Pre-alpha screenshot. Art and interface will change.
The first system I rebuilt on the new engine was gathering. It’s the quiet heart of a sandbox. If chopping a tree feels bad, nothing built on top of it will feel good.
There are four gathering skills in the build: Lumberjacking, Mining, Skinning and Foraging. Each one rises by use, from 0 to 100.
Tiers you grow into
Each skill has materials you can’t touch at first. Pine logs and copper ore are open to anyone. Oak and iron need 30 skill. Ash and silver need 50, yew and cobalt 70, and emberwood and glimmerite 90.
Your chance at a material rises in a straight line as your skill climbs past its floor. You only learn from work that challenges you. Chopping pine at 80 skill won’t teach you much.
Foraging works the same way. Berries and apples are easy. Wheat, flax and cotton grow in the fields. The rare herbs (mallowort, ashcap, moonpetal and wyrmroot) take real skill to find.
The land runs out
Every 16 metre square of the world has its own stock of wood, ore and plants. Cut a stand of trees bare and you’ll have to move on or wait for it to grow back.
Foraging also eats into the grass the deer live on. Strip a meadow and the herds there go hungry. I like that a lot. Your choices leave a mark on the land.
The day after
On 28 October I went back for a polish pass on lumberjacking. The hatchet now shows in your hand while you chop. Tools come in five metals, and better metal lasts longer. A copper hatchet survives about 400 swings, a glimmerite one about 1,600.
Yield now scales with skill. A beginner gets one log a swing and a master gets ten. Characters and the world also started saving to disk that day, so your logs are still there after a restart.
What’s missing
You can gather, but you can’t make anything yet. Logs, ore and hides sell to the traders in town. Crafting is next on the list, and it’ll get its own post.