Tobold's Blog
Friday, October 27, 2023
 
Return to Moria world hopping

I am 9 hours into The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, and I am enjoying at least the start of the game very much. Now what I frequently do in games in which you need to make decisions and which aren't perfectly on rails is that I play for some hours to learn the basics, and then restart to "get the start right". And that in Return to Moria works better than in most other games.

The worlds of Return to Moria are procedurally generated, based on a world seed, which is a number with up to 9 digits. I am not so superstitious as to believe certain numbers are luckier, so my world seeds tend to be extremely simple: The first world I created had "1" as a seed, the second one "2". It is interesting to see that some parts of the two worlds, e.g. your first camp, are very similar, while other parts are different enough to make different seeds distinctively different to play. I wasn't very happy with world "1" for different reasons, and I like world "2" better, at least for the start of the game.

Most interestingly your character, his equipment and inventory, exist independently and outside of the worlds. Which means that when stopping to play world 1 and switching to world 2, I was able to keep my character. I did lose all the recipes I had learned and had to go through the tutorial again. But I kept even the gear which on the new world I wasn't able to make yet. And I could stuff my inventory with everything valuable from my chests in world 1, and transport the stuff to world 2.

That allows for some interesting "world hopping", where by going back and forth between two worlds, you can move resources from one world to another. While some resources respawn, for example mushrooms and other edible plants, the resources you mine don't respawn. So I brought a bunch of iron ore and coal over, which speeds up the start of the game a lot. And I brought all the treasures I randomly found by destroying containers in abandoned buildings. So, if you ever find yourself in a world which you like, but where one specific resource is hard to find, you can explore other worlds and get it from there.

Many resources in the game are really abundant. So for my second world I decided to proceed a bit more systematically and "mark" the places I had already explored. I found the best way to do that was installing wall torches everywhere I have been. They also have the advantage of increasing your "light" meter, but I am not yet sure how exactly light is helpful, other than keeping a "darkness" debuff at bay and making things visually easier. But as there is a lot of going back and forth, at least the light allows me to carry a shield instead of a torch in my left hand. And apparently it also makes it less dangerous to move around at night, although I still try to be at a safe location and sleep at night.

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