Novus Inceptio

Novus Inceptio is a survival RPG set on a restored Earth in the distant future. You explore its wilderness, craft equipment, build a home and gradually uncover the Creators’ role in humanity’s past and the planet’s restoration. Survival matters, but it stays in the background; the emphasis is on crafting, building and making a place for yourself in the world.

The restored Earth

The world includes dense forests, grasslands, deserts, tropical jungles, snowy regions, swamps and an underwater environment. Time moves from day to night, and weather varies by biome: deserts get sandstorms, mountains get snowstorms, and forecasts show what is approaching. You can interact with the terrain, plants, trees and buildings. Trees provide more than wood, including bark, leaves, branches and resin, while plants can be gathered and eaten.

The wilderness has no fixed settlements apart from the Towers of the Creators, which provide travel, and your starting location. You can build elsewhere or find places in anomalies. The world from earlier versions remains available as the Old World, and one character can play in both worlds.

The story of the Creators

The Creators have searched the galaxy for intelligent life for eons, protecting planets with advanced organisms and trying to prevent civilizations from destroying themselves. They influenced humanity’s physical, technological and mental development, but people turned to war and abandoned their gods. After their last messenger fell, the Creators left through a portal while continuing to collect information.

Human civilization lasted almost 2,000 more years before nuclear war devastated Earth. Radiation killed most of the population; of tens of billions of people, only a few hundred thousand survived. The Creators learned of the destruction, returned and wiped out humanity. Over millennia, Earth shed its deadly radiation, and the Creators used human DNA and their vast store of information to restore nature and create new people, Homo Novus.

Each clone has a personal robot, A2-A, which helps and protects its charge, carries belongings and gradually passes on more complex knowledge. It also observes its charge’s behavior, as the Creators seek to prevent the aggression that destroyed the previous civilization. The Creators seeded the planet with anomalies that let clones travel through time and learn from their ancestors’ mistakes; the anomalies may also lead to other dimensions. The Creators continue to analyze information from tens of thousands of A2-As as they wait to meet their new humans in person.

Craft and build

Crafting involves making almost every part of an item separately. The material used for each part affects the finished item: oak and pine, for example, pass on different properties, and wood type and hardness matter. You can use a simpler crafting mode that fills in materials, or choose them yourself in advanced mode. Skills and item quality grow together, and crafting skill affects the damage you deal with a weapon.

You plan a building before gathering the materials and constructing it. Modular parts let you design your own home, or you can use ready-made houses. Building is limited by the available recipes, materials and skills, as well as your creativity. You can establish a farm near your home to grow crops for meals, plant a forest or bring plants from other biomes. Recipes for building parts can be found in chests around the world and in anomalies.

Develop your character

Your attributes and skills improve through use. Rather than choosing a race or class, you shape your character’s specialization through your actions. Your character can be a man or a woman, and characters age as you play. They can die of old age, after which play moves on to the next generation: age represents experience, and each generation represents a level, bringing bonuses and improved attributes.

Explore and survive

You begin in the wilderness with a knife and basic tools, accompanied by A2-A. You need to find food and warmth and prepare for the dangers of the forests; disease, injury and death are part of life in this world. As you learn how it works, you can travel in search of rare materials or the truth about the restored planet’s purpose.

Anomalies are portals to other dimensions and times. Their chests contain rare rewards and recipes needed to progress in crafting, but the anomalies also hold dangers. Seasonal events include Halloween and Christmas.

Combat

You can fight at close range, use a bow, or go unarmed. Dodging moves you out of reach, while crouching lets you sneak past creatures until they spot you. Damage depends on your skill with the weapon you wield, so specializing in a weapon pays off. Creatures have fixed strength by level, as does equipment; stronger creatures wait farther out in the world and in anomalies.