Expanded the desert and added roaming automatons
Survival grew into a 430 by 400 tile wasteland where enemy packs move through the world instead of waiting at fixed encounter points.
The Survival map expanded to 430 by 400 tiles, large enough for travel, harvesting, camps, vehicles, and contact to occupy different parts of the same session.
Automatons now roam that space in packs. They can cross the player's route, create an unexpected tactical contact, and continue to exist outside a single scripted arena.
“The desert became a world when contact could find the player between destinations.”
The larger map forced changes to encounter capacity, pathfinding, saving, and the minimap. The world has to remain understandable even when most of it is beyond the current camera.
This is the point where Survival stopped feeling like a test field and started behaving like a place a campaign could inhabit.