Missive VIII - Quests

Development Update

Development on the game is continuing apace. Since the last tech test, the primary focus has been the full implementation of our backend scaling architecture. This work has involved making sure all core services communicate correctly across the stack so the game can scale cleanly.

We have also implemented our anti-cheat solution, alongside a large amount of optimization work across the client and server. In addition, players will now have the option to use SSGI instead of Lumen, giving more flexibility for performance and visual configuration depending on hardware.

Alongside backend and technical work, we have continued polishing all existing gameplay systems and content that appeared in the previous test. This includes ongoing balance passes, systems tweaks, UI refinement, performance improvements, and the addition of more atmospheric detail across all maps. Every area of the game has received incremental polish, and that process is continuing.

We also have a number of small surprises planned for the next test, along with new cosmetics and additional visual improvements.

Looking further ahead, Early Access is only the first step of a much longer journey, and a large amount of new content is already in development. This includes new cosmetics, new NPCs, new quests, new maps, new types of Hunger, and new weapons expanding the current roster. We are also working on new Living characters to play as, additional cosmetic categories, and new game features designed to expand the ways players can group together and play cooperatively.

Work is also ongoing on the other districts of the Chateau, which will open over time as development continues.

Thank you for the continued support. If you have not already done so, join the Discord to stay up to date with development, and make sure the game is wishlisted on Steam.

The next tech test is approaching.

Quests

The Chateau - Hub, Town, and Quest Centre

Players begin in the Chateau, which is the main hub of Hunger. It functions as a town space where you meet NPCs, access vendors, manage your character, and pick up quests. Most progression starts here, and throughout the game the Chateau remains the place you return to between Expeditions.

Quests are the core spine of progression in Hunger. While you can gain gear through combat, looting, crafting, killing, and exploration, the intended path through the game is driven by the quest system. Early quests are designed to teach the fundamentals - looting, healing, combat, extraction, vendors, and how the Chateau itself is structured. We deliberately introduce mechanics through quests rather than front-loading everything at the start.

District Progression and Unlocking New Systems

The Chateau is divided into multiple districts, and progression is tied to moving through them in order. Each district has its own characters, story questline, and set of objectives. To advance, you must complete the main questline for the current district, beginning with the cast-offs in the Outer Ramparts.

Progression is not meant to come from grinding gear. Finishing the questline for a district unlocks the next part of the Chateau and the systems tied to it.

Moving into new districts does not just change the environment - it expands the game itself. Each area introduces new mechanics and new features. The second district, the Cauldron, unlocks major systems that are not available in the Outer Ramparts, including the ability to form guilds and the ability to begin advancing your profession. Hunger contains many interconnected features, and the quest structure allows us to introduce them gradually as you climb, instead of overwhelming the player at the start.

Rewards, Reputation, and Long-Term Progression

Quest rewards scale with progression. Early quests give basic gear and supplies, but later questlines can reward weapons, rare materials, crafting recipes, and cosmetic schema.

Schema are the recipes used to create cosmetics, and in many cases the only way to obtain certain cosmetics is by completing specific questlines. This is intentional. We want visual progression to reflect what you have done, not just what you have found.

Reputation also becomes more important as you advance. As your standing in the Chateau increases, new tiers of quests unlock, including daily, weekly, and monthly assignments with higher-tier rewards. These repeatable quests are designed to support long-term play after you complete the main storylines. They provide unique rewards and more.

At the start of Early Access, completing the current main story questlines represents roughly sixty to seventy hours of content for new players focused purely on narrative progression, with significantly more content available on top of that through repeatable quests, side quests, exploration, and systems progression. During Early Access we will continue expanding the quest system with new NPCs, new story arcs, and new quest chains that take players to different maps, new locations, and unexplored parts of the world.

Quest Origination

Not all quests simply come from the same place, and progression is not limited to picking up tasks from a single NPC. As you complete questlines and build relationships with characters in the Chateau, new quests unlock, new dialogue appears, and additional opportunities open up.

Completing work for one NPC may lead to new assignments, new storylines, or access to characters that were not previously available. In some cases, building enough trust with a quest giver can unlock new vendor inventories, allowing you to purchase items, recipes, or supplies that you could not obtain before. Certain NPCs may also change roles over time, becoming vendors or offering new types of quests once you have progressed far enough with them.

Because of this, quest progression is not strictly linear. Advancing one storyline can lead to another, open new interactions in the Chateau, or expand the range of items and services available to you. As your standing grows, the hub itself evolves along with your character.

Post-Launch and Early Access Expansion

During Early Access, we will expand how quests originate and how players discover them.

In addition to receiving quests in the Chateau, players will be able to find quest items during Expeditions that can be extracted and brought back to the Chateau to begin new questlines. We also plan to introduce characters who can be discovered out in the world. Once found, these NPCs may return to the Chateau and become permanent quest givers, opening entirely new storylines that were not previously accessible.

Some quests will also be tied to specific locations, conditions, or encounters in the maps themselves, allowing the world to act as a source of progression rather than the Chateau being the only place quests begin.

The goal over Early Access is for the quest system to become increasingly dynamic, with new characters, new quest chains, and new ways of unlocking content appearing as the game continues to grow. As your relationships develop and you explore more of the world, new opportunities should continue to present themselves rather than progression feeling like a fixed list of tasks.

Quest Types and Freedom of Approach

We have many different quest types in Hunger, but we often leave it up to the player to decide how they complete the objective.

For example, a quest might require retrieving an item from a dangerous location deep inside the Pit, one of our in-game dungeons. A more aggressive player might enter the Pit with heavy weapons, clear out the Hunger, and fight their way to the objective. Another player built for stealth might complete the same quest by slipping in and out without ever alerting the Hunger at all.

