History VideoGame / SunlessSkies

* OrganizedCrimeSidequest: As with the previous game, players can ignore their personal goals in favor of working as a smuggler, transporting contraband goods for shady clients all over the High Wilderness. Each of the three main regions has a smuggler port, each carrying one type of contraband that you can ferry to another region. Of course, in order to turn a profit, you'll need to outfit your [[CoolTrain locomotive]] with the necessary hidden compartments, most of which can only be bought from the smugglers in Albion... and before they'll do business with you, you'll need to help the Red Honey farmers in [[spoiler: Titania]] find a way to transport their goods without getting caught by the authorities. These sidequests are more profitable than normal prospects, but they also take longer because you're always required to sneak the items through a relay to another region. You can also only have two at a time, and likely won't be able to do more than one at a time without carrying more contraband than your hidden compartments can conceal.

* UnstableEquilibrium: The way Terror works, every time the bar is filled raises your Nightmares by one level. At 4, you instantly lose, and the higher it is the harder it is to keep your terror low thanks to random events besieging you; at high Condition levels your captain is losing their mind and the hallucinations and actual weird shit attracted to maddened minds visiting the locomotive do ''not'' help. By then, it's best to try and drop at Magdalene's even if the price is exorbitant.

* AbnormalAmmo:

** The design of the areas of the High Wilderness is considerably more forgiving than that of the Unterzee. The primary port for the area is always roughly centrally located, making it easy to find and get to, has an infinite-storage item bank that is linked to all other central ports and contains a market that will buy everything at a decent price.

* AppealToObscurity: To complete the Song of the Sky Ambition you need to complete significant accomplishments in-game to have something to write about. You do get one for free, though- you can claim to have escaped Piranesi because no one in London knows enough about it to prove the contrary.

** The Moloch-class luxury liner is the StarshipLuxurious of the game. It is unrivalled in crew space, has the highest base cargo space, has two auxiliary slots, and has offensive and defensive stats similar to the game's other top-tier locomotives. It can be bought in the Reach before ever traveling through a relay. Unfortunately, at the price of 20,000 Sovereigns, by the time you can afford to trade up, you can likely make it to Eleutheria and obtain the Altani-class Outrider, which is almost as good in every way (and has a higher potential cargo space) at half the cost.

** Most of the top-tier gear requires similarly top-tier stats to use it, and as a result, you're likely going to be using the lower-tier gear instead. You might not have the ''best'' engine, or the ''most powerful'' gun, but you won't need to worry about grinding out your stats to use those and can focus on other matters instead.

* CombatTentacles: The Guests are eldritch monsters that nest inside train engines. At first glance they look like normal trains but when attacked they burst out of the hull and attack.

* DeadAllAlong: [[spoiler:According to the Royal Astronomer, Albion's sun had already been dead for centuries by the time London breached the Avid Horizon.]]

* DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu: London has defeated a sun and replaced it with their own Clockwork Sun. [[spoiler:Actually no, they didn't; it's never left clear if Unclear Bombs would do anything, and actually managing to kill a sun requires a lot more than a false-star... [[DoubleSubversion which you end up finding]] in an ending to the Truth Ambition, not only killing a sun but ''the ruler of the dead.'']]

* OrganizedCrimeSidequest: As with the previous game, players can ignore their personal goals in favor of working as a smuggler, transporting contraband goods for shady clients all over the High Wilderness. Of course, in order to turn a profit, you'll need to outfit your [[CoolTrain locomotive]] with the necessary hidden compartments, most of which can only be bought from the smugglers in Albion... and before they'll do business with you, you'll need to help the Red Honey farmers in [[spoiler: Titania]] find a way to transport their goods without getting caught by the authorities. These sidequests are more profitable than normal prospects, but they also take longer because you're always required to sneak the items through a relay to another region. You can also only have two at a time, and likely won't be able to do more than one at a time without carrying more contraband than your hidden compartments can conceal.
* {{Overdrive}}: Similar to the previous game, Full Steam mode allows the player to go 150% of their normal speed at the cost of burning additional fuel. Unlike the previous game, it's slightly harder to activate so you don't trigger it by mistake, and it's only available on engine modules at blue rarity and above.

