Best Of

Yes please change it, I'm sitting around waiting for Throne and Liberty to do something too but unlike Ashes they haven't promised it. I SHOULD get to be farming in the game. I SHOULD have an herbalism system by now. I SHOULD have a way to meaningfully contribute to a broader economy. But every single time I come back to poke at Ashes there are only steps back not forward. I thought they really valued the life skill part of this game. But it has taken the biggest back seat to PvP (not even PvX really) and that was all AFTER every crafter got to 'learn' that 'actually no, you don't get a homestead everyone is expected to be a slave unless they have a big guild' as the intended play. If you can't make 'not owning a homestead' fun for crafters and you keep under prioritizing actual crafting experience and econ. WE WONT BE CONVINCED YOU CARE.

Hello New Aela.

Back in my day, I played a little bit of EvE online mining my way into fortune.
I feel that EvE got the depth/complexity right for gathering and processing, keeping things simple enough to start with but complex enough that there's room for specialisation.

[style size="30px"]Resource Gathering & Processing[/style]
[style size="24px"]Mining Rocks[/style]
Instead of having rocks like "Granite (Rarity)" which is then processed into a granit mold or generic dust of some kind...
Split it out into distinct types of granite, each with different static Rarities assign to the types.
Eg.

• Fractured Granite (Common)
• Weathered Granite (Uncommon)
• Granite (Rare)
• Infused Granite (Heroic)
• Heartstone Granite (Epic)
• Primordial Granite (Legendary)

When it comes to processing, you can process them into molds and such as you can now OR...
Break them down for Ores and Minerals.
Eg.
Fractured Granite (Common) Composition per unit
Quartz: 90%
Alumina: 8%
Iron Ore: 1%
Calcium: 1%

Primordial Granite (Legendary) Composition per unit
Quartz: 50%
Alumina: 15%
Iron Ore: 10%
Titanium Ore: 8%
Gold Ore: 5%
Diamond: 5%
Mithril Ore: 4%
Phosphorous Ore: 3%

You can then specialise in your artisan tree to improve your extraction proficiency for either a rock type or a specific mineral/ore type.
Let's say you start at 50% extraction efficiency and you have 10 units of Fractured Granite, processing it would result in:
Quartz: 9
Alumina: 0-1 (80% chance for 1)
Iron Ore: 0-1 (10% chance for 1)
Calcium: 0-1 (10% chance for 1)

These materials could then be refined further (the ores) or be inputs to other recipes.

Furthermore, have different sub-biomes influence slightly the composition of the minerals within.
ie.
Fractured Granite (Common) Composition per unit mined from dry areas
Quartz: 85%
Alumina: 8%
Iron Ore: 5%
Calcium: 2%

Fractured Granite (Common) Composition per unit mined from swamps
Quartz: 85%
Iron Ore: 15%

When you're close enough to interact with the mineral, you should be able to see the rough compositions for the elements you have the skills to detect. Keep other elements greyed out to give you incentive to progress your mining/prospecting tree.
Prospectors can track down rocks with the highest concentrations of a mineral or ore that they are after.

I'm using granite as an example, but all rock types would get this treatment.

[style size="24px"]Mining Ores/Minerals[/style]
Similarly, ores and minerals should be split into types, with each type assigned a rarity. Many ore types can share rarities as not all ore types might be found in all places.
Ores containing copper Eg.
* Chalcopyrite (Common)
* Malachite (Uncommon)
* Bornite (Uncommon)
* Covellite (Rare)
* Azurite (Rare)
* Chalcocite (Rare)
* etc...

Chalcopyrite (Common)
Copper: 50%
Dregs: 40%
Lead: 5%
Silver: 3%
Gold: 2%

Covellite (Rare)
Copper: 70%
Arsenic: 15% --- Makes mining this ore toxic, needs special gear
Quartz: 15%

Chalcocite (Rare)
Copper: 80%
Silver: 13%
Gold: 7%

Same thing for Minerals/Gems etc...

