About the Saga: Origins, Philosophy, and Features

Origins and Design Philosophy

This project scratches a very particular itch its author has carried for years, ever since first encountering the original Progress Quest (around 2010-2012). It's been a long-lasting dream to create a game in that spirit, but one specifically designed to overcome a common hurdle in long-running idle titles: the eventual instability or crashes often caused by astronomically large numbers. Nyxatar Heroes Saga tackles this with its core generational system, allowing the game to be a true marathon, designed to run in the background for potentially days, months, or even years. The initial creation of this saga was a labor of love, brought to life in May 2025.

A Note on the Development Journey: To quickly establish the base and "vibecode" the initial structure of this saga, AI tools were mindfully used as a development aid. Further development, learning, and refinements will be a traditional, solo coding adventure by the author, pursued in spare time. Y'all know, when inspiration or boredom sufficiently motivates!

While originally conceived for an ephemeral, in-memory experience, an optional save/load mechanism is also available (see how to run with game saving enabled on the main page).

| Version Type      | Semantic Example(s) | Thematic Name Idea       | Example Theme                |
| :---------------- | :------------------ | :----------------------- | :--------------------------- |
| **Major Release** | `1.0.0`, `2.0.0`    | "Volume [Roman Numeral]" | `v1.0.0 - Volume I`          |
| **Minor Release** | `0.6.0`, `1.1.0`    | "The [Ordinal] Scroll"   | `v0.6.0 - The Second Scroll` |
| **Patch/Hotfix**  | `0.5.4`, `1.0.1`    | "Parchment Update/Patch" | `v0.5.4 - Parchment Patch`   |

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Prefer to listen? Hear a quick, AI-generated audio introduction to Nyxatar Heroes Saga, covering its core ideas and what makes it unique.

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Core Features

• Zero-Player Gameplay: Truly idle! Set it up, and then sit back to watch your heroes' sagas unfold automatically in your terminal with no further input required.
• Generational Heroes: When a hero meets their end, their named heir continues the family line, potentially inheriting a small portion of gold and an Honorific Title based on their parent's dominant strengths, adding flavorful continuity to the lineage.
• Eternal Progression: Conceived for extremely long background runs, the game is designed as a marathon, not a sprint, with systems ensuring numerical stability over vast timescales.
• Lightweight: Designed for minimal resource use (e.g., ~18-25MB RAM observed), primarily operating in your computer's RAM for a classic, efficient experience.
• Persistent Sagas (Optional): Enable game saving to resume later, featuring safeguards like periodic auto-saves, automatic backups (.bak files), and crash recovery files (.CRASH) to protect your long-running chronicles.
• Procedural Universe: Unique heroes, quests, items, and monsters are generated every time, leveraging extensive internal lexicons for a vast spectrum of names, descriptions, and emergent narratives for every lineage and epoch.
• Diverse Hero Pursuits & Worldly Happenings: Heroes undertake varied activities from questing and combat to more contemplative or mundane pursuits like tending local landmarks, sharing tales in taverns, crafting simple goods, studying map fragments, and observing their surroundings, each with unique outcomes and flavorful logs. Rare global events can also occur, adding unexpected turns to the saga.
• Evolving World Tiers: As heroes level up (every LEVELS_PER_WORLD_TIER levels, currently 10), they advance through World Tiers. These tiers progressively influence monster difficulty and naming conventions, the quality and types of items found, the potency and frequency of Nemesis encounters, and other emergent challenges, ensuring the saga remains engaging and scales with the hero's power.
• Dreaded Nemesis Encounters: Rare but exceptionally dangerous "Nemesis" monsters can appear, their chance increasing with the hero's World Tier. These formidable foes are significantly stronger than typical encounters, often wielding unique descriptive prefixes, pose a high risk of True Death if the hero is defeated, but yield substantial XP, gold, and unique high-quality loot if vanquished.
• Epochal Sagas & The Turning of Ages: Beyond individual generations, the saga unfolds across vast Epochs. When a lineage has persisted through an immense number of generations (currently configurable via GENERATIONS_PER_EPOCH, defaulting to 5000), the world experiences an 'Epochal Shift.' The generation count for the current epoch resets to one, a new thematic Epoch name (e.g., "The Starfall," "The Age of Echoes") may mark the new era, and the chronicle of the original founder's bloodline continues into a new chapter of its immense journey. This ensures even the generation counter remains thematically fresh over cosmic timescales. (Further details on customization in the Advanced Usage Guide).
• Simple & Portable: Nyxatar Heroes Saga is built using only Python's standard (built-in) modules, requiring no external libraries and ensuring it can run easily on many systems. The project was developed with Python 3.13.3 tools and is tested for compatibility with Python 3.12.10 and newer. This focus on recent Python versions was a deliberate choice—balancing the desire for broad accessibility with the need to use modern language features for better game performance, code sustainability, and because essential development tools were aligned with these newer versions. While there's a deep appreciation here for software freedom, minimizing e-waste, and the often underestimated capabilities of older hardware (many systems from the last 10-15 years can run modern Python if not artificially restricted by their OS, and tools like Termux bring this power to many Android devices), a full backport to very old Python versions (e.g., pre-3.8, where issues were observed) is unfortunately not feasible for this solo project. Thus, for the intended stability and experience, Python 3.12.10 or newer is strongly recommended.

In-Depth Mechanics and Cheatsheets

Many of the precise probabilities, item generation rules, and event triggers described in these cheatsheets are governed by constants within the game script, offering avenues for advanced customization (see the Advanced Usage Guide for details).

For a comprehensive look at the game's inner workings, probabilities, and event outcomes, explore "Trigger Cheatsheet":

• View the Cheatsheet as an HTML Table

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Other Nyxatar Heroes Saga pages:

• Advanced Usage and Customization Guide
• Main Project Page