Sim Adventurers

Shadowbane was built for hundreds of players at once; this shard has a handful. Sim adventurers fill the gap: computer-run characters with real names, races, levels, trained skills and worn gear, out in the wilderness camping the same monsters you camp and fighting back when attacked. From a distance one looks like another player working through their evening — and increasingly, up close, so does its behaviour.

They are not scenery and they are not scripted encounters. They earn their levels, join guilds, build towns, hold grudges and occasionally come looking for you.

In this section

• How they level — experience per kill, trained skills, and why their gear makes sense now
• Parties — why they will not leave without a healer
• Guilds, houses and towns — the society they build
• War and vengeance — the two reasons a hunting party ends up on your map
• What they say — and how loud
• Friends, fights and limits — everything you can and cannot do with one

How many, and where

Six hundred sim identities exist, drawn from four races across both genders and spread over levels 20 to 65. Each keeps its name, level, skills and gear across restarts. About two hundred are in the world at any one time — because the other four hundred are logged off.

They organise around monster camps. At startup the server clusters the wilderness spawns into roughly 700 camps of about seven monsters, covering some 5,500 of the world's 6,200 or so eligible mobs, so you meet sims where you would farm yourself.

Where one appears follows three rules:

• About three in ten spawn near a player who is online; the rest across every valid wilderness zone.
• None ever appear inside a player city, an NPC city or a safehold.
• None appear within 300 units of a player, so you never see one materialise beside you.

When they are online

Sims keep hours. Each one plays roughly an eight-hour session and is then logged out for sixteen, on one of three staggered shifts, so about a third of the roster is out in the world at any moment. The shard is never empty and never all six hundred at once.

Some keep worse hours than others. A sim's addiction runs from 0 to 10 and adds that many hours to its session while taking them off its sleep, so the worst case plays eighteen hours a day and sleeps six. It is skewed hard toward zero — most sims keep ordinary hours, and the handful that do not are the ones you keep running into. Since levels come only from kills, those are also the sims quietly out-levelling everyone on their shift: something you can watch happen rather than a hidden bonus.

The rota rotates every week. If it did not, playing the same evenings would mean meeting the same two hundred sims for ever and never once seeing the other four hundred. Every week the whole rota moves by one slot, so a player with a fixed schedule meets a different third of the world each week and has met all six hundred within three.

Shifts also stagger the ladder. A shift levels together and the three are permanently out of step, so the roster spreads across levels instead of climbing as one block.

What they do all day

A sim's day is a loop: pick a camp, walk to it, fight it, rest, move on, and eventually log off for the night. Camps are chosen within about 6,000 units — roughly a seven-minute walk — at random rather than nearest-first, so two hundred sims do not pile onto one clearing. A sim stays 10 to 25 minutes and leaves early once it has outgrown the camp.

They fight for real, whether or not anyone is watching. The monster a sim is fighting genuinely dies, and killing is the only way a sim advances. The wilderness is therefore being worked while you are elsewhere, and a camp you arrive at may already be thin.

They also behave like people who have died before:

• They rest when hurt. Below about 70% health a sim sits down and heals, and gets up at 95%. Sitting heals at the same rate it does for you.
• They fight back at whatever is hitting them, rather than wandering off to pull something new and ending up fighting two.
• Healers heal. A sim with restoration powers uses them, on itself and on its party.

Do they compete with you?

Yes. Sims kill wilderness monsters from the camps and respawn timers you use, nothing makes one drop a pull because you turned up, and they fight whether or not anybody is watching — so a camp can be thin when you arrive. A contested camp is genuinely contested.

A few things pull the other way. Camps under a player city are never chosen, a camp just worked is scored down for five minutes so the next sim goes elsewhere, and loot defers to you: within 150 units of a kill, with that monster targeted, or with your pet or mercenary contract fighting it, the sim takes nothing.