Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Destructible Props

The window is the joke and the brick is its punchline

Town lots are scattered with small, breakable scenery — up to three props per lot, placed the same way every time a chunk streams in so a town reads as somewhere recognisable rather than randomly reshuffled on every visit. Any ranged hit that would otherwise stop on a wall stops on one of these instead, chipping its HP down exactly the way a real obstacle would, until it breaks outright.

The five props

Every prop that breaks eventually comes back, on its own timer — the game's own design notes are direct about why: a world where every crate is gone for good after a week is a worse world than one where they return.

Glass is the one that matters

The Window has the lowest HP of any prop by a wide margin and is the only one that drops nothing at all when it breaks. That's entirely deliberate — the design notes single it out specifically as "the joke," on the reasoning that breaking a window the moment a player finds a ranged weapon is an interaction almost everyone will try within a minute of realising it's possible, and it should be effortless and yield nothing besides the satisfaction of doing it.

Reuses the shape of player-built walls, none of the numbers

Props deliberately don't reuse the game's existing player-built-structure durability system — that system is tuned for walls meant to withstand a siege (hundreds of HP, with damage deliberately capped so a real fortification takes real time to breach). Pointed at a crate, those same rules would turn breaking one into a two-minute chore. Props only borrow the general shape — HP, a break, a drop, a respawn — and use their own much smaller numbers built specifically for scenery meant to break in one or two hits.

Ranged only, for the same reason as everything else this cycle

Props can currently only be broken by ranged weapons — melee is checked in the same projectile sweep every wall and prop already sits inside, and the game's own melee swing is driven by mouse input in a way this project's automated testing tooling can't reliably simulate, the identical reasoning that kept Weak Points ranged-only in its own first pass too.

Every prop in the table above sits well below eye height — the tallest, the Fence, tops out under 3 units against a camera sitting around 3.2 units up — so a shot fired straight ahead, level with the crosshair, passes clean over the top of all five without touching any of them. Breaking one on purpose means deliberately aiming down at it rather than just shooting in its general direction, which the development log flags as a genuine feel question worth revisiting rather than something settled by the numbers alone.

History

• Destructible Props added (cycle 1 of a planned three) — the five prop types, their HP, drops, and respawn timers, but shipped with nowhere in the world to actually find one; the only way to see a prop at all was through the game's own internal testing console.
• Props placed in the actual world (cycle 2) — town lots gained real, deterministic clutter built from the same positioning method the houses and citizens on each lot already use, which is what turned the system from an inert backend feature into something a player could actually walk up to and break.
• A real performance problem found and fixed — with a large number of long-lived, entirely untouched props sitting in the world, simply keeping track of which ones might be due to respawn was measured eating roughly a third of a 60fps frame budget on its own, purely from checking thousands of props that had nothing to report. Fixed by having broken props register themselves separately, so the respawn check only ever has to look at props that are actually waiting to come back rather than walking the entire list every single frame.

Trivia

• A prop's mesh is parented directly to the same chunk of world it belongs to, so it's automatically culled and cleaned up exactly like every other piece of scenery when that area unloads — the underlying record then notices its own mesh is gone and quietly removes itself too, with no separate cleanup step needed anywhere else in the game.