* BattleTrophy: You can take the nameplates off locomotives you destroy if they are of certain affiliations, in order to prove that you defeated them to those that might want them dead and thus reap a bounty.

* NoPointsForNeutrality: {{Inverted|Trope}}. In the Reach, PlayingBothSides and killing both Tacketies and Stovepipes keeps you in both sides' good graces and allows you to exploit the conflict for personal gain.

** If you get permission from the Sun's Daughter to take the Industrialist's Lost Love outside of the Blue Kingdom, she gives the caveat that you have to bring her back within a year and a day or suffer the consequences. The couple have nine months together before you can pick her up, so you have a three-month period to get her back to the Blue Kingdom in time.

* PortalNetwork: The four main regions are connected by Singh-Jenkins Transit Relays, which use the Red Science to slingshot locomotives across vast interstellar distances.

* SacredHospitality: To depart The Blue Kingdom, a captain is requred to repay their hosts' hospitality for any petrichor they and their crew have consumed. The Inhabitor will explain this, attributing your ignorance of the custom to being from skies where "the laws of hospitality have eroded beyond recognition". This can come off as a bit {{hypocrit|e}}ical, considering they already charge you to buy the petrichor to start with -- twice the sticker price of mortal supplies, in fact. But it's entirely in character for the Blue Kingdom and its outright hostile bureaucracy.

* SanityMeter: The Terror mechanic from ''VideoGame/SunlessSea'' returns, though tweaked. Terror still rises and falls as always (with rather more options for reducing it now), but when the meter hits 100%, something bad ''will'' happen to you and your crew. It won't necessarily ''kill'' you, but it won't be good (and it ''can'' kill you, so don't think you're safe). Then you will get +1 Nightmare, and your Terror resets to 0%. Lest you think this is a reprieve, as you get higher Nightmares, creepier (and deadlier) things will happen randomly to you and your crew, generally making Terror rise ''faster'', and Nightmares are difficult to get rid of[[note]]You can only lower your Nightmare quality at Magdalene's in The Reach, and while the first treatment per Captain is free, each subsequent treatment requires more and more resources[[/note]]. If you're in Albion or Eleutheria, you ''can't'' treat Nightmares at all. You can "safely" get three Nightmares, but if you already have three Nightmares and you let your Terror reach 100% again, [[NonStandardGameOver your crew will give in to madness]]. [[SanitySlippage And you won't be any better off.]] You're also never entirely safe: there are random events that, unless you have the right resources, will force you to get a Nightmare straight up (and if that puts you at 4 Nightmares, it ''will'' kill you).

* SecretCompartment: As part of the smuggling sidequests, it's recommended to outfit your ship with hidden compartments to hide contraband. Certain modules come with a "Hidden Compartments" stat that increases this value between 1 and 3. This doesn't add to your total cargo space, but instead indicates how many contraband items you can hide and pass through customs undetected. If you exceed this value, it increases the difficulty of the Veils check needed to get past custom.

* NonStandardGameOver
** Three ways at Death's Door in the Blue Kingdom: [[spoiler:You can try to see beyond Death's Door and be caught. You can [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence pledge your service to the Blue Kingdom's judgement]]. Or you can [[RageAgainsttheHeavens mount a short-lived attack against the atrocity that is the afterlife given to all spirits who arrive here]].]]

* OrganizedCrimeSidequest: As with the previous game, players can ignore their personal goals in favor of working as a smuggler, transporting contraband goods for shady clients all over the High Wilderness. Of course, in order to turn a profit, you'll need to outfit your [[CoolTrain locomotive]] with the necessary hidden compartments, most of which can only be bought from the smugglers in Albion... and before they'll do business with you, you'll need to help the Red Honey farmers in [[spoiler: Titania]] find a way to transport their goods without getting caught by the authorities.

