Stats (Attributes) & Gameplay Settings
Stone Age Survival Game Development Blog
Attributes, stats, and vitals bring depth and variation to gameplay, making them essential features to consider.
To see what works, I looked at common gameplay settings across various survival games and simulators, then researched what players actually enjoy. Customizable settings add massive value—they let players tailor their experience, skip tedious mechanics, or enforce challenging restrictions. There is no “one size fits all” approach; every player wants something different.
From a development perspective, exposing these gameplay settings usually requires little coding or testing effort relative to the value they provide.
Games analyzed: Stranded: Alien Dawn, Farthest Frontier, Medieval Dynasty, Manor Lords, Bellwright, Green Hell, Stranded Deep, Kenshi, Sons of the Forest, The Long Dark, Infection Free Zone, Conan Exiles, Sengoku Dynasty, Soulmask, Frostpunk, Surviving Mars etc.
Some of these games offer few or no settings, while others (like Soulmask and Conan Exiles) feature pages of detailed configurations. The ideal approach lies somewhere in the middle.
Here are the most important and engaging settings to consider:
1. Timescaling
Time affects every vital mechanic, from hunger and thirst to healing speed.
Running a game in actual real-time is almost guaranteed to be boring, so the clock needs to move faster. However, the shift shouldn’t be too unrealistic.
Examples:
A solid default baseline is a 60x multiplier: 1 real life second equals 1 in-game minute, meaning a full 24-hour in-game day lasts 24 real life minutes. Accounting for sleep, a player would spend about 18 minutes actively playing each in-game day on default speed.
Another popular approach players enjoy is adjusting the day-to-season ratio. In Medieval Dynasty, for example, a season can last anywhere from 1 to 30 days. The default is 3 days, meaning one in-game day is one in-game month. This lets players experience changing seasons more frequently, keeping the gameplay varied and more engaging.
So let’s say 1 season is 1 in game “day”. With sleep mechanics, that would be 18 x 4 = 72 minutes for one in game year. That would give the player good variation for season-related challenges.
Village management games sometimes allow players to accelerate time during active gameplay. While this is harder to implement and test, it is worth considering.
2. Stats, Attributes, and Vitals
Hunger
An active adult needs between 2,000 and 3,000 calories per day. To simplify this for gameplay, we can set the requirement to roughly 1,000 calories every 6 hours. When starving, the character should suffer negative effects like reduced movement speed, lower strength, and diminished perception. A healthy adult can survive 30 days without food, and the game should reflect a scaled version of this resilience.
Idea to consider: Should weight management be a mechanic? Tracking body weight—which could influence movement speed and starvation resistance—would add another layer of depth.
Thirst
An active adult needs around 3 to 4 liters of water a day, though some of this comes from food. A human can survive without water for about 3 days. The in-game mechanics can mirror this ratio: the character needs roughly 1 liter of water every 6 hours to function properly, with negative side effects similar to hunger. Water purity introduces excellent mechanical depth. In areas without clean streams or rivers, boiling water becomes a mandatory survival step to avoid illness.
Sleep
An active adult needs around 8 hours of sleep per day. Sleep deprivation should trigger fatigue, irritability, and various forms of cognitive impairment. It could make sleep mechanics more engaging by introducing a dream system—though the exact gameplay purpose of dreams is still open for discussion.
Health
A simple health bar is boring. Instead, health should be tied to overall physical condition: is the character well-fed, hydrated, wounded, or diseased? Additionally, different foods should grant temporary bonuses to health, recovery speeds, and other attributes.
Stamina
Stamina is a dangerous mechanic that can easily ruin the fun if mismanaged. Because exploration is core to survival games, stamina shouldn’t feel overly restrictive. At the same time, making it trivial has the exact same effect. Finding the right balance will require extensive testing. Players should have multiple ways to increase their stamina pool, such as physical exertion (running around) or eating specific foods. Injuries and diseases must also impact this—a broken leg should severely limit both top speed and total stamina.
