My own version of the Conan Exiles dev kit. The kit ships a complete "vanilla game", and an actual game is a mod on top of it: it inherits the kit's content, overrides what it wants and never forks a piece. It started on September 29, 2026 and is built by Claude Code agents, with me setting the direction, reviewing the work and making the design calls.
The pieces
| World | kit_time (the world clock), kit_sky (a physically based sun and sky), kit_ocean (FFT waves), kit_boat (a sailing yacht) |
| Survival | kit_survival (temperature, wetness, rest, spoilage), kit_harvest, kit_wildlife |
| Items | kit_items, kit_inventory (slot or weight limits), kit_crafting (timed queues, by hand or at stations), kit_loot |
| Building | kit_building: a build hammer, build sets, snapping, doors |
| Combat | kit_combat (six weapon classes, shields, lock-on, knockdown), kit_archery, kit_progression |
| Plumbing | kit_net, kit_assets (content packs), kit_ui (a themeable design system), kit_admin, kit_hotbar, kit_character (one skeleton, a shared cast, grips for held items) |
The rules that make it work
- One code path for every mode. Single player is a server with one player. Clients only send requests; the server checks and applies them, and the results replicate back. Every piece's tests run headless in all three modes.
- Content is data. Each piece ships its content as a JSON pack, the way Hytale does it: a game says
base = "foundation"and overrides any stat. - UI never hard-codes a color or font. Screens are built from
kit_uielements and painted by the game's theme, so a game can restyle or replace any screen. - Decisions are written down. More than a hundred numbered decisions, with dates and reasons, so the reasoning behind every choice is preserved.
- Systems are chosen by research. Inventory, combat, survival and progression were each specified from a researched questionnaire about what players praise and hate in Conan, Enshrouded and ARK. They were prioritized with MoSCoW, then built.
Combat
Melee plays the way Conan Exiles and the soulslikes do. There are six weapon classes: dagger, sword, spear, axe, club and a two-handed maul. Each reads as its weapon. The dagger is the fastest and shortest, the spear is long and narrow, and the maul lands late, with a heavy blow that can knock a player down. A shield goes in the other hand beside a one-handed weapon, with its own block, parry window and stamina cost.
- Impacts are measured off the animation, at the frame where the striking hand moves fastest, so the hit lands when the swing looks like it should.
- Lock-on frames the target over the shoulder and turns movement into strafing. Big animals have several lock points on their bones.
- Animals fight with tells. A wolf winds up, lunges and backs off to its lunge distance. Its bite lands only on what's still in reach and in front, so stepping back or rolling beats it.
- A combat critic agent reviews the classes for balance, so no class is strictly better than another.
Characters and held items
Every body shares one skeleton, so every animation plays on every body. The default pair is CC0.
- The hand closes round what it holds. Finger poses are read from clips made holding something, and each prop is seated on the ring the curled fingers make, measured live, so it fits every hand. The arm carries the item within the range a real elbow, forearm and wrist can turn.
- Props are modelled by script. A stone-age set (axes, picks, a club, a maul, a flint knife, a spear, a shield, a bow, a torch) is built in Blender at real size and baked to one material each.
- New clips are derived from old ones. A small tool cuts or re-times a clip, takes body parts from other clips and turns bones by timed offsets. A woodcutter's chop becomes an axe's light and heavy attacks.
- A cast studio shows any body with any item in either hand, playing any clip, grouped by which piece plays it and what sets it off.
Creatures
The creature skill builds game-ready animals unattended. It models each one in code, has an independent judge compare it to reference photos until it passes, then rigs and animates it (idle, walk, trot, run, attack, hit, death) with gaits based on real animal locomotion. Nothing visual counts as done until it has been reviewed in the game's own renderer.
The death is a directed rag doll. Physics does the collapse, so it falls where it stands; once it's mostly down, it's steered into a natural resting pose: on its side, head on its cheek, the lower paws on the ground and the upper legs resting on them, with nothing sinking into the ground.
The builders grow with each animal. The bison added hooves, horns, a head fitted to a real skull scan (CC BY 4.0, credited) and woolly coats, and every later creature gets those for free. Six animals are in the kit: deer, doe, elk, hare, wolf and bison.
188 commits since September 29, 2026.