The Gazetteer of the Unterzee, part 1: the Corsair's Forest and Demeaux Island

Or, a quick preview of a couple of locations in the Unterzee - and our first actual screenies.

We've left out the currently very placeholdery ship controls, fuel and crew display and so on; and we've got the ambient light turned up at the moment to make everything clearer for demo and debugging. But this is how the prototype's actually looking now. In these very early days! This is not even pre-alpha! it needs way more work! But it'll give you some idea of what to expect.

Demeaux Island: named for the navigator snatched by a waterspout from the coast of Macau in 1822. The luminiferous bosk-shrooms of Demeaux Island enjoyed a brief vogue as avant-garde building materials, but sleep can be difficult in bosk-bole buildings. Contrary to popular rumour, bosk-shrooms cannot 'swim'.

Here's the SS John Masefield idling off the Warehouse of the Iron & Misery Company, on Demeaux Island. That's a port where it can make landfall, resupply, and find out why the I&M Company hasn't been making shipments back to London recently. We're using luminous features on this island, as others, so you'll be able to make out its outline even in utter darkness with your prow light turned away.

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The Corsair's Forest: a thousand stalagmites bridged and elaborated by warring pirate-clans, exiled artists and worse. Is it more dangerous to navigate the jagged roots of the stalagmites by ship, or walk the creaking ways between their summits? Hard to say, but the stalwarts of the Royal Navy prefer to avoid either approach, and so the fugitives from Justice lair here still.

And here's the Masefield pushing through the Corsair's Forest at half-speed. Note the wake and the smoke streaming from its funnel (more visible when it turns). Half-speed makes it easier to negotiate the confines of the forest, and also consumes fuel less aggressively, which can be important this far out. Especially since we've whacked the prow glim-light up to maximum radiance, so that's also burning fuel (you can see the stalagmite occluding the light if you look at the top right, too). There's another port to the bottom: the Corsairs are wary folk, so they keep cranes at the summit and use those to hoist cargo - or even ships - up to a safer height...

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