Tenderfoot Tactics has a huge open world. Like irresponsibly huge, for the size of our team. There will be a lot of open, undesigned wilderness. This is good, not accidental, not regrettable - Tenderfoot is very much about naturalness, and undesigned spaces are an important piece of how we're embracing that. They're quiet bits, important for pacing.
But still, we don't want that natural space to be empty of anything interesting. Within the fog, this isn't a problem - the world will be full of horrible things to sneak by or fight through. But we want people to love spending time in the areas they've cleared fog out of. We want those places to feel alive, happy, and worth visiting. Have it be a triumph to have returned the world to a wild state, have that place feel like a place that you're glad exists.

Herbs! Herbs! Herbs!

One long-held plan for this has been to have collectible herbs and other plants naturally grow in specific biomes. We plan to have sort of side-quests where a goblin craftsperson can make you a useful equip out of certain plants, and to fulfil that you could take a leisurely boat around the safe periphery, gathering what you need from where you need it. Sounds pleasant!!
(ignore our temp ui lol) On first implementation, the herbs grew in the fog as well, which is fine, but takes away the specialness of having a healthy and happy area clean of the fog, where useful things can grow.

Forgetting

We've also been having a second design discussion around skill swapping. In the prologue, skills can be freely forgotten and relearned at will. It's appropriately fun and fast for the chaotic, brief experience of the Foreverlands, but it leads to your gobilns feeling kind of interchangeable and amorphous and forgettable. We wanted to find an elegant solution where players who want to respec need to spend some time and intention making it possible to do so. What we've done is made it so that any herb that would grow in a foggy area instead grows in as 'fae weed', a sort of fog-corrupted plant analogous to the fog-goblins. Fae weed can be plucked and equipped like other plants, but it also serves the purpose of being consumable. Your goblins now forget skills by eating fae weed. I like the logic of this. It makes some fictional sense that the fog, which brings some sort of self-identity-collapsing chaos to the goblins it touches, also sucks the color from plants in the area - and those plants become infused with that mind-erasing power.
Currently at least, we've also made it so that plucking fae weed knocks the fog out of a large area nearby - the same thing that happens when you defeat a fog spirit. It's nice because it feels like weeding to maintain the land's proper biome, keeping the fog at bay, without combat. But of course it, like everything else, could change. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061610/Tenderfoot_Tactics/