** The Moloch-class luxury liner is the StarshipLuxurious of the game. It is unrivalled in crew space and cargo space, has two auxiliary slots, and has offensive and defensive stats similar to the game's other top-tier locomotives. It can be bought in the Reach before ever traveling through a relay. Unfortunately, at the price of 20,000 Sovereigns, by the time you can afford to trade up, you can likely make it to Eleutheria and obtain the Altani-class Outrider, which is almost as good in every way (and has a higher potential cargo space) at half the cost.
** The Uninvited, a weapon that fires EldritchAbomination parasites as AbnormalAmmo. It's the first decent large mount weapon you can equip, has low stat requirements (+25 Hearts), and can be obtained in the Reach if you can fight enough Guests to make it. That said, it's a shotgun-type weapon with unpredictable spread and random bullet patterns, making it difficult to use consistently, especially against smaller and speedier opponents.

* ColorCodedItemTiers: There are, broadly, four tiers of modules, with each requiring higher stat requirements to equip.

Cause our Captain is a... splendid boss.

* GlassCannon: The London Monitor is a gigantic sniper rifle with locomotive engines; its firing range, projectile speed, and accuracy are beyond anything you can use, and trying to snipe back is like shooting at a stick blowing in the wind, but it has trouble turning or evading from the sides due to its thin frame and can be taken out easily by a flanking backstab with about three high-powered shotgun hits. The cargo they have is sparse yet expensive. In response, the Tacketies create...
** MightyGlacier: The Tackety Liberator, the anti-Monitor. They look like bloated Scouts; they have overly-reinforced plating, and explosive flamethrowers on the sides for anyone who tries to flank them with shotguns. Their main downside, unfortunately, is their inability to fight or chase down said London Monitors, leaving them easy prey for a captain with anything other than shotguns. Also, they explode when they're destroyed and carry loads of supplies.

* IncomprehensibleEntranceExam: {{Subverted|Trope}} with the Royal Horology Exam, whose questions seem complicated but are actually quite straightforward once one understands the single immutable axiom on which all of Albion's conclusions about time are based.[[note]]Specifically, that London's clock is the one and only time that exists anywhere and is always correct, no matter what sort of [[TimeCrash time-fuckery]] is going on elsewhere.[[/note]] Whether the player answers the first two questions right or wrong, the Chief Horologist will skip the remainig 248 and pass/fail them right then and there.

* MightyGlacier: Any sort of Dreadnought that London sends. They're fairly slow to both move and turn, and they have no lateral jets so they can't really do a snap dodge and thus anything aimed at them will hit them. But they all have at least one heavy repeater with an automated turret to complement it, as well as heavy armor that'll make them harder to kill than most other enemies even under heavy fire.

* MurderByCremation: [[spoiler:Attempted by the crew of the ''Boatman'' onto the newly revived dead bodies they were ferrying to their final resting place, to the understandable ire of the latters. Though to their credit, from their point of view, it looked like a NightOfTheLivingMooks and they fully freaked out as a result, not knowing the dead were in fact reunited with their minds and were as harmless as their living selves.]]

** Of the Weird Wind sort, but one often finds some harsh winds blowing through the High Wilderness that have strange effects on your vessel and its passengers/cargo. Most common are the Peacock Wind of the reach, that'll cause vegetables aboard to sprout and grow with edible, but unnerving nodules, and the Candlewind that'll rot away your supplies and starve all aboard, not to mention occasionally has a reverse push on your vessel than it'd seem (as in, going against the wind is ''faster''). Both, naturally, cause your Terror to rise.

