Terraforming and mobile base: Earthlock 2 has new ideas for the open-world genre

In Earthlock 2 you travel through a vast desert. Fortunately, you don’t have to trudge through the sand alone, but have a ship and crew

If you’ve ever played a survival game with a large open world, you’ll probably know how tedious it can be to transport the resources you’ve collected across the map back to your base. Or even to dig new shelters out of the ground at every corner.

The role-playing game Earthlock 2 aims to avoid this work with a simple trick: You simply take your base with you.

From the desert to the oasis

Earthlock 2 has now released a cinematic trailer that shows the extraordinary idea behind the game. On a kind of ship that glides over the sand, you explore a desert landscape in which immense riches are said to await. Apparently, by defeating monsters, you can also transform parts of the hostile desert into flourishing oases:

Gameplay is not yet shown in the trailer, but short videos of the biomes and your mobile base

In several blog entries, the developers also reveal exciting information about the features shown

Your mobile base

Your so-called caravan should not only be a means of transportation, but also your home. During your journey, you can gradually upgrade it and adapt it to different play styles. Advanced technologies improve the caravan’s characteristics, mountable weapons help in battles, and reinforcements arm you for the harsh climate.

Explorable biomes

For reasons as yet unknown (this is said to be one of the game’s great secrets), you can create green oases in the desert virtually out of nowhere. The developers have also already revealed what these biomes will be characterized by:

• Lots of variety: You should find different fruits, animals and other life forms in each explorable biome. There are also secrets waiting to be discovered everywhere.
• Biomes are not immutable: In order for the oases to thrive, we must nurture and care for them. We can ensure their well-being, or we can extract too many resources and kill them. On top of that, it is possible to deliberately transform the biome into a different variant, which can be richer or more dangerous.
• What are the biomes good for?  Apparently, we can sell mined resources to trading posts. However, the developers have not yet revealed whether they are also relevant to the story or bring further benefits.