Release 172: Alts and World Levels!

What are Shrines?
Also, you speak of knowing where to find these soft coal seams?
Those are both things someone who has not played long would know? I don’t know.
Do you mean there is a pattern to the seams?
I have not noticed such in the few hundred coal I have dug up.
Well, other than the ores are near each other and the fossils/tech stuff is usually 2 away.
YES, I have found better drops on the dangerous world of Vulpo, in a 17 node soft coal seam I got 23 coal, much better than the home world. I used stone hammers to get it because I don’t have enough copper smelted to “waste” copper hammers. .
As for mining there, I had to fight quite a few creatures to get to said mining, and had a few trips to the Sanctuary. Stone Slingbows are “ok” against solo creatures, but I always seemed to run into 3-4 at a time.

I have seen a “whopping” six people in the Entire week I’ve played so far. (40-ish hours)
The first Three of them ignored me entirely. Chat, Trade, Friend, you name it.

To the best of my ability I have figured out quite a bit of the game, but I might as well be playing solo for my experience so far, with the exception of some nice people near me who were building a slide. Haven’t seen them since.
But then, I have been playing on the mostly empty, except for the large number of “active” beacons, starter world for the most part. Are we saying that playing there as a new player is making for a bad choice? If so, why start us there?

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Vulpo and the moons are harder so they are dangerous. You can find some decent seams on starter worlds in cave systems, etc. They won’t be as large but with some mining and looking you can do ok. I am only 1.5 weeks in and was finding enough copper and coal to smelt stuff.

As for the amount of people, yes it is an alpha game so there is a smaller community. The Europe servers seem to be the most active if you are really looking for more interaction. I go back and forth between solo and that.

You should be on the starter world to learn things, build your setup and house and then move out from there. The challenge is there for longer progression not quick higher tier stuff. Overall what helped me best was remembering this is an alpha game and it needs time to cook and grow… All I know is the community has wonderful people and the Devs do listen. So I am happy personally…

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Vulpto/Munteen etc do not provide nice mining experiences imo (except for places like Spoygg’s tunnel). It’s incredibly time consuming to navigate their caves vs the moons.

Septerfon, Andoweem, Epsilon, Elopor (the moon worlds) all have massive cave systems which are ideal for speed mining. You can run for an hour in a direction and just get seam after seam. They also have multiple cave levels that provide these rewards. After the most recent patch they also spawn multiple coal per node which makes the soft coal on them nice to farm.

The shrines are game spawned objects under trees in forest biomes. Each shrine has 26 compact peat under it (which equates to 43 smelts). They are in abundant on ring worlds - you just have to search for the biomes.

Yes, you need knowledge to find resources. The whole idea is that everything is not abundant everywhere. It encourages trade and exploration.

  • Coal is called “black gold” for a reason - we’re meant to learn specific routes and places to actually find it.
  • Copper and iron are more “farm on demand”.
  • Gold is easier than silver since it needs more supporting resources to make alloy.
  • Silver/titanium is scarce but essential alloys. They are the “farm on see” resources.
  • Gems are very specific in location. They’re meant to be what you target - but typically at the price of much more travel time/other resources.
  • Recently: Gems are now something to farm in groups on ring worlds from level 4/5 mobs.

Remember, the game is designed to encourage trade. You don’t have to farm everything yourself (in fact doing that is terribly inefficient).

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Seconding the moons recommendation. Also, @GrimmLiberty if you’re not a fan of caves (or if, like me, you have a special talent for falling in lava), try looking for those weird square mountains that look like sandstone wedding cakes. They have tons of seams (both ore and soft coal) on the outside, are rock all the way through (no switching to shovels for stupid gravel!), and if you fall you can land on the ledge between tiers. Take dual-wield grapples, for climbing.

There are several of those mountains on Epsilo – if you take the Epsi portal from @SWProzee1’s hub you’ll land on the ring at the Alpha gate and you can see a handful of wedding cakes from there.

I’d advise you to /wave to get people’s attention, but you know that already because you did it to me :wink: . Ooh am I one of the fabled six? Am I whopping?
:muscle: awww yeah!

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@GrimmLiberty for reference purposes this is what about 30 minutes of farming on Septerfon just got me:

Going to Andoweem next.

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LOL, yeah, you are one of the few that talked at all. I keenly appreciated that. I love /wave-ing anyhow…

And please understand that I am trying to type this from the point of view of someone new to Gaming and specifically this game, based on those I have encountered in my years of survival gaming. There are Specific reasons this game is a sleeper, I’m trying to sound the alarm, as it were. Most of you have played so long it is second nature now, so a “new” character really isn’t. I have been told by a DEV(sorry forgot the name) that they DO take that into consideration, that they understand new character isn’t the same as a new player.