A Side note on minables...
We should have more types of minable nodes.

• Large surface boulders which can be mined multiple times. The larger the boulder, the more times it can be mined. Boulders can use that fancy rock breaking tech to get smaller and smaller based on how much stuff is left in that node.
• Mineral veins that spawn in vertical rock/cliff faces. These should spawn in multiple mineable node lines that require traversing the vein to mine it all.
• Tunnel mines (small, medium, large), think of our current "cave" tech but it's an interactable face that as you mine it, recesses further and further. Could find encounters and treasures here. After some time, the mine collapses and resets somewhere else.

[style size="24px"]Harvesting[/style]
Introduce the already planned young/adult plants. Maybe add an aged & wilting stage for some types of plants.
Also split out the plants into individual types with associated rarity.
Eg. Daffodil

• Daffodil (Common)
• Sunbaked Daffodil (Uncommon)
• Pristine Daffodil (Rare) etc...

You can guess how refining should be based on the mining suggestions.

A side effect of having rarity tied to its own resource type means that in the overworld, someone doesn't need to blanket tap out all resources to find the rarer types, leaving the less rare to those who are still trying to work up their skills. You can even tie being able to distinguish higher rarity nodes to prospecting or some active skills in the gathering/processing tree.

Obviously all names and material breakdowns are just examples.

I'm aware I didn't touch fishing... my brain juice has run out.

Glorious community,

Our latest Development Update Livestream has wrapped, and this month was packed with exciting reveals and deeper dives! From worldbuilding and player systems to backend insights and design previews, there’s a lot to unpack.

We chatted about the new starter zone, economy updates, new races, and how we’re preparing for the next phase of testing. You might’ve caught glimpses of work-in-progress tools, UI updates, and even a few surprises we’ve been forging behind the scenes. 🔨

What stood out most to you? What has you eager to jump in? Let’s chat below! 👇

---

🗣️ In case you missed it, our latest livestream dived into the upcoming Alpha Two Phase III, covering a new starting area, races, nodes, PvP, guild systems, and an econ & stat revamp!
https://youtu.be/6BG0kkSkNaQ

I most definitely prefer Town -> City.
It sounds the most common and approachable.
Metropolis sounds too grand and abstract - to me anyway.

Dygz wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

What does "risk" mean?
Make the "risk" be associated with danger from NPCs and environment too and not only when players want reward. Separate risk from reward.
Verra should be a dangerous place, even for the largest well organized guilds and for solo beggars collecting sticks.

For Steven, Risk seems to mean high chance of being attacked by other players.

I wonder how long this thought of his will last past him being in charge of several servers with vastly different population levels.

Ludullu wrote: »

Vaknar wrote: »

Side note - Looks like we're not getting pinged about reported posts on the moderation side, so I'll be reaching out to Vanilla, our forums service, to escalate that. In the meantime, you can always @ me for spam, or shoot me or volunteer moderators a DM. Thanks, all!

Glad that it's just a system issue rather than a mod one. Hope it gets resolved soon, cause these spammers are annoying as hell, and I definitely don't want their existence to influence the forum posting flow, like it did at some point in the past.

Yeah, I feel that too. The bad actor(s) involved here sometimes are able to bypass our spam filters. I can increase the filters, but these tend to capture false positives (meaning posts will periodically disappear, before reappearing. You've probably seen this happen in the past). Imo, that's a worse experience and more disruptive than the occasional spam post that lives for a few hours. At least on a day-to-day basis. I tend to turn those on when things get really bad.

Regardless, we certainly appreciate the thoughtfulness and understanding here. As for the list of volunteer moderators, you're right. Looks like we don't have a public list of active volunteer mods for the forums, and there isn't a way to ping all volunteer moderators at once. I've added it to my list to look into this. I'll also take another look at our filters to see if I can tweak them to catch more of these posts since my last time under the hood tweaking them. Thanks for the suggestions