# Expeditions

How materials, recipes, and trouble enter the game. AFK timer-resolved, no real-time gameplay.

## Mechanic

- Pick a destination (zone).
- Pick a team (1 minion solo, or up to N for team expeditions).
- Set off. Time passes (minutes to hours depending on distance + risk).
- They come back with a report — loot, events, possibly injuries or worse.

## Risk tiers

- **Safe** — predictable, modest rewards, low variance, no real risk.
- **Standard** — some variance, decent rewards, occasional minor injuries.
- **Dangerous** — high variance, premium rewards, real injury and (rare) death risk.

Riskier missions need better gear, better team comp, and Soldiers as escort. Soft-gating: you *can* send an underprepared team into the Mire, but they'll come back hurt or not at all.

## Team composition

- **Soldiers** required for hostile zones, otherwise penalty.
- **Beastmasters** can pacify creature zones, reduce hazard rolls.
- **Scholars** boost recipe-find rate.
- **Gatherers** boost yield by biome subspec.
- **Merchants** boost found-coin and trade-route bonuses.

Team comp is its own puzzle separate from gear loadout.

## Resolution: procedural event log

No LLM, no runtime AI. Templated text snippets with slot fills:
```
[hazard, biome=Mire, severity=medium]
"{minion} stumbled into a {creature} nest. {teammate} pulled them out, but {item} was lost in the muck."
```

Selected by zone + risk tier + team composition + trait rolls. Templates have conditional branches (different snippet if a Brave minion is present, etc.). Authoring the template pool is real work but standard work.

## Drops

See [14-materials.md](14-materials.md) for the materials taxonomy.

- **Raw materials** (primary) — biome-appropriate; ore, wood, botanicals, bone, hide, etc.
- **Refined / components** (occasional) — when expeditions encounter abandoned camps, ruins, or merchants
- **Recipes** (occasional) — sometimes specific to the zone's flavor
- **Trophies & curiosities** (rare) — relics, artifacts, named weapons, lore items
- **Trait shifts** (sometimes) — minions return changed by what they saw
- **Relationship changes** (always-ish) — who saved whom, who was reckless
- **NPC encounters** (very rare) — recruitable adventurers met on the road

## Wounds vs. death

Working position: **wounded by default**, true death only on catastrophic failure in the highest-tier zones.
- Wounded → infirmary for X hours, can't expedition during that time.
- Wounded with Brave trait → shorter recovery, gains scar (cosmetic + flavor).
- Death → permanent loss, with a memorial entry in the Library.

Reasoning: losing a leveled-up portrait you've grown attached to is brutal. Permadeath everywhere makes players resent the game. Permadeath as the *worst possible outcome of the worst possible expedition* makes it dramatic.

## Open questions

- How granular is the destination picker? Region → zone → encounter, or just region → zone?
- Do players watch a real-time progress bar, or does the report just appear on completion?
- Should expeditions chain (a successful expedition opens a follow-up that's only available for 24h)?