The three things I think should be more streamlined are:

  1. Get rid of wood tools, what a waste of 10-30 minutes, you can use your Totem to get to Stone tools. The totem is indestructible and free to craft, so you have a “fall back” system in place already if someone loses everything somehow.
  2. The required skill buys could just be given for going through the Gate, a sort of “we decided to help you on your way ‘gift’” along with an explanation that skills cost points you gain by leveling, you can’t do everything, even at max level, and letting the player make decisions from there.
  3. Start a player with three Location chits of places near where they spawn, So they have some ideas of directions to head, even if they want to head away from everyone else…

[edit]
I just checked SteamCharts again… in Jun there were an average of 23 players online at any given time, ± 5 depending on the time of day, in August there is an average of 57 players at any given time, ± 23 depending on the time of day.
That is not even vaguely a MMO population, heck EQ Landmark did better until they folded. It’s my main worry right now because, Like Landmark, I love the game and want to see it take off. The best thing I can think to do is cover the ideas I can see a new player balking at… shrug
[/edit]

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Dragging Omni’s feedback over here from the Issues thread to add some notes:

I just turned level 38. At level 37, my daily XP bonus required (iirc) 52,136 XP, of which 5213 is granted from logging in. Since this release, I haven’t once completed the objective. To be honest I haven’t made any really concerted effort to, either, but my general expectation is that an objective of this sort is meant to encourage active gameplay, not hours of grinding. Am I wrong??

Over the last three days, I’ve played ~4 hours per day on my main character. Typical breakdown for me is probably ~1 hour mining on ring worlds, 2 hours building, and 1 hour doing non-XP-granting things like shopping, exploring, or talking to people. Total XP per day:

  • Day 1: 16k
  • Day 2: 10k
  • Day 3: 50k

The only time I came anywhere close to making the bonus was yesterday – and that’s only because I completed the Weekly Activity Bonus.

So, without changing my playstyle, I earn on average 1XP/sec. It would take me a little over 13 hours of typical playtime to earn a level-38 daily XP bonus. And because XP gain is relatively flat wrt level, 31.25 hours at level 50. Which, for a daily bonus, seems unlikely to happen…

Let’s say I spend all of my time mining rock. With my current spec (max power, max control, half-max dex, half-max hammer) I can probably break 1 starter-world rock per second, so 4XP/sec. At that rate it would take me 3.25 hours of straight grind.

Found this quote in an old thread:

This sounds fine in principle. Problem is, objectives run out, feats quickly become underpowered for XP – what good is 1000XP if it takes more than 20 minutes or so to obtain? – and contracts don’t exist yet. So we’re left with actions…and frustration. Lots of frustration.

Questions for @james @olliepurkiss @luke-turbulenz (and players too):

  1. How much playtime do you think it should take to level, at levels 10/20/30/40/50?

  2. How long should it take an average player to gain the daily XP bonus?

  3. Where do you intend us to get the majority of our XP, right now? Because, for all that we understand the pre-alpha-ness, it’s hard to playtest a thing when you keep getting stuck on levels.

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Waiting for mobs still feels dreadfully long (IRL minutes). This seems to be the case whether standing still or running to new zones looking for them. It feels like they respawn on a fixed long timer.

This makes combat a lot more boring than it should be IMO: I can literally eat my breakfast and type this post inbetween fights.

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@luke-turbulenz setup the XP balance - so I’m sure he’ll take a look at it based on your feedback.

Spawning is supposed to be increased. It’s possible that you need to move through the world to trigger more spawning. Are you harvesting the corpses?

This is actually a bug. It should be the amount you need for your current level not the total amount of XP you’ve accumulated.

I’ll raise as an issue in our database.

So I decided to record some numbers to get a better idea. I ran out from my base on Munteen and killed anything and everything in sight and continued to move. I quickly alt+tabbed after each kill and logged it with a timestamp.

First 10 minutes of killing: 23 mobs (this felt good)
Next 10 minutes of killing: 14 mobs (started to feel like more searching than killing)
Next 10 minutes of killing: 11 mobs (at one point it took me 3 minutes of straight running to find the next mob)

Also of the 50 mobs I saw & killed only 4 were level 5.

EDIT: I have max movement speed (All Agility and just missing 1 all attributes). It feels much worse with my slower combat character (no agility, no all attributes). It easily takes a minute to move between spawns.

EDIT 2: On another feedback related issue: I have 8200 hp with my combat character and a level 3 hopper just 1-shot me. This feels very overpowered - especially considering that it does not die from it and they come along with other mobs. I went and found one again and got one-shot again. It looks like it does multiple 2000hp hits in very very quick succession.

Detailed log

18:39 l3c
18:39 l3w
18:39 l3w
18:40 l3c
18:40 l4w
18:40 l4w
18:41 l4w
18:41 l3s
18:42 l4h
18:42 l3h
18:42 l4s
18:43 l4s
18:44 l3c
18:44 l3c
18:44 l4w
18:44 l3h
18:45 l5c
18:45 l3c
18:47 l3c
18:47 l3c
18:47 l3h
18:48 l3s
18:48 l3h
18:49 l5c
18:49 l3c
18:50 l4w
18:50 l4c
18:51 l4w
18:52 l4c
18:52 l4h
18:52 l4h
18:53 l4s
18:55 l3h
18:55 l3h
18:57 l3c
18:57 l3h
18:58 l3c
18:59 l4s
18:59 l5s
19:00 l3c
19:00 l3s
19:02 l4s
19:02 l3c
19:06 l3h
19:07 l3h
19:07 l3c
19:09 l3c
19:09 l4w
19:10 l5w
19:11 l4s

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Sorry, I’m confused… The 112,500 value is from @OmniUno at level 50, but as far as I can tell it’s consistent with my numbers at level 37. From what I can see, the daily XP bonus requires you to gain 1/4 of a level, and rewards you with 1/40 of a level. The daily activity bonus also gives 1/40 of a level. So a level 50+ player needs 500,000 XP to “level” and 125,000 for the daily XP bonus – but gets 12,500 from logging in, hence 112,500. Is there a bug with the XP-per-level values?