* WishingWell: Old Tom's Well is an extraordinarily unusual example. Found near the Leadbeater and Stainrod Nature Reserve in the Reach, it is said that a prospector had made a wish into it and soon after discovered countless veins of hours on the Mother of Mountains and became excessively wealthy. Since then, people from all over the Reach come to the well in order to have a wish granted. How is that unusual? [[spoiler:Old Tom's Well is a black hole, and the small settlements built above it are cold as ice and ravaged by strong winds. Some deluded wishers still swear they saw gold at the bottom of it, though.]]
** [[spoiler:It ''does'' grant exorbitant wishes, but at an unacceptable cost; those that are granted riches will have to come back shortly to be transformed into inanimate objects and forced to worship the well for all eternity. Or lure in suckers every year to worship for them.]]

** You can let the entity inside [[spoiler:the Regent's Grave]] borrow your body for a year and a day so it can do maintenance work on the Traitor's Woods.
** If you get permission from the Suns Daughter to take the Industrialists Lost Love outside of the Blue Kingdom she gives the caveat that you have to bring her back within a year and a day or suffer the consequences

* TheDreadedDreadnought: The Enduring Dreadnoughts, big blue locomotives maneuvered exclusively by Her Enduring Majesty's most loyal officers. While not necessarily amongst the strongest enemy locomotives roaming the High Wilderness, the same cannot be said about the glowing Glorious Dreadnoughts and the glass-encrusted Deranged Dreadnoughts. While the Glorious ones do not attack you if you are on good terms with the London loyalists, the Deranged ones, which are found flying near the [[MechanicalAbomination Clockwork Sun]], shoot you on sight regardless of your affiliation.

* TheEmpire: The British Empire is expanding once more, this time across the stars.

* GuideDangIt: The quest to find the Chamberlain at the Masoleum will stall when you search the catacombs, with the game informing you that "bright eyes and a cold hand around your heart" are needed to progress. What does this translate to? [[spoiler:50+ Terror and two Visions of the Heavens.]] The game gives no hints as to the actual requirements needed here (the option to progress isn't even visible), and unless you look it up, you'll probably only figure it out by accident.

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: There are a few difficulty tweaks the player can do to make the experience a bit easier. Those being bullet speed, aim assist, and the rate at which resources deplete. The game allows you to change such options too whenever you start a new character in the lineage.

* AdamSmithHatesYourGuts: [[InvertedTrope Inverted]] by the trading system: by taking advantage of Bargains (opportunities to buy certain goods for significantly lowered prices in certain ports) and Prospects (quests which allow you to sell requested goods for much higher prices than normal), you can sell goods for up to five times what you paid for them. The random nature of these means it's entirely possible to acquire a Bargain for goods you need for a Prospect in the same town, meaning you can buy cheap goods and sell them at an inflated price without even leaving the city.

* ReadingsAreOfTheScale: The various engine modules all use an image of a pressure gauge, and with each upgrade, the pressure level on the gauge increases. When you obtain the Devourer of Distance, a special engine acquired through a story event after you've acquired the best standard engine, its version of the gauge has completely passed the red line and [[IncendiaryExponent is on fire]].

** In the Forge of Souls you can find The Custodian of the Forge, the first person to pass through the Avid Horizon. Apparently he had a zee-captain companion before the Clerk of the Sevens (Implied to be the [[VideoGame/FallenLondon Northbound Parliamentarian]]) took over their job out of sympathy. All signs point to him being the Merchant Venturer, who you can help breach the Horizon in VideoGame/SunlessSea.

* NotSoAboveItAll: [[spoiler: The Judgements. Despite giving the appearance that they are in fact above it all, the Judgements are at war against one another, proving that they are just as capable of pettiness, disunity and strife as mortals. One can infer that this is greatly embarrassing for them since they will hunt down those who discover this truth.]]

* EatTheDog: Starvation can force you to turn to your engine's mascot for nutrition, including the [[BigFriendlyDog Inadvisably Big Dog]].
--> "A sad, silent meal. How quiet the engine is, now. How empty."