The objective stays the same, but the approach is up to you.

We want quests to support different builds and different playstyles rather than forcing every player to solve the same problem in the same way. Sometimes the fastest solution is combat, sometimes it is planning, sometimes it is stealth, and sometimes it is simply knowing when not to fight.

Gear reflects your general level of progression, but it is not the progression itself. Better equipment makes things easier and faster, but the real progression in Hunger comes from what you have completed, which districts you have unlocked, and how far you have climbed through the Chateau.

The Lore of the World After the End

Moving forward, we will begin sharing some of the foundational lore that sits behind the world of Hunger. It is built on a large body of written material that has been developed alongside the game from the beginning, and it defines the boundaries, logic, and tone of everything we create.

This lore exists to guide development. Every map, character, faction, weapon, and creature in the game is designed within the rules of this world, rather than being added arbitrarily. Those of you who played in the Tech Test will already have seen this in practice. Locations have histories, enemies have origins, and the objects you carry have a place in the setting.

We believe this grounding is an important part of what makes the World After the End feel coherent and believable, even at its most strange. Because of that, we want to start sharing some of these texts with the community so you can better understand the structure behind the world we are building.

The following piece is one of those writings.

Origins and Spread of the Bacterium

De Bacterium Volume I - Being a True Account of the Bacterium and the Undoing of Men

Set Down in the Year of Our Lord, 1815, by One Who Watches, Nameless

No scholar has yet been able to determine with certainty the moment at which the Bacterium first entered the affairs of men. The calamity that followed was so sudden in its later stages that it invites the comforting fiction of a clear beginning - a single ship, a single patient, a single dreadful day upon which the world turned. Yet the surviving records allow no such neat division. When the old papers are examined with care, the earliest disturbances appear scattered across many years, long before the final campaigns of the Empire, and long before any man imagined that what we now call the End could come to pass.

Most accounts place the first credible signs at the ports. Bordeaux is most often named, though never with certainty. The registers of the city for the year 1798 contain an entry from the infirmary near the Chartrons quay describing a sailor brought ashore from a vessel newly arrived from the West Indies in a state of violent agitation. The attending physician noted that the man fell upon two orderlies with such strength that irons were required to hold him, though he had already received wounds that should have rendered him insensible. The case was entered simply as a derangement of the humours attended by fever of an unknown kind. The man died before morning, and the matter went no further.

Earlier still, a parish book from the countryside outside Poitiers, dated October 1794, records the execution of a farm labourer who, after several days of what the priest called a black fever of the mind, seized a stable boy and tore at his throat with his teeth before being shot by men of the local guard. The disturbance was set down as delirium brought on by privation, which was common enough in those unsettled years, and no further notice was taken.

In Lyon, the surgical notes of the Hôtel-Dieu for March 1799 describe a patient who continued to thrash, bite, and struggle after receiving injuries which, in the surgeon’s words, ought to have extinguished all voluntary motion. The man expired only after prolonged restraint. The attending surgeon judged the case to be a most pernicious inflammation of the nerves, perhaps made worse by drink. Nothing in the report suggests that the occurrence was thought extraordinary.

There exist even older notices, though their relation to the Bacterium cannot be proved. In the diary of a merchant of Nantes, written in the summer of 1787, there is mention of a dockworker who, after falling into a violent fever, attacked a customs officer without provocation and attempted to bite those who came to his aid. The writer supposed the man to have contracted some distemper brought in with the cargo newly arrived in port, and the incident was passed over without remark. No deaths beyond the patient himself were recorded.

Among the military papers preserved at Metz is a memorandum dated 1792 concerning a dragoon who, after complaining for several days of pains in the head and spine, struck at his comrades with what the adjutant described as animal ferocity. The report recommends confinement, and in the margin is later added that the man died in the infirmary after a sudden worsening of his condition, the cause being entered as malignant fever.

Taken singly, such incidents appear of little consequence. The medicine of our present day possesses a broad and accommodating language for afflictions imperfectly understood. Disorders of the humours, corruption of the blood, inflammations of the nerves, putrid fevers, distempers brought by ship from distant climates - any of these might be named, and often are. In an age long accustomed to war, famine, and pestilence, violence attended by delirium does not at once present itself as the sign of any new calamity, but is readily set down among the many miseries to which the body and mind of man are already subject.

Only after the calamity had fully declared itself, in the troubled years that led at last to the End, did clerks, surgeons, and magistrates begin to look back through the old entries with a different eye. When these scattered notices are set side by side, they give the uneasy impression that the Bacterium may have moved quietly among the people for many years before it was recognised. A sailor in Bordeaux in 1798, a labourer in Poitiers in 1794, a soldier in 1792, a dockside sickness in 1787 - each too small to alarm the authorities, each explained according to the understanding of the time.

Some therefore hold that the first stirrings of the plague may reach back further than a decade before the fall of the Empire, perhaps further still, concealed among the ordinary confusions of disease and madness that filled the records of the closing years of the last century. Others maintain that these earlier cases are being drawn into the present account only because later horrors compel us to search for a beginning where none was recognised at the time.

Thus the origin of the Bacterium remains uncertain even now. It may have entered France by way of a crowded seaport in the last years of the previous century. It may have lingered, weak and imperfect, through the disorders of the Revolution. It may even have appeared more than once before finding the circumstances in which it could fully take hold.

What seems most certain is only this: by the time men understood that something new had come among them, it had already been there far longer than anyone then living was willing to believe.

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