More Basement Ideas

Starr mentioned looking for more basement ideas in the recent Housing Deep Dive session, telling us to post into the forums. I figured I'd create a thread to dump some ideas into, as basements and underground areas should likely be something pretty common that have existed since around 400 years previous when the moons collided, containing tons of passages, chambers and the like as the populace hid below-ground. Here are some random ideas:

-Temple/Prayer/Conjuring/Spiritual Space
-Fortified Treasure Vault(s)
-Armageddon/Panic Chamber (likely built around the Fall as moon-pieces continued to rain down)
-Performance Space/Community Gathering Space (e.g. smaller version of Stephen's amphitheater - perhaps a slightly larger number of attendees allowed?)
-Underground Baths/Thermal Vent Hot Tub (in Owls Head at least), Large Underground River/Pool/Grotto (connected to Sea?)
-Maze Basement (Pacman PvP session)
-Underground Garden (Luminescent Fungus!)
-Root Cellar
-Water Wells
-Tavern/Wine Cellar style basement with huge casks for player-run buildings like Taverns
-Underground Crypt
-Ship Basement (the hold and/or bilge on ships)
-Five Level mine basement that the player actually has to maintain or carve-out somewhat with pickaxe utilizing periodically replaced wooden trusses, and that may occasionally have a minor cave-in pending proper maintenance following major use.
-Ruined or flooded basement (swim around underneath - maybe for river homes. Varying water levels depending on time of day due to tides, etc)
-Have bottom level of a basement be part of a sewer, for those who don't mind foul odors. Add in trash eating creature in stead of a trash-bin.
-Give basements placed in specific locales a % chance to generate the occasional low-grade resource or have a few levels appear a certain way based on some local topographical feature (e.g. Owls Head - steam vents, hot springs, etc).
-Archeological dig theme (unearthing pre-Fall architecture/debris)
-Undead Pens (for necromancers, if that comes to be. Let them lead 'pets' out alt. entryways)
-Small shacks/hovels built into the surrounding walls for those overly enthusiastic servants or areas where guildmates can quickly store something, or swap out equipment.
-Crawl spaces to get between chambers (of course a new method of Avatar movement would need to be enacted with this).

In addition it would be nice to be able to purchase a connection to a common instanced underground town passage (make the player mine the passages to initially reach it). In this it would be nice to have a common shared connection to other basements in the same locale, accessible by other guild members, permissioned citizens and the like (e.g Thieves Guild members coming and going, secret societies, town elders). I wouldn't mind seeing a connection to a tunnel that leads outside the town, sewers, or even to the Underworld entrance. Some nefarious citizenry may not want to come and go out of the front door of their homes.

 

Nice ideas, I like crypts & catacombs, maybe the basements that have joined the secret underground coven of underdwellers could have a secret entrance from their basement to the underworld. Still hope their working on the underworld, the world under the surface where there is no map, just maze tunnel after tunnel with catacombs and even an underground city, they mentioned this a while ago wonder if it's still in the works.

 

Multi layer prison basement

 

+1000000 on the underground bath... I had a house in a game with a hidden underground bath/pool, and it ended up one of the more popular hangout spots for a lot of people lol

Would also love to see a greenhouse/garden type thing... (I don't care that it's underground, cast a sunlight spell on a crystal or something XD )

 

"Between Something that Rocks and a Hard Place"

~All great suggestions there Hazard~

I think our Development Team is currently being whipped by Darkstarr in a red bikini right now attempting to place some of the more ready and playable content into our game for it's testing.
There was a feverish drive of artwork being pumped out for a while there in these areas while they were putting together the few cities, towns and villages we now can see in-game. Yet the drive set in the graphic arts department at Portalarium seems to be involved with a massive amount of adaptation in technically shaping up our world. Though I'm certain that they will eventually get back around to polishing up and improving new designs of everything, it's a shame that our online store with it's pledge designs and available content for sale has become a bit stagnate with anything new fourth coming. As I feel that our game is in no way a small budget styled game, yet actually having a small budget to do the work with, we here in the suggestion forums seem to be in a holding pattern until other things are first overcome because of a limited staff of very hard working tired and pissed off little Red Hat Gnomes

I personally can forgive all that waiting, but I've also got money in my pocket that wants to burn up on some newer designs of housing in pledges and much more available content to choose from in the store's add-on's. "Variety is the spice of Life", of that we're all but certain, but let's hope that Portalarium's financially successful time of pledging, isn't missing it's even bigger boom here that could be achieved by expanding our player purchased content with more variety. The fundraising is continually booming more and more as we now draw closer and closer to our October release date, yet I do hope that Portalarium will not miss this "Time & Chance" they have to hit their funding booster rocket with more pledge'able, purchasable content, to which their fist released online store content did for them in the not so distant past. I do though feel a bit frustrated as Jackie Gleason that said "To the Moon Alice" and not just into orbit...


