SEARCH REQUESTS

At game start, the map is completely unexplored and covered by a "fog of war" obscuring its features. New characters will be randomly dropped onto the island's shores; from there, to uncover tiles on the map and figure out more about where they are, search requests are required to document movement, attempt to uncover hidden materials and passages, discover or confront dangers, find old ruins and create new settlements, and potentially, solve puzzles related to the mystery of the island itself.

RULES AND GUIDELINES

Search requests are a required mechanic of this game. A search request for the current AC cycle must be submitted in order to pass AC without a strike.
Mistakes in search requests will never be penalized. Don't be afraid to eyeball a distance or make an approximate guess; if the math doesn't quite match up, or the path doesn't exist, I will offer alternate destinations and work with you in order to decide how the search request will resolve.
Search requests will rarely be immediately fatal. Unless your character is doing something intentionally reckless, I will do my best to offer paths of escape for any sudden dangers that arise.
You can be as precise or as vague as you want. If you want to exactly plot out the squares your character will travel through and search every IC day, that is totally fine. It's also fine to simply report that your character is staying in one place all month, or to give a starting point and a desired destination, with a general request to search a wide area. Just note that, the more vague you are in your request, the more I will extrapolate to fill in the blanks.
Retroactive/backdated search requests are allowed. They just can't be used for the current month's AC if they fall outside of the current month's AC period, or overwrite a previously submitted search request. Forward-dated search requests are also allowed as long as they fall within the same IC day that the request was posted (for example, if you post a search request on IC Day 30 morning, you can make that search request last for the entirety of IC day 30, not just the morning of).
Thoroughly searching a square, rather than just traveling through it, halves movement through that square. So if you choose to search every square along a path, you'll only travel half as far as someone moving with purpose to a destination. Remember that simply traveling through a square will still fully reveal it.
IC Days are split into three 8-hour increments. Each of these corresponds to one OOC day. Morning is from 4AM -> 11:59AM, Day is from 12PM -> 7:59PM, and Night is 8PM -> 3:59AM.
Several examples of search requests are provided below to help illustrate how they work. If you still have questions, please ask them in the FAQ (or in your search request!).

MAP REFERENCE/TRAVEL CONDITIONS

TRAVEL CONDITIONS | IC DAYS 15 → 17

MORNING

DAY

NIGHT

BEACH

OCEAN*

JUNGLE

FOOTHILLS

MOUNTAINS

4 squares/hour
(32 total)
3 square visibility

4 squares/hour
(32 total)
5 square visibility

4 squares/hour
(32 total)
1 square visibility

2 squares/hour
(16 total)
3 square visibility

2 squares/hour
(16 total)
5 square visibility

2 squares/hour
(16 total)
1 square visibility

1 square/hour
(8 total)
0 square visibility

2 squares/hour
(16 total)
2 square visibility

2 squares/hour
(16 total)
3 square visibility

1 square/hour
(8 total)
1 square visibility

1 square/hour
(8 total)
5 square visibility

1 square/hour
(8 total)
7 square visibility

1 square/hour
(8 total)
3 square visibility

*The average human can only tread water for three hours

LEGEND

- Preexisting Structure

- Ocean

- Reef

- Deep Water

- River

- Natural Landmark

- Beach

- Jungle

- Mangroves

- Character-Made Landmark

- Foothills

- Mountain

Click on any of the map tiles for details.

III

VII

VIII

XII

XIII

XIV

XVI

SUBMISSIONS

# | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
All new characters will be given a toplevel to this post. To submit a search request, fill out the below form and copy/paste it as a response to your toplevel.

IC DATES: The IC dates the search request covers (I would also recommend putting this in the subject line to make it easier to keyword search later). You can use whole days, partial days, or a combination of either. To verify what IC days line up with real-world days and events, consult the Calendar.

STARTING SQUARE: The square your character is starting their search request on, format TILE.COLUMN.ROW. This should line up with your previous search request, or your starting location if newly arrived/revived.

