Souls-like survival mode

[dawaltco]

I think it would be fun to introduce a kind of a souls-like semi-progress-preserving mechanic either as its own survival "challenge" mode, or as an option that's always available immediately after dying in survival.

The basic idea is that you could re-enter a game world you had just died in. All item placements are retained and there is a frozen corpse at the site of your death (or nearby if you fell off the map) with your clothes and inventory. All items that you have interacted with (inventory and placed items) take a significant condition hit, either a flat percentage (like 50%) or equivalent to some significant amount of time passing (like 150 days, idk). It should be enough that most food is spoiled and any items in poor condition at the time of your death are destroyed, but any items in good / perfect condition can be repaired & recovered.

If you take this option, you cannot start the game in the region where you died, or in neighboring regions (at least if you died in a connecting region). You should have to trek across enough of the map that there's real risk involved in trying to immediately retrieve your things. It's a trek requiring significant preparation, all while your placed items are continuing to decay. if you die before you reach your corpse, then the world is reset and you lose that progress for good.

Perhaps you can repeat, preserving only the items you placed on your most recent attempt, but that may be infeasible with the way the world's items are populated.

I think this would accomplish two things I'd really love to see from the game

1. Incentivizing long-distance travel across multiple regions of the game world, in a way that still lets the player explore at their own pace
2. Cushioning the blow of a survival mode death—others may disagree, but I find death in survival to be so devastating in terms of lost time / progress that I usually can't play the game again for at least a few weeks. No other fail-state in a game has so thoroughly broken me, which...is kinda cool tbh but I want to keep playing.