[For loot,] what are the rules? How do we decide what goes into loot and where?

Well, I think anyone who plays games enough kind of knows what to expect from loot, and we're not going to reinvent the wheel there. But for a long time, loot was owned by individual content designers, so it got a little bit inconsistent. And in an initiative at the start of this year, I've taken it over as a systems designer to try and get things back to consistent again. And hopefully you'll notice that in Align and Mine and the most recent Stormbreaker locations. So basically we just take a few things into account: category of the item, rarity, and size, because it all has to fit in a box. So we have four main categories, which are weapons and ammo, armor, medical, and then miscellaneous. And those are distinguished visually by different boxes. Miscellaneous can then be broken down into more specifics like food, mining, repair, so that if the level designers have a cafeteria or a garage, they can place things that make more sense in there. And then we have five rarities: common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. You'll find the first four of those in loot boxes. We have three different rarities of loot boxes: common, uncommon, rare. Epic, we don't have a box for that, but it appears in all those boxes in a very small amount, with more likelihood of getting it if you are looking at a rare box. We don't have those distinguished visually yet, but that is the plan. We will be getting new models for those, so you'll be able to just glance at a box and see that, oh, that's a rare box. It'll be a lot shinier than the common one, I assume. And then we also have size of the item. We have three different sizes of boxes, and it obviously makes sense that you can't find a railgun in a small weapons box. And it tends to be that as things get more powerful, they get larger. So you'll only get the full suit armors inside the largest armor box. So it's kind of turned out that as far as gameplay goes, the size of a box is actually, I think, more important than the rarity of a box, because what is rare is kind of like a tint on an item or something like that. And then we have legendary items, and those don't appear in loot boxes. Those are saved for the location. So in Orbageddon, in Align and Mine or whatever it's called, we had the camo rifle, the Vault Rifle, and we had the camo hunter outfit, the hunter armor. And then in Stormageddon, Stormbreaker, we had the bright yellow radiation suits. And those will never be found anywhere else. They'll be found in those locations. Whereas all the other stuff that's kind of unique to those locations, it's only unique right now. As they get older, they'll kind of spill out into other locations as well. And how we decide where they go, those individual boxes or the loot: we draw a map of the location and then we decide how difficult it is to get into all those rooms and then assign them a loot value, and that determines whether they can have uncommon or common loot inside them.

Maybe good to mention, we are also making an active effort to go back through some of our old locations and update them to snuff. Obviously, there's no date on when that is or when that's going to finish, but it's something we are trying to do to make sure we're consistent.

Yeah, and that will be done using the new extension to the system that Jacob's currently working on, which makes it easier for us just generally to set up loot, to place loot, but also to define locations. So you'll start seeing differences between Stanton and Pyro through loot.

Yeah, so a lot of what Luke has said is things that we're already doing. We're trying to make each location have its own themed loot in some way, but it currently takes quite a lot of manual intervention to make that happen. A lot of inefficiencies in the workflow. So I've been working on some extensions to the system to improve our tools around that and make it easier for designers to set things up in such a way that it can scale to all of our different locations, all our different systems, and grow for the future as well.

Yeah, when I first started on this, I remember you saying this system was made to place rocks and trees.

Yeah, one part of the system was made to place rocks and trees. And now it's grown, and it's even placing Atlas Geosuits, I think, in certain places.

You didn't say I couldn't, Jacob. If you don't tell me I can't do something, I'm going to do it, all right? I'm a designer. My goal is to get stuff done by any means necessary.

Yeah, no, I understand that, I respect that. What I do is I try to adapt to the changing needs that the designers have as we're making new content. And what might not have been supported at one particular time will be supported later. So we keep growing our technology as the needs of our content and gameplay grow as well.