ENDING SQUARE: The square your character is ending their search request on. If you're not sure where they'll end up (the area is unexplored/your character has a vague idea of where they want to go/you're not sure on the math/etc.), you can give a more rough answer here. Something like "they want to make it to Tile II," or "as close to II.AA.3 as possible" are perfectly valid answers.

DETAILS: The meat of your request. This is where you describe:

The path your character is taking,
The squares you want them to search,
Any special actions your character is taking during this period of time (or inaction), and
Any other special notes or questions you might have about this request.

Again, you can provide as much or as little information as you want; saying that your character is simply moving from point A to point B without searching anything is 100% acceptable.

NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Morning 016
Starting Square: IX.AA.27
Ending Square: IX.AA.27
Duration: 4 hours (there's a lot of panic happening in that period of time)
General Search Results:

tire tread scrap
scrap circuitboard
AA battery
large coconut crab (this is what greets her in the tide pool)

No signs of buildings, paths, roads, or people in her immediate surroundings, unfortunately; just the corner of a long beach leading into sparkling, coral-filled ocean.

IC DATES: Day 16 --> Night 16
STARTING SQUARE: IX.AA.27
ENDING SQUARE: ?
DETAILS:

Oh, ew. God, the tidepool smells so fucking weird. Ew. Ick. The coconut crab is kinda cool-looking, though. Maddy watches him for, like, maybe a minute or two, before she leaves him - or her, she's a feminist, so she believes it could be a girl coconut crab - to live his/her/their best coconut crab life.

Oh, and she's not taking anything she found because, like... it's all just gross random trash! No, thanks. An old tire tread? Eeeuw, yuck. Question, though! The tire tread - what kind of vehicle would it have come from? Based on thickness/material/size/pattern, does it seem like it came from a car/truck or something else? Or would she even be able to tell?

She'll venture to the edge of the water and peer down at the coral below. For a few minutes, she briefly forgets her misery and terror and panic, rendered breathless with awe by how beautiful the ocean is, sparkling clear water with colorful coral underneath. A few questions: how deep does the water look? Can she see all the way down? Can she see any animals/trash/anything else in the water below? She dips a bare toe in. What temperature is the water?

After studying what she can of the ocean under the surface of the water, Maddy will be moving north following the coast. Her working theory right now is that she's been drugged and kidnapped, somehow, and she briefly hesitates before grabbing the walkie. Maybe it belongs to one of the kidnappers, and listening to it will tell her what they're saying to each other?

Realizing she wasted four hours crying and panicking, and afraid the kidnappers might come back any moment, Maddy will move somewhat swiftly along the coast, heading North. She wants to get as far from her starting point as possible before nightfall.

When it gets dark, she'll try to find a place to hide, curl up, and cry for about twenty minutes, before finally turning on the walkie to see if she can hear anything that would tell her what's going on.

Edited 2023-07-09 01:54 (UTC)

Day 016 ➜ Night 016
Starting Square: IX.AA.27
Ending Square: X.P.29
Duration: 16 hours
General Search Results:

bottlecap
shot glass
mudskipper

The tire section looks very thick, like it came from an extremely large vehicle, with heavy-duty treads to match. The nearby water is already warm, even in late morning/early afternoon, and pretty shallow this close to shore; it doesn't look like it gets any deeper than around ten feet in the kilometer bordering the beach. Various colorful fish dart among the shoals of coral, along with one or two darker, larger shapes that might be sharks.

Maddy circles what ends up being a large peninsula jutting into the center of the reef, following it into a bay until she runs into an enemy river soon after entering tile X. She finds signs of habitation - a small campsite, abandoned for several days - in square X.F.23, plus another, more recent-looking one in square X.L.28 as she's forced to follow the banks of the wide, fast-moving river southeast. Her path eventually takes her several kilometers into deep jungle by the time the sun sets.

IC DATES: Night 16
STARTING SQUARE: X.P.29
ENDING SQUARE: X.P.29 (stationary)
DETAILS:

Great! She's very lost now!

