Time System
Time is Dredge's master resource: sailing, fishing, and dredging all advance the clock. Since night brings fog, panic, and monsters, every action carries an implicit second cost — the entire game becomes continuous risk budgeting ("one more catch" vs. "can I make it home").
Chosen over fuel
The prototype had a fuel mechanic, and the team killed it after testing every variant:
- Manual refuel button at docks → a meaningless cheap transaction, but forgetting it felt terrible.
- Automatic refuel → the mechanic is invisible until you run dry mid-ocean.
- Running dry → they wouldn't kill the player for it, so the penalty became "move very slowly," which was pure tedium.
None of it produced the feeling they wanted — the excitement of being caught out after dark — so time replaced fuel as the resource. Notably, players still request a fuel mechanic; the team's answer is that they tried it and it wasn't fun (see Dredge - Cut Features & Playtesting).
Design principle
Pick the resource whose depletion state is interesting. Fuel depletion = slow limp home. Time depletion = night, horror, the game's best content. The failure state of the resource should be a feature, not a chore.
Enforced in the physics
The commitment ran deep enough to shape the water simulation. The team explicitly decided waves must never move the boat, because the player's position in the world should be purely the result of their time-spending choices — no free drift, no unpredictable displacement. An early build where waves pulled the boat like driftwood was cut for exactly this reason. Wave height is even painted to zero at island edges so the sea can't beach you.
Max boat speed was treated as a design constant: it determined how far apart islands and points of interest could be placed (Dredge - Regional Design).
Interactions
- Freshness decay (one condition level per 12 in-game hours) converts time into money pressure — see Dredge - Economy & Upgrades.
- Night gives a flat +3% aberration chance and unlocks night-only species, making darkness a reward zone, not just a punishment zone. This is the tension engine: the best loot and the worst danger share an address.
- Longer journeys to far zones consume more daylight, which is how map geography translates into risk.