The Fog is a spatio-temporal anomaly, a trace of the Rust World seeping into our dimension. No one knows what brought it about. What we do know is this: the Fog is chaos, and it cannot abide order or human resolve. Wherever it lies, the world stands frozen: stone will not yield to the pickaxe, plants do not respond to the touch, things slip from your grasp. Only civilization can stand against it. The domes of settlements push the Fog back and bring the world back to life.
Where the Fog lies
The Fog covers everything outside settlement domes.
The exception is story locations to which at least one settlement has activated a translocator. Such a location is free of Fog for all players. See the article “Translocators to story locations” for details.
The edge of the Fog is not fixed. If a settlement’s dome shrinks, the Fog takes over the space it leaves behind. Buildings that end up under the Fog are not destroyed.
The Fog border
The Fog border is shown on the map. In the world it is easy to notice: visibility drops gradually but quickly, and a message appears in chat.
What you can’t do in the Fog
- Break, mine or place blocks.
- See block information.
- Place map markers on Fog territory, no matter where you are standing.
- Interact with plants.
- Use crafting stations.
- Open chests and other containers.
- Pick up items from the ground.
What you can do in the Fog
- Fight.
- Throw stones.
- Trade with traders who happen to be in the Fog. Interaction with them works as usual.
- Loot slain mobs and animals.
- Recover your own inventory after death. Your death point is marked on the map, even in the Fog.
Dangers of the Fog
Visibility. You can barely see anything in the Fog, and your vision is distorted.
Temporal stability. In the Fog it drains constantly: a full reserve lasts about 45 minutes. When it runs out, the usual consequences follow, just as anywhere else in the game. The usual ways of keeping your stability up still work in the Fog.
Creatures. The Fog is home to ordinary mobs and animals. The border doesn’t stop them: they freely wander under the dome and back out again.
If you get stuck
You can neither place nor break blocks in the Fog, so if you fall into a crevice there may be no way out. For such cases there is the Unstuck feature. See the article “Unstuck” for details.
Calm
When rift activity becomes calm, the Fog draws back around every dome by one more dome radius. The Fog-free area temporarily becomes twice as wide.
In this temporarily cleared band:
- visibility is normal, with no distortions;
- temporal stability does not drain;
- block information is visible;
- prospecting works;
- you can place map markers, and they remain after the Fog returns;
- you can found a new settlement.
Everything else is blocked, just as in the Fog.
You’ll know when a calm period starts and ends from the usual signs of rift activity and from a message in chat. When the calm ends, the Fog returns, and anyone still in the band finds themselves back in the Fog with all its effects.