I’ve been reading the forums and watching dev videos and trying to figure it out but I’m a little confused about how settlements work.
So you get prestige for building things on your settlement, but I’ve been to probably 10+ settlements and I’m never actually able to USE any of the crafting tables or compactors or anything on them. So you build equipment in a settlement and get more prestige, but its only for you?
Settlements seem pointless if you can’t do anything at them because it all belongs to other players, but I’ve got to be missing something.
People have to give you permission to use their stuff.
A settlement is a group of people with plots near each other that is above 10k in prestige, or maybe even just one person I think.
It’s just a way to rank the size and value of a town/plot of land basically. A kind of mini-game for people to compete with each other to have the biggest cities.
You are not missing anything. As was stated you have to have permissions to use other people machines and storage, This is to keep people from taking things from other people. The beacon protects your property. machines and storage from other players.
Thanks for the replies, disappointing that so much trust is still required, makes it hard to really scale up to really huge cities. It would be cool if the machines could be shared but the contents storage could be instanced so you could use the machine but not be able to steal peoples’ stuff.
Oh well maybe in the future. Anyway thanks for the clarification, I just couldn’t find a straight answer.
The game mechanics do allow that, but requires a specific setup: Permissions can be assigned per plot if said plot contains its own beacon (not the master control but another, nonessential one). This allows settlements to have central factory-type setups available to be used by multiple residents, though this require a degree of cooperation obviously.
As you explore you will find some large settlements already. Just give people time to play the game with you, they will develop a level of trust in you. Look at joining a guild that is a good way to interact with new and more experienced players.
also prestige is a factor when it comes to tax share. If there is trading in a settlement a portion of the tax which is taken each time when people use selling pliths or request baskets is returned to the owners of beacons in that city. The more prestige you have the bigger your share of this coins. For example I have the 4th high valued beacon in a big city and I get about (i think) 7-10% of the tax. So sometimes I not only get footfall for visitors, but even more through the taxes ^^ … The prestige of all your beacons in a settlement are calculated as one for this mechanic
Also, the guy/gal/whatever with the highest presige in a settlement can name it and also, the settlement with the most combined prestige is automaticaly the capital of the world it’s on, so there will be a symbol on the radar of every player visiing the world, leading to that settlement (and you can see it with a totem in your hand when looking at the planet).
not sure if I’m misunderstanding your comment, but the protection isn’t just for other players, it’s for the land too!
if you build or dig in an area that is not protected, it will get reclaimed by regeneration and the land will reset to its originally generated form (this doesn’t apply to ores and surface resources, those get spread out somewhat randomly, depending on how much was harvested nearby and such)
but trees and gleam will be exactly in the same spot every time ;D
