Rooted Weekly Dev Log: Week 28, 2026

Base building took most of this week and now has its full in-world player loop. Alongside it: a coop-focused pass on the wildlife simulation, combat presence for human enemies, and, courtesy of the heatwave, a step back into design research on enemy AI, wildlife and weapons. None of this is in the public build.

Base building: everything that happens after placement

The building system could already place pieces. This week it gained the loop around them, playable end to end.

Structural support is now computed as you build: every placed piece registers what it rests on and what rests on it, at the moment it is built. Knocking out a load-bearing piece brings down everything it carried, including chains further up the structure.

Working on a piece is a normal interaction. Depositing materials into a blueprint is a quick tap that hauls everything matching from your pack in one go, and anyone can pitch in. Demolishing, repairing and reinforcing are all right there on the piece, with the destructive actions behind a hold so nothing comes down by accident. Refunds are real too: tearing down an undamaged piece returns its full material cost, a damaged piece returns a share proportional to its remaining condition, and if your pack is full the leftover drops into the world instead of disappearing.

Demolition shows its consequences before they happen. During the demolish hold, the game runs a dry run of the collapse and stamps in red every piece that would come down with the one you are removing, cleared if you cancel. Looking at a piece also warns you when it is barely supported. The preview visuals currently use a simple outline as a stand-in; the dedicated overlay materials are content, authored separately.

Wildlife, tuned for playing together

The wildlife simulation got a pass focused on how it behaves with several players in the world.

Predators now pick their target sensibly. A predator keeps a memory of everyone who hurt it, weighted by how much damage each player dealt, and commits to the biggest threat instead of bouncing to whoever hit it last. That memory fades on its own, so a player who disengages stops being the target.

Carcasses have a life cycle. The world caps how many dead animals it keeps, they decay stage by stage on a countdown that survives saving and loading, butchering one resets its timer, and bones eventually crumble away, oldest remains first.

Two smaller changes round it out. Animals simulated at a distance now travel at their real species speeds, trotting when relocating and sprinting when panicked before settling back down, instead of one uniform placeholder speed for everything. And the thresholds that decide when an animal goes alert, when it flees and how sharp its hearing is now live on each species' data asset, so making a doe flee earlier is a data edit.

Human enemies: bodies, voices, wounds

Human enemies moved from functional to embodied. They now carry a full combat animation set: armed locomotion in eight directions with crouch and aim stances, fire and reload animations per weapon type, and directional hit reactions that depend on where a shot lands, all replicated so they read correctly for every player in a coop session.

They make noise too. Enemies have voice sets, barks, death cries and breathing, and one enemy type telegraphs its internal state through its breathing, which ramps up with stress.

Wounds behave like wounds. Bleeding announces every tick of damage it deals instead of silently draining health, so a wounded enemy flinches and grunts while it bleeds. Once out of combat, enemies bandage themselves, following the same rules as the player's bandage. Enemy behavior also has its own dedicated test level now, where every archetype can be exercised in isolation.

A heatwave and some design homework

With the room sitting at 33 degrees this week, I took the heat as an excuse to step away from the keyboard for part of the days and dive back into conference talks and design writeups: enemy AI, animal simulation, base building structure, weapon feel, and how other games solved the problems Rooted is working through.

The honest outcome is reassuring rather than dramatic: apart from a few small updates, the reading confirmed the choices and directions already taken, on both the design and the technical side. It still left concrete traces. The weapon damage and gunfeel documentation now matches the shipped behavior line by line, with a ranked list of the few gaps worth closing and a short list of popular techniques deliberately rejected for this game. Building and wildlife were measured against the structural and AI models of the reference survival games, each with its own gap list and settled decisions.

The inventory and equipment docs were realigned with the actual behavior, previously undocumented parts (the inventory screen, clothing layering) got their own documents, and two decisions were settled: what happens to your gear on death (the bag drops, the body keeps what it wears), and encumbrance (a hard volume cap with an overloaded state rather than a continuous speed penalty).

That's the week from the development side!

Mat