** The Uninvited, a weapon that fires EldritchAbomination parasites as AbnormalAmmo but whose unpredictable spread and random bullet patterns make it difficult to use, especially against smaller and speedier opponents.

** The Medea-class destroyer, one of two endgame ships (alongside the Moloch-class luxury liner). Costing 20,000 pounds to purchase, the Medea is specced entirely for combat, able to mount two large-size weapons and three shields, and can have over 200 hull. Unfortunately it is massive, its side-mounted vents are underpowered, and it has the exact same heat gauge as the other locomotives and thus tends to overheat if you try mounting two large weapons in it (who often have 50+ heat per shot). On top of this it has ''pathetic'' cargo space for its size, low crew space and only a single auxillary slot, which makes it lousy for hauling cargo and long-range exploration. It can also only be purchased in Pan, which is a pain to reach in the first place.
** The Moloch-class luxury liner is the StarshipLuxurious of the game, unrivalled in crew space and with decent cargo-hauling or exploring ability plus decent offensive and defensive stats... Unfortunately, for a price of 20,000 it isn't all that much better than the Altani-class outrider, which outside of being only found in the Eagle's Empyrian is almost entirely as good in every way (and has a higher potential cargo space) at half the cost.

-->[[spoiler:One is timeless. One's dominion is history itself. Chronology bows before one. One is Eternity's Mistress.]]

-->''Time offers no surety against Death.''

* BerserkButton: Eleutheria presents you with a MortonsFork of these. Dousers are fanatically devoted to the Liberation of Night and will try to kill you if you so much as light your front lamp anywhere near them, and Grievers are trying to sleep and will try to put any lights out nearby even if it means taking the entire locomotive out along the way. Empyrean Outriders, of the Eagle's Empyrean, are trying to keep the dark at bay and will quickly get pissed off if you ''don't'' have your lamps on where they can see you.

** The Altani-class Outrider engine is one of the most practical engines in the game. While ''getting it'' requires braving the very dangerous region of Eleutheria and it costs as much as the more accessible Agravain-class Juggernaut, it's less expensive than the Moloch Luxury Liner or the Medea-class Destroyer and sits perfectly between the two: it has the same armament as the Juggernaut and the Liner, only slightly less Hull (70 as opposed to 90), the second-best hold space in the game (a mere two less than the Liner), and its three Auxiliary slots (better than any other engine) allow it to be customized for pretty much any task. While it lacks the sheer firepower of the Destroyer and isn't quite as tough as any of its peers can get, it can do pretty much everything whereas the others have trouble filling certain roles. It's also one of the most agile engines in the game.

* BoringButPractical: Most of the top-tier gear requires similarly top-tier stats to use it, and as a result, you're likely going to be using the lower-tier gear instead. You might not have the ''best'' engine, or the ''most powerful'' gun, but you won't need to worry about grinding out your stats to use those and can focus on other matters instead.
** The Empyrean Outrider engine is one of the most practical engines in the game. While ''getting it'' requires braving the very dangerous region of Eleutheria, and it's not cheap, it's less expensive that the Moloch Luxury Liner or the Medea-class Destroyer and sits perfectly between the two: it can mount one light and one heavy weapon[[note]]compared to the Destroyer's two heavy weapons and the Moloch's one light weapon[[/note]], has a good amount of cargo space[[note]]less than the Moloch, more than the Destroyer[[/note]], and can mount both armor and cargo space upgrades. Getting the Moloch or the Medea is impractical and forces you into a specific playstyle, while the Outrider continues to let you do everything. It's also one of the most agile engines in the game.

* BrickJoke: At the very beginning of the Parliament quest chain, you learn that a bill is being voted on by the [=MPs=] that defiantly renames "Victoria Sponge" to "The People's Cake"; at the end of the quest chain,[[spoiler:The Parliament somehow blackmailed Queen Victoria into letting the legislature function again... but she will NOT tolerate this talk of "People's Sponge" nonsense!]]