Verticle Climbing

[Josiah Gibbonson]

One time I was exploring without any blocks or tools and fell down a hole. Had to either starve or use the /suicide command.

 

It would be awesome if we could climb up flat, verticle surfaces. However, it wouldn't be that simple- there'd be a grip meter.

To start climbing vertically, go up to the verticle surface in question and press a specific key. That will have you cling to the wall. Then hold W to ascend, and the ASD keys to move in their specific directions.

Once you cling to a wall, in the top right it'll show your current grip strength- it starts at 100%. 

Everytime you move against a block while gripped to it, be it verticle or horizontally, that percentage goes down based on the kind of block it is. Slicker blocks would lower the grip percentage much quicker.

If it's raining on the blocks you're trying to grip against, grip percentange goes down twice as fast.

If you press the jump button you'll leap in the direction specific to your WASD keys. However, once that leap finishes, you'll lose a lot of grip. 

 

Once grip percentage reaches 0%, you slip and fall, and have to wait until it fills back up to 100%.

 

Wearing gloves can lower the rate at which grip is lost. Getting damaged while climbing will lower grip by a lot. Climbing while hunger is below 50% will make grip drain faster. 

[LadyWYT]

https://mods.vintagestory.at/verticality

Friend installed this on his server and it's proven to be rather fun and balanced so far. However, I do expect that kind of vertical movement to completely break the story locations. If this kind of movement functionality were added to the game(outside of the rope ladders we have), the story locations would probably need a major rework in order to avoid resorting to immersion-breaking "invisible walls" that outright stop the player from climbing around.

[Josiah Gibbonson]

To avoid breaking story locations, the materials used for their walls could make grip drain too fast to actually scale anything (being too slick or dangerous to scale- like rusty?) 

[LadyWYT]

On 3/14/2025 at 6:49 PM, Josiah Gibbonson said:

To avoid breaking story locations, the materials used for their walls could make grip drain too fast to actually scale anything (being too slick or dangerous to scale- like rusty?) 

That doesn't really help when there are walls that are just over one block high that you normally can't jump, but could with the ability to climb. There's one spot in the Archive that's particularly bad and would 100% need a redesign, as otherwise the player would be able to avoid a certain encounter entirely and skip straight to the end. One of the locations from chapter 2 would also end up trivialized completely, since it requires some fancy footwork that would no longer be necessary if the player can climb.

I think if climbing were implemented in the base game, it'd be better to either implement a version like you suggested now, so that there's not as much to rework, or even better implement something like this: 

Requiring special equipment to scale walls and things would be a better way to handle such a mechanic without needing a complete rework of existing locations. The existing protections would still apply, preventing you from using items to tamper with the blocks within. Of course, that might lead to a bit of immersion breaking, since you should logically be able to crawl/climb through certain bits, however, we already kinda have that kind of immersion break due to gameplay constraints.