Perpetuum

The playing environment in Perpetuum consists of several islands, and have either alpha, beta or gamma status. Islands are connected by a teleport network.

Alpha islands are relative safe; player vs player (PvP) can not be initiated unless players activate their PvP flags, and NPC's are (with some rare exceptions) of relative low difficulty and/or value. Beta islands offer more of rarer resources, more challenges and higher rewards, but players can always attack each other. Additionally, beta island offer corporation-owned outposts, to be conquered from other corporations in what is known as an intrusion. This system was later improved, with a more organic mechanic, where ownership of an outpost must be reinforced by completing small objectives randomly set every 8–16 hours, ensuring the owner has a convincing foothold in the area.

All islands originally belonged to one of the three alien factions, and feature faction-specific textures and architecture.

Unlike most other massively multiplayer online games, player characters in Perpetuum advance continuously over time by the accumulation of extension points (EP), a passive process that occurs in real world time so that the advancement process continues even if the player is not logged in.[14] One EP is assigned every minute to a player's account's EP pool, from which the player can install abilities, or extensions, to any of up to 3 characters.

Any extension can be installed, depending on their prerequisites, but their rank (1 to 9) and attributes determine the cost for increasing levels. Although older players seem to have the advantage (having acquired more EP), younger players can install a wide assortment of extensions straight away, while older players will pay an increasingly larger amount of EP for smaller nominal advantages. Additionally, if a new player is willing to specialize, they can catch up quickly.

The in-game economy in Perpetuum is an open economy that is largely player-driven. Non-player character (NPC) merchants sell low level modules and ammo. The players themselves gather the necessary raw materials to manufacture a large portion of all of the robots, modules and ammunition in the game. NPC robots can be looted for items, kernels (to be sold or used for research, providing base knowledge to build items) and materials. The in-game currency is called NIC, an abbreviation for Nian Credit (the events of the game take place on the planet Nia).

The amount of money or materials in the universe is not fixed and, as such, the economy operates under supply and demand. The game provides support for the trading of in-game resources, including graphs of item price history. Some players operate primarily as traders, buying, selling and transporting goods to earn profits. Others operate primarily as producers, purchasing components or raw materials and transforming them, sometimes on massive scales, into useful items such as modules, robots, ammunition, or various technologies wanted by players. Others still operate as miners, collecting and sometimes processing the raw materials used in manufacturing to sell on to others in bulk.

Robots in Perpetuum are organized into four general classes: Light robots, assault robots, mechs and heavy mechs. With the 3 alien factions, the game follows a rock-paper-scissors scheme, where each faction is weak to one faction, but strong to the other. Additionally, there is a fourth industrial faction, but they feature no significant offensive capabilities.

Each robot has a different set of characteristics and can be fitted with different combinations of modules subject to their fitting requirements. Robots have a wide variety of characteristics, including (but not limited to) reactor size, CPU (robot's computer processing power), accumulator size and accumulator recharge rate (functionally, a battery for activating high powered systems), armor, maximum velocity, locking range, time and maximum number of lockable targets. Robot systems also receive bonuses to performance depending on the level of various appropriate extensions that have been activated by the robot's pilot. These bonuses usually correspond closely to the particular role that the robot has been designed for, and thus vary as widely as the roles of the robots.

One of the most important characteristics of a robot is the slots it has available for fitting modules. Each robot has a number of slots available, ranging from a handful to ten or more. Slots and modules come in three variants: head, legs, and chassis slots, with head modules fitting in a corresponding head slot and so on. Generally speaking, head slots can be considered electronics (such as scanners or sensor amplifiers), legs slots for engineering and chassis slots are for offensive and industrial modules.