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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Freehold processing will take real world time, and what that means
Spif
Member, Alpha Two
No insider info here, just making some logical guesses. From the wiki:
The bulk of the time spent in the artisan system resides in the processing branch. The processing time varies based on the quality of the processed goods.[18]
Lower level processing, up to tier 3 can be achieved in nodes.[22]
Reading between the lines, Tier 1-3 (white/green/blue) mats are going to refine relatively quickly, and will be used to skill up in a Node's refining stations. I'm going to guess that the character will have to stand at the station and process stuff, and there won't be a limit to how many people can be refining in any Node's station. This will work a lot like other games where you queue up 100 chunks of iron ore to be refined, and it whips through it in seconds or at most minutes. 10 people can use the same Node refining station at the same time.
Tier 4 was defined as Epic/purple in A1. I'm assuming that there will be Tier 5 materials (Legendary/gold). This stuff can only be refined at Freeholds. "The bulk of the time in the artisan system", if weighed against gathering, suggests that this stuff will take a *long* time to refine. I don't think IS will force a character to stand at a processing station to for more than a couple minutes doing processing - aka staring at a progress bar. That's very unfun gameplay unless it's part of a really good mini-game.
This suggests that refining time will be counted by the Freehold building itself
So I'm expecting that each Freehold refining station is going to have a limited quantity of materials that it can process in a given day. IE, a single metalworking building has a smelter that can only process 100 epic mithril bars in a day. So you'd take your 25 mithril ore chunks and other mats, start the smelting process, then let it process while you adventure, and come back in 6 hours when your NPC helpers have finished the task. An upgrade choice might be between faster processing, or having 2 batches process at the same time.
This makes a lot of sense when you think about how Freeholds are setup with a family system, and Steven was not really going to commit to guild rights to Freehold buildings. You wouldn't give guild-wide access to such a limited resource if one smelter that can only process one batch of ore at a time. Also, if your smelter can only process one batch of ore at a time, that's a lot like a field can only grow one crop at a time. We already saw the end-result of farm fields and gathering, and they very carefully avoided talk about planting and grow times, but that was obviously a thing when they talked about buying/planting seeds and then harvesting later.
TLDR; It looks like Freehold processing stations are going to have limited throughput, and don't expect that an entire guild can use one processing station. But this only applies to Epic/Legendary materials.
There's implications here regarding gathering's usefulness, but we don't have any info on how long it's going to take for resources to recover after having been harvested.
The bulk of the time spent in the artisan system resides in the processing branch. The processing time varies based on the quality of the processed goods.[18]
Lower level processing, up to tier 3 can be achieved in nodes.[22]
Reading between the lines, Tier 1-3 (white/green/blue) mats are going to refine relatively quickly, and will be used to skill up in a Node's refining stations. I'm going to guess that the character will have to stand at the station and process stuff, and there won't be a limit to how many people can be refining in any Node's station. This will work a lot like other games where you queue up 100 chunks of iron ore to be refined, and it whips through it in seconds or at most minutes. 10 people can use the same Node refining station at the same time.
Tier 4 was defined as Epic/purple in A1. I'm assuming that there will be Tier 5 materials (Legendary/gold). This stuff can only be refined at Freeholds. "The bulk of the time in the artisan system", if weighed against gathering, suggests that this stuff will take a *long* time to refine. I don't think IS will force a character to stand at a processing station to for more than a couple minutes doing processing - aka staring at a progress bar. That's very unfun gameplay unless it's part of a really good mini-game.
This suggests that refining time will be counted by the Freehold building itself
So I'm expecting that each Freehold refining station is going to have a limited quantity of materials that it can process in a given day. IE, a single metalworking building has a smelter that can only process 100 epic mithril bars in a day. So you'd take your 25 mithril ore chunks and other mats, start the smelting process, then let it process while you adventure, and come back in 6 hours when your NPC helpers have finished the task. An upgrade choice might be between faster processing, or having 2 batches process at the same time.
This makes a lot of sense when you think about how Freeholds are setup with a family system, and Steven was not really going to commit to guild rights to Freehold buildings. You wouldn't give guild-wide access to such a limited resource if one smelter that can only process one batch of ore at a time. Also, if your smelter can only process one batch of ore at a time, that's a lot like a field can only grow one crop at a time. We already saw the end-result of farm fields and gathering, and they very carefully avoided talk about planting and grow times, but that was obviously a thing when they talked about buying/planting seeds and then harvesting later.
TLDR; It looks like Freehold processing stations are going to have limited throughput, and don't expect that an entire guild can use one processing station. But this only applies to Epic/Legendary materials.
There's implications here regarding gathering's usefulness, but we don't have any info on how long it's going to take for resources to recover after having been harvested.
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Comments
so if you queue up 100 iron ores and go to sleep, you won't wake up with 10 iron ingots. maybe you will have 3 or 4 and you will get the rest throughout the day when you perform maintenance on your stations.
You provide the processor with materials, and fuel set and forget.
Then there is probably durability of the processor for another material sink.