"Between Something that Rocks and a Hard Place"
-Do Ya' get it Portalarium?-

~Time Lord~

 

Something that taps into an elemental or extra-dimensional hide-out space that is cool maybe like the elemental planes of air and fire, or the ethereal void...

 

Underground hotspring? Good list of ideas here.

Sent from my GT-S5690M using Tapatalk 2

 

Smuggler's Cellar: A small 'official' cellar with some secret door that lead to bit more storage space and a tunnel that leads out of town (one way out not in).

Underground river.

 

Hazard this is an amazing list! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and I wish I could like them more than once. If they could some how sell the basement as a container (1 to 5 levels) and sell these different pieces to plug into those 5 levels that would be a huge win.

Maka's basement
[Wine Cellar]
[Underground Baths]
[Underground Garden]
[Temple]
[Treasure Vault]

Cheers!

 

Rivendale. Ok, if not that, then an elf-themed basement with trees. Yes, trees underground. And tree roots.

 

I really like the idea of a fortified panic room under my house (with a secure exit leading to the underground cave system). Just need to squeeze either a Tesla or water powered generator down there with lots of supplies and I'm set. After all, you never know when the next Great Cataclysm will come

 

A large underground lake with an island in the middle of it. And the ability to put one of your spare houses on the island.

 

Good ideas so far. Here are a few more:

• I'd like a village-version of the arena, so Knight's might have a place to tournament.
• I'd love a natural tunnel system basement, not a mine but something that would fit in under the Druid's home. Animal dens?
• An Avatar's tomb, like in Blade of the Avatar, would rock for a Town or City basement.
• In some cities, I hope there is a persistent sewer system that runs between housing lots; the option to purchase a connection to that as well as to your house would be cool.
• An oubliette; basically a two-story basement but the second floor is the depth of the five-story basement, with a vertical shaft between them. Probably with chains and cages at the top, and a box cage at the bottom. The top would look a lot like the caged man room in The Clink.

 

Ooh, what about some pre-Cataclysm ruins with miniature standing stones that teleport you to the closest full standing stones via lunar rift? Probably not much room for anything else, except maybe an alchemy table and some bookshelves. Would make an awesome mage's lair.

 

A dragon's lair basement with a live pet dragon.

 

Modular basement levels FTW! This way we're not stuck with just one design.

Great ideas

 

A monster zoo basement - with cages that displays all the monsters you have slain.

 

Tamed, maybe. Slain would be a trophy room, like a museum; which would also be neat!

 

Really good ideas so far. I'm glad to see this thread get started after it was suggested in the deep dive yesterday.

Maybe something with a vast amount of head room like a giant cavern that is 5 stories deep? With a forest of some sort:

or old school with a mushroom forest here:

 

I have a Basements and Personal Dungeons writeup from a while back. It has info about connections to the underworld and modular building over time.

I also had some ideas regarding underground housing...

One challenge I see is that there needs to be a few thousand lots to satisfy the entire group of pledgers who are at a the lot/housing level. They all get above-ground houses, so there should be that many lots available at launch to satisfy that. Creating 'underground houses' and giving them to pledgers would give people an option to live below. (But they'd still need to satisfy the above-ground lot number requirement in the event everyone picked that, I'm guessing.)

The modelers could make basements and caves that fit more of the house/livable space layout, yet not have to build the outside of any structure. It would be a new "Underground House" type. The dungeon kit modular pieces could be used to make it easier. Create the lot 'stubs' where the basement doors would go off hallways from the main service/NPC areas. Stubs could be created as a fifth lot type, a mini-lot, perhaps 2 x 3 or 4 x 6 meters (compared to 20x30 for the village lot size) that would allow you to place the basement door just as you would if it were on an above ground lot. This would allow Portalarium to reuse the same implementation already coded/planned for basements. People could place some items near their basement door for customization (you know, neon arrow signs pointing down 'SECRET LAIR IS HERE!'), but it would obviously not be as much as they would above ground.

The current dungeon kits could be used as a starting point, but I think that a few special pieces might have to be created. The kits as they exist need lots of room to layout. Some compact pieces for stairs and perhaps a couple more room shapes. Of course, more pieces means more work which is something this idea was supposed to limit, but probably still less work than creating a whole house. Another variety of basement houses would be to use the larger rooms in the modular kit and break them up with wood partitions.

It makes sense that after 400 years, people would have built up some interesting underground living situations. I'm sure not everyone moved back above ground when it became hospitable, and even those who did would have left behind their carved out homes.

Perhaps basement-style underground houses from simple to elaborate could be sold/inserted into pledges?

@DarkStarr @Chris @chillblain @Scottie ... any comments?