Recovery Rates
Health and stamina recovery should function as separate mechanics, only loosely tied to the maximum pools available. Just like the stats themselves, players should have multiple ways to boost their recovery rates.
Mood or Sanity
The best survival games incorporate a mood, morale, or sanity component. This adds psychological depth and creates high-stakes scenarios: you might have plenty of food and water, but if your character loses their mind, it’s game over.
Cleanliness
Getting dirty could introduce health risks when eating and cause humanoid NPCs to avoid talking to you. On the flip side, being covered in mud might make you harder for wild animals to detect. This is a relatively simple way to add situational depth.
Temperature
Extreme heat and cold should be debilitating. 12,000 years ago, the average global temperature was over 5°C colder than today, though summer temperatures in low plains could still get uncomfortably hot. The primary focus here will be surviving the freezing cold.
Body Weight
As a vital parameter, weight balances performance. A lower body weight makes the character nimble, fast, and stealthy. A higher body weight boosts melee damage and carrying capacity.
Note: Every vital listed above should be modifiable by multipliers. If a player wants a “relaxed” or “brutal” experience, they should be able to tweak the numbers to match their preference.
3. Spawn Times and Yields
Should trees take 60 years to grow, or just one day? While realism is a noble goal, it can easily make a game unplayable.
Spawn Times: Resources like berries and mushrooms should regenerate at an accelerated rate unless the player explicitly chooses a hardcore, realistic mode. Wildlife should be abundant by default.
Yields: Resource drops must remain balanced. Finding a single berry bush shouldn’t grant a week’s worth of food, as overabundance kills the survival challenge.
Finding the sweet spot will require serious playtesting, and these variables should absolutely be adjustable in the world settings.
4. Spoilage
Everything degrades over time, including tools with wooden handles. Spoilage rates should directly correlate with storage conditions. Leaving berries out in the open air, exposed to the elements, means they rot quickly. Storing tools and food in a temperature-stable, low-humidity environment should drastically reduce decay.
Examples: raw food like meat, berries, mushrooms usually last a week at best. Smoked and roasted food can last for more than a year. So cooking methods will be an important part of the game. A tool with wooden handle will become unusable in just couple of months. Will the game seasons or “days” be basis of the spoilage? That’s a good question. I’m leaning more towards time played affects spoilage.
5. Health Issues & Hazards
Looking at popular survival games, there are plenty of distinct ways to challenge and penalize players: fevers, diseases, bleeding, broken limbs, poisoning, food intoxication (e.g. from rotten fruit), hypothermia, and sleep deprivation.
To make things interesting, these conditions should have cumulative effects. Example: wearing wet clothes lowers body temperature faster, if the character is hungry at the same time, their chances of catching a disease spike. Forgetting to wash your hands before eating a meal might add food poisoning to your list of problems.
The severity and frequency of all health issues should be fully customizable so players can fine-tune the friction they encounter.
6. Damage Multipliers
Introducing different damage types could be fun: fall damage, disease progression, bleeding rates, melee attacks, and ranged attacks. The challenge for the default setting is finding a balanced baseline. Letting players tweak individual damage sources opens the door to custom community challenges. Survival game discussion groups are full of such challenges that players themselves organise.
7. World Events
World events can range from basic environmental shifts—like rain, snow, thunderstorms, forest fires, droughts, floods, landslides, and avalanches—to more complex scenarios. While setting the frequency and severity of these events is worth implementing, it requires careful balancing, as random events can easily derail a playthrough if they feel unfair.
8. Learning Speed
I have already decided against using a traditional “skill tree,” at least for the early stages of development. Instead, an activity-based learning system (doing actions to improve skills) sounds far more engaging. That said, the rate at which players gain skills and improve attributes should be adjustable via a multiplier.
There is still too much left to decide to write a definitive summary, but this establishes a solid framework for the attributes, mechanics, and customization options the game will feature. Eventually, testing will decide what we’ll end up with.