The requirements are too high for the bonus targets.

I’ve put a few solid days into the testing branch as a crafter/builder and just want to leave feedback on the xp gain.

I currently have an arrangement with a few miners and builders as their sole provider of tools, blocks and equipment at no charge, and even with all of this work and materials provided to me, my xp gain is pitifully slow. My workshop is continually operating at 100% capacity while I also work to help build a town around me, but xp gain is so slow that I’m falling several levels behind my miners.

For reference, my shop at max capacity production includes:
6 crafting tables, bulk crafting stones
1 Workbench producing bulk iron tools
1 Compactor, bulk medium coal / compact iron
1 extractor, bulk medium fossils
2 refinaries, bulk refined rock / refined iron
4 iron crucible, ingots, glue, meat

All of these machines crafting together while also building and chiseling yield barely 200xp a minute, while my miners are pulling easily 2-3x that just strip mining. I realize I could just as easily go mining myself for better xp gain, but I have 0 talent points invested in any skills outside of crafting skills and mining for me is slow, tedious, inefficient and boring.

I have plans to double my workshops effective max capacity, but right now my production roughly matches the supply and demand of my little community.

Please consider raising xp gain from crafting and building by a moderate percentage. At least 33% seems appropriate, as I’m 4-5 levels behind at the same number of hours invested. (We all play together in a discord channel, so it’s not a case of disproportionate time invested)

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We are looking at this and we’re analysing the information to see what players are doing and how they are getting XP and if it is in line with what we think it should be to level up and achieve the level cap.

We’re mindful of making quick changes here because we’ve seen players react to these changes and some even change how they play the game so they can “power” through the levels faster instead of playing the game and enjoying everything it has to offer.

Increasing the XP for crafting and building will likely see a shift of players stacking items up in the queues and going out mining for hours then placing “redundant” blocks just for XP and not because they are trying to craft something they need or they are trying to build something impressive. They are simply doing it for the XP.

As the last update showed, we’re currently going through the process of splitting up the game into different tiers, Worlds, creatures, resources and recipes are going through this at the moment. So low level tiers will give you basic XP, mid tier gives you mid range XP but you need the skills to do it (crafting, fighting, mining, etc) and the same applies for the high range. Once all these tiers are in place we’ll be able to balance it more effectively and limit the amount of “power leveling” people end up doing by exploiting a system, like crafting or placing blocks because they need the skills to be efficient at that tier.

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Would it be possible to passively raise the xp gained by a profession based on the number of talent points invested in it? This would allow a dedicated crafter to more quickly level up with crafting than a miner who also crafts on the side.

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That should be automatically implied by the tiers. I think we are going to be adding crafted consumables which temporarily boost your xp in different areas.

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Part of the problem is that a lot of what the game has to offer doesn’t grant XP, or grants very little. We get to a point where leveling is preventing us from playing the game. In my case it’s usually because I run out of plots long before I gain enough XP to get more of them.

A quick questions:
What areas do not give you XP?
What areas do you think you don’t get enough XP?
How many plots are you using?
Why do you need plots?
Do you have plots you have forgotten about?

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In my case, exploring. I love running around worlds just to see what’s out there, and it’s fun to find all the names of the features, but it gives no XP at all. :cry:

I think XP across the board just needs a blanket scaling factor. My weekly XP counter, which is just about to flip over, says I’ve earned ~100,000 XP total this week. I would think that a week of consistent but XP-casual play – probably equivalent to a few hours of XP-focused grinding – should get me a level.

Otherwise, I’d say that mining/gathering on harder worlds needs to give XP in line with block health (sounds like it’s in the pipeline already), and that creatures should give more XP when killed. Maybe something like 50/100/250/400/500 for killing level 1/2/3/4/5 creatures? Killing 1000 level 5 spitters should be enough for a level, even at max!

Right now I have 354 of 362 plots allocated. Of those, I’m using 80 for an aqueduct/street on Elopor and the rest for my house/base/thing on Epsilo. I don’t think I’m forgetting any…I’m keeping a handful in reserve until the aqueduct is finished, but that means stealing them from my Epsilo iceberg.

I tend to use a lot of plots in general. I like to build things that make use of the terrain, which means expending plots to make sure weird fiddly bits don’t regenerate. I like building on diagonals, which means lots of zigzagging. And I like making sculptures, which end up being on large scales just due to how chiseling works.

My Epsilo build is intended to extend underwater and deep underground and will probably use another 300+ plots.

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