coming from a per-weapon sound map in the weapon's data. That one is built data-driven on purpose: filling a sound map is enough, no graph authoring, which keeps it moddable.

Wildlife: animals that fight back, and can be put down

Animals can be hunted for real now. They take the same per-bone hits as everything else, die, ragdoll, and leave a carcass that records the species and who made the kill. Hurting one alarms the herd. The bear runs a proper escalation ladder: it assesses you, warns with a huff, charges, attacks, and disengages back to its territory if you leave; its claws make you bleed. The gray wolf joined the cast as a species with its full data set; the pack-hunt data is in place, the pack logic is not wired yet.

The world also seeds its animals for real now, from biome profiles around placed anchors, with density by area and sex ratios, materializing them near players. Deer and wolf have their locomotion animation.

Power: the first electrical system

A brand new system this week: electricity. It solves power as networks of producers, batteries and consumers, with a watt balance and priority load shedding when production falls short. Solar output follows the sun's elevation and the cloud cover, wind follows the weather, generators burn fuel per second, and all of it is data, per device.

Found infrastructure is part of the design: a twenty-year-old wind turbine or solar panel out in the world still runs on its own. Connect claims it into your grid; Repair restores output worn down by age and dust. Fifteen devices (solar, wind, generators, battery tiers, consumers) are authored as data on a single actor, and even the art is assembled from data, the panel on its support, the turbine body plus its rotor. The same primitive reads at district scale: substations and a power plant form a repair chain that gates whole-district consumers, and the state persists in saves.

Playing together: a coop parity pass

A round of fixes on what a joining player actually sees and can do. Worn gear shows on other players and stays on, equipment changes refresh on clients, and muzzle flashes are visible to everyone. Every inventory gesture (equip, unequip, move between pockets and bag, split, merge, drop, consume) is now a server-side transaction, so the inventory screen behaves identically whether you host or join. Input release reaches the server too: no more runaway auto-fire or stuck sprint on clients. And camp props replicate, so clients see the same sandbags the guards are covering behind.

Also this week

• Tactical treatment - a self-heal channel with a hold ring, and healing a teammate in coop.
• Workbench - the prompt anchors on the bench body, the camera blends over the shoulder while crafting, and the panel force-closes if you die or take a hit.
• Compass - the compass gained POI and teammate markers, rendered as color-coded beads.
• Sleep polish - the time skip now happens behind the fade, with a slower wake.
• Inventory - worn layered apparel (base and outer chest layers, for example) now shows in the equipment boxes and can be managed from them.
• Saves - world systems persist their state through a generic save channel; the enemy director and the ambient roamers are wired into it.

That's the week from the development side!

Mat