Maddy will take the shot glass, which she will immediately smash to use one of the pieces of glass as a weapon just in case she needs to defend herself. She'll leave everything else. She will stop and search/pick through the older, obviously abandoned campsite as she passes it to see if there's anything she can take that might be useful, but she'll skip over the newer one — that one looks like someone might still be using it and she doesn't want to take anything from someone who needs it.

Maddy will stop moving for the night and try to find a tree to climb. She doesn't want to climb a tree, but she wants to sleep on the cold, probably damp ground even less.

Pros with this plan: she's pretty small + light, so it shouldn't be too hard to find a branch that can support her weight. Also, she's a cheerleader, so she does have some knowledge of how to jump/fall from a height without injuring herself if she slips while climbing.
Cons with this plan: it's getting dark so she can't see what she's doing; also, she doesn't actually know how to climb trees.

Either way, she'll try a few times to climb a tree but if she injures herself in the process or just fails to climb the tree successfully multiple times, she'll give up and just try to find an out of the way spot to hide and put leaves or whatever she can find between herself and (ew) the ground.

This is where she'll stop moving for the night. She'll also look around to see if there's anything that makes a better weapon than her smashed shot glass, but it's dark and it's the jungle so she probably won't see very well. She'll cry, listen to her walkie and then sleep for the rest of the night until morning.

In the morning, she'll reluctantly drink her Coke. She doesn't like sugary drinks, but she's getting desperately hungry + thirsty enough to need something.

Night 016
Starting Square: X.P.29
Ending Square: X.P.29
Duration: 8 hours
General Search Results:

two handfuls of stinging nettle
old fruit skin - looks like it used to be a banana

Maddy does find a decent tree to climb in within a couple of hours, and it doesn't break under her while she sleeps.

Edited (typo) 2023-07-15 21:50 (UTC)

Thank God.

IC DATES: Morning 17
STARTING SQUARE: X.P.29
ENDING SQUARE: X.U.29
DETAILS:

X.P.29 -> X.Q.29
X.Q.29 -> X.R.29
X.R.29 -> X.S.29
X.S.29 -> X.T.29
X.T.29 -> X.U.29

Maddy tries to stay close to the river, trying to find civilization or signs of people, but something spooks her and she ends up darting off-course, into the unexplored jungle. Once she realizes she's lost, though, she'll stop and try to figure out how to get herself back on track. Maybe it's a good idea to call for help now?

(OOC: I thiiiink I'm right about which side of the river she's on? If I'm wrong and this path doesn't work, though, let me know! I'd be happy to re-write.)

Morning 017
Starting Square: X.P.29
Ending Square: X.U.29
Duration: 8 hours
General Search Results:

bucket, heavily rusted
keychain bauble - cartoon head of a giraffe
strange mushroom - salmon-colored, wide and flat, growing on the roots of a tree
muzzle
novelty socks - ankle, yellow, has cartoon mouse faces on them
strange fruit - bright lavender, looks like a blueberry but the size of an apple

Taking the bucket, albeit while making a grossed-out face in the process. Maybe she can get the rust off somehow? Ugh, ew, though.

Taking the strange mushroom and the strange fruit, too. She's getting pretty hungry, so after some internal debate, she'll take a bite of the strange fruit. Hopefully nothing bad happens!

What's the terrain like? I'm assuming probably jungle but would like to be sure!

This is also where Maddy will stop to call for help, so she'll be stationary for at least the next hour or so.

The fruit's internal consistency is similar to a watermelon's, with a likewise mild, but sweet flavor to its vibrant purple flesh. It doesn't have any visible seeds.

Local terrain is extremely thick and healthy-looking jungle as far as the eye can see, yes (which is admittedly not very far).

Search Requests

SEARCH REQUESTS

RULES AND GUIDELINES

MAP REFERENCE/TRAVEL CONDITIONS

SUBMISSIONS

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