System mechanic — added v228 · pays nothing, on purpose

The Drowning

Blow a hole deep enough to sink dry land below the waterline, and it is gone for good — but the sea is not allowed to help you

Almost nothing in this game is truly permanent. Ore nodes come back. Trees come back. Enemies come back. A wall gives you half its materials back when you pull it down. Even the terrain brushes you reshape by hand are capped at 400 and quietly forgotten once you've made about four hundred of them. There is exactly one exception: every frag bomb, nuke and dig bomb the player has ever detonated pushes a permanent crater record into the save, uncapped, never removed, read on every single height sample for the rest of that character's life. The ground is lower there forever. The Drowning is the system that finally reads that record and recognises what some of those craters actually are.

What a drowning is

Blast a hole in dry land deep enough that the floor of it falls below the waterline. You have not dug a pit — you have made a lake, and the land that was there is gone. This game has no way to raise it again. That is a drowning. It counts once, it counts forever, and there is no roster of them and no way to see the last one you made.

The catch: the sea is not allowed to help you

The obvious, efficient way to do this — walk to a coastline where the ground is already close to sea level and lob a bomb — is exactly the one thing that can never count. Every point in a ring around the hole has to be dry land: not one sample point may be at or below the waterline. That rules out the shore, the riverbank, the edge of any lake, and even the margin of a lake you made with an earlier drowning. You have to carry explosives inland, into country with no water anywhere near it, and find ground low enough to sink under the waterline with nothing already wet around it. High ground is useless because the crater floor won't reach that deep; low ground near water is useless because the ring fails. A bigger bomb is not simply an upgrade either — it digs deeper, but it also widens the ring of land that has to stay dry.

It cannot be farmed by bombing the same spot twice: the second blast lands on ground that was already underwater when it started, so there is no dry land left there to take. The only way to do it again is to go somewhere else entirely.

How rare a qualifying hole actually is

Sampled on a 40-metre lattice across a 6-kilometre square of the world: 16,174 points stand above the waterline. Of those, 6,362 are simply too high for a frag bomb's 14-metre crater to reach the waterline at all, and a further 2,970 are ruled out by the dry-ring test alone — leaving 6,768 that genuinely qualify. In other words, the ring rule alone throws out roughly three holes in every ten that were already deep enough, on top of the ground that was never reachable in the first place.

What it deliberately doesn't do

No marker, no mesh, no water plane. Nothing is created anywhere in the world when a drowning is recognised. The hole you blasted is the only thing there, exactly as the bomb left it — this system only ever recognises a puddle, never adds one.
No map, no coordinates, no list. It never names a location or keeps a page of past drownings. Knowing your own country is the entire point.
No warning, no aim assist. Nothing tells you the ground ahead is deep enough or that there's water hiding behind the next ridge. You find out from a single toast message when it happens, or you don't find out at all.
No denominator. It sets no target and moves no existing completion figure — the Apex Hunter total, the Bestiary, the Furniture Collection and every other trophy count are untouched.
Pays absolutely nothing. No coin, items, experience, stat, drop or unlock, at any number of drownings. Bomb throwing, crater generation and the height formula itself are not touched by this system at all — it only watches.

Old saves start at zero, not a debt

The first time this runs on a character who has already been bombing the map for months, every crater already sitting in the ground is written off as spent and uncredited — a drifter with ninety existing craters starts on nought, the same as a brand new character, because the system wasn't watching when those landed. Nothing already earned is taken away either.

Its counterpart: The Mark

The version immediately before this one, v227, added The Mark — a system that counts land you permanently claim by building on virgin ground. The Drowning is its deliberate mirror: land you permanently destroy instead. Together they are the only two systems in the game that track whether the world itself is different because of you, rather than tracking your own body or your own ledger.

Version history

v228 — added. Ships with exactly the design described above: the dry-ring test, the old-save write-off, and no visible feedback beyond a single toast message the moment a drowning is recognised. No changes recorded to it since.

Trivia

The system is built directly on top of the game's persistent bomb-crater array — the same data that had quietly existed, untouched by any reward system, since roughly a hundred versions earlier. Two hundred-plus versions of players making craters happened before anything in the game cared what any of them actually were.
Like The Mark's counter, the internal tally of how many drownings you've caused is named as though it could reset, but nothing in the code ever lowers it — it is a lifetime total in practice.