"Dad, There Should Be Bandits!" 🏴‍☠️

The best ideas for this game don't come from a desk, they come from playing. The other day Justus was at the screen, flying from one planet to the next, and eventually out came the sentence that always starts things around here: "Dad, there should be bandits." His reasoning, roughly: it's all a bit too safe out there. You fly, you land, you build — and nothing unexpected ever happens. He was right about that, and honestly he had the better concept in his head straight away.

His idea, in three flavours. One: bandit ships in space. Rare, random, somewhere between two planets — they hail you and demand part of your cargo. Two: bandit camps on planets, something like a village, only smaller, shabbier and populated by armed residents who don't ask questions. And three: lone raiders who ambush you on a planet and try to rob you.

The best part wasn't the fighting. Justus specifically wanted the bandits to hail you first. You should be able to pay. Anyone carrying nothing worth taking is left alone — "they want to get something, not annoy you". Refuse and there's trouble. That's exactly what makes it exciting: not the shootout, but the seconds beforehand when you have to decide. A child casually explaining game design to you. 😄

And then Dad turns up with the boring questions. That's my share of this family division of labour: Justus has the idea, and I keep asking until it turns into something you can actually build. How much are they even allowed to demand? (Answer: around a third of the one or two biggest material stacks.) Can they take your tools? (No — tools are off limits, exactly as they are when you respawn. Nothing is more frustrating than standing there without a pickaxe.) What if you're carrying nothing at all? (Then they shrug and move on.) And the most important question of all: what happens if someone plays with ship weapons switched off and a bandit shows up they simply cannot fight? We've had exactly that bug once already, with the UFOs — which is why the plan already says: bandit ships only appear if you're allowed to shoot back.

How rough may this get? That was the longest discussion, and it has nothing to do with technology. Our game is played by children — so bandits should be rascals, not horror figures. Cheeky in tone, a bit full of themselves ("toll for this sector!"), but no threats, and paying up is always a legitimate, safe way out. On top of that there's a dedicated bandit slider in the world settings, from "off" to "lots". Anyone who just wants to build in peace turns them off — no discussion required.

What surprised us while planning. A robbery is technically almost the same thing as… taming an animal. 🐾 Taming runs a little back-and-forth between server and player: the creature wants a particular item, you hand it over, it reacts. A bandit demanding an item and waiting for an answer is exactly the same machinery with the signs flipped. So large parts of it don't have to be invented at all. But you only find that if you take a calm look at what already exists before you start building.

Two details we're looking forward to. Answering a demand comes with a visible countdown — and the buttons stay locked for the first couple of seconds so nobody reflexively slams "no" and then wonders what happened. And if you fight back and win, the wreck contains precisely what the bandit was trying to take off you. Poetic justice belongs in space. ⚖️

Honest status: none of this is in the game yet. What exists is a fully worked-out concept — which files get touched, which traps to avoid (a bandit camp you've cleared out must not be standing there again next time you enter the world; we know that one from other structures), and which tests have to lock it down. Building it is next up, in one go.

Justus, by the way, already has follow-up questions: whether you can tame bandits too. I said probably not. He said we'll see. I have a feeling I know how this ends. 😅