Can I leave the island here and go elsewhere?
You’re not supposed to go outside the confirmed safe area. The confirmed safe area, the official ‘Haven Zero’ territory, includes:
- The developed and undeveloped parts of Key West.
- Stock Island, to the immediate east, which has two footbridges to it. This is often assumed to also be part of Key West, and is included in City of Key West in other timelines, but is technically a different island.
- Dredgers Key, Fleming Key and Sunset Key, which can be reached by boats you can rent at the dock.
- Lower Harbor Key, which is a place for criminals will not live responsibly with others and have been ‘exiled’ for their behavior. You are not allowed to visit it except to visit prisoners, but it is still part of Haven Zero.
Project Zero doesn’t have a way to stop you from going to another location in Timeline Zero, not even via time machine. That may sound odd because Project Zero does require time machines stop you from being able to visit a previous time in Timeline Zero, and they could have required similar restrictions for location, which would have made access much harder, especially since there are no fast boats here.
But after careful consideration, Project Zero decided that could backfire. It seemed obvious people would start hacking time machines to travel around the planet, and it seemed optimistic to assume that they’d all choose to leave the temporal restriction in place. Project Zero decided the safest course of action was to give people no incentive to disable any restrictions, or even build unregulated one that might have no restrictions at all. This worked, the TEAs have never found a time machine that had it disabled or not included.
Which means time machines will allow you to select somewhere else on Haven. Sometimes not by default, but it’s easy enough to enable in the settings.
But it’s still technically illegal, and there are monitored locations where you will be caught if you show up, the closest and most obvious is the Isolation Zone on Lower Harbor Keys. If you go there, it’s assumed you’re trying to break people out.
There are also at least six admitted-to facilities constructed elsewhere on the planet by MTPs, and possibly more. Their locations and purpose are not listed. If you stumble across one of them, and they see you, they will likely arrest you. They are even authorized to use force, although that has no happened yet.
Beyond those locations, there is no way to enforce restrictions. The planet is too big, you have time travel that can just as easily move you physically, and trying to monitor the thing would be impossible.
Now that we’ve explained why you can and we can’t stop you, let’s explain why you shouldn’t:
Leaving is extremely dangerous.
You are not taking a camping trip into the supposedly ‘untouched wilderness’ on a world that was tamed by people. If you want that, Haven Zero has small islands to camp on, you can get there by boat. If you leave the safe zone, you are taking an uncharted trip into a world you do not understand, and having maps of the physical geography does not make you safe.
Dire wolfs roam North America. It seems the theories were right, and the arrival of humans to North America did contribute to their extinction, and that didn’t happen here. There may also be sabertooth tigers, they have been sighted but are unconfirmed.
There are no monitored radio frequencies for distress calls, so we won’t even know you’re out there. If you do manage to signal us, we can travel anywhere on the planet by time traveling, but we have no way to locate you. There is no satellite positioning or no real way to know exactly where you are. If we have to search, there is exactly one solar-powered helicopter on this entire planet, and it has limited range and is not particular fast, and is mostly for moving people quickly between the safe zone islands.
This is not humanity’s planet. Do not treat is as humanity’s planet. You will likely die.
That’s one of the reasons Key West was selected for the Haven Zero location. It was too small for most predators who could attack humans, and Project Zero just had make those six square miles safe. Granted, the full extent of the dangers was not known at the time, and this was considered slightly paranoid, but it has turned out to be a very good decision.
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