Lisimba

+1, they should have been merged a long time ago.

I'm seeing these too. They float below the water surface. When I get close enough I can right click them, but the menu just sits there saying "Refreshing...". I wonder if this is a graphics issue and it's actually rendering stale nodes from elsewhere? I've seen other landscape things do that sort of thing, especially when it's really laggy, like after a slaying. There'd be trees and grass out over the sea, although those did follow the contours of the landscape they used to be on.

Potential loss of hard to replace stuff. Notably fighting skill, affinities, and to an extent gear. Not being sure if there's anything else at risk. There are a lot of complicated game mechanics and I don't know them all. For all I know there's some obscure mechanic that allows opponents to steal my meditation levels. I don't *think* that's the case, but you get the idea. Not sure where to start. What would I even do? Just wandering into a PvP zone seems like it would be basically the same as wandering around on a PvE island, up until I encounter an enemy player and then I'll be dead ten seconds later. That doesn't seem very attractive. But asking someone who knows feels like wasting their time, since as long as my affinities are at risk I'll probably not follow through anyway. Might help if there's a PvP noob guide. I'd at least read it.

No, it's part of the game now. We expect that it should be possible to get that high. There are titles and bragging rights to be had, even though it makes little to no difference for in game results. I'm saying that it's fine if it takes deep knowledge of the game and using all your skilling tricks, though, and even then is still difficult and/or time consuming, especially above 99. That includes knowing about and using affinity moonshine, regular affinities, path of knowledge, CoC, tools like grinder, alcohol for difficulty, the finer details of sleep bonus and coffee, grinding wounds, low quality tools, knowing the difficulties and formulas used, etc. Up to 70 you shouldn't need any of that, beyond maybe how to use sleep bonus. Over 90, and especially over 99 though, you're in very advanced territory and no punches are pulled.

If you get a skill over 90 that's pretty much just for bragging rights though (except for a few special cases like faith). From what I've heard over the years, they never intended or even really believed that people would max out skills when the skill system was first designed (they even had skill decay back then). We're just a way more stubborn bunch than they expected, and we like numbers going up slowly. But if you go for 99+, you pretty much are in minmaxing territory. Is it really that different to do mass cocoa paste beverages over mass roasting? It would be more steps and give more RSI but the gameplay seems very similar. You're going to be mass-doing *some* recipe either way. The thing with using alcohol to adjust difficulty is that it allows people more freedom in picking what they do. In mining for example, where I'm now north of 99.9987, I'm pretty much stuck on sandstone and have been for a very long time. It would be quite welcome if I could take a handicap on the difficulty of a more useful vein and skill while getting things I actually need more. Same thing for beverages, I've been grinding it on coffee bean roasting by using alcohol to match skill, and I can actually *use* that coffee, and mass store the roasted beans for later. If I had to mass make some other recipe, chances are the only thing I could do with the result is toss it out the window. For roleplay purposes it might be nice to have something that has the same effect mechanically but without getting you drunk. Maybe meditative tea? But from a mechanics perspective I think alcohol or equivalent should be used in more skills, not less.

I get what you're saying, and I agree with it - for future players, or those who come back from hiatus some time in the future. For current players though, this *was* explained in the patch notes. Everybody who plays should read those.

That's literally the opposite of what I said.

Yeah I don't think the mountain availability is a substitute for winter availability. You were able to fill up in winter before, that should remain possible. Being able to fill up in summer by going to a mountain is nice for people who make a new larder though, or who weren't playing during last winter. I hadn't heard of that before but that seems like a good idea. Or maybe make it so you can compress snowballs into a block, or a larger ball, which is then one item to mail.

It was in the test thread: Here is the entire post: And once again, using alcohol to increase difficulty is already a mechanic in a bunch of other places. So show some of those empirics. It's very common for people to have done something in this game for years, and still have no real idea how these things work. Think of all the stuff that got disproved after Wurm Unlimited could be datamined. That seems like making an issue where there is none. 90 tiles is less than fit in a minimum size deed, even if you didn't go low stamina mode you probably wouldn't even had to leave the average deed. Besides, if you really do like low stamina mode, it *still works*. You can still do this. I've already ran out of stamina twice doing nodes just because I was going too fast to regenerate stamina. No, they did. All things that can be foraged and botanized had an associated difficulty that was based on your skill, the tile it was found on, and that tile's growth stage. There was not a lot of variability in the actual resulting difficulty though. For most things the effective difficulty just ended up being "your skill minus five". It picked something you were going to harvest, and then used its difficulty to do the rest of the calculations. Good, some actual numbers. And yeah, I think that checks out. You mentioned having 99+ skill? Grinder shows that at 99 skill and a difficulty of that minus five (94), you get a skill tick about 48% of the skill checks. I figure you might actually have been getting about two ticks per tile though, just half the size it appears. Sure, look. Could be interesting. That still doesn't seem like all that much. Even if it was 4 times as much, if you did 90 tiles before that means doing 360 tiles after, which is like a 20x18 field. Considering this again, I was thinking of the iron rocks I found. I don't think I found true ore yet.

Yeah, that should change too. If you aim for 80+ you should not cancel that fast though. I did some testing and all of the second action balls I got were in the 80-90 range, and most of the third action ones were above 80 too. Did... you not read the rest of that sentence? It's talking about a possible change. If you get a ton of snowballs from one node (and they don't do the quality decreasing thing), you get way more snowballs, and so you get way more chances at 99q+ balls. And so with that change it would be easier to get them.

I don't know about expanding the amount of snow nodes. The point of increasing the rate at which you get them from snow drifts however would be that you spend less time getting balls. If you get 25 balls from one node for example, you need to find only four nodes to fill a larder, and it's also much easier to get a larder full of 99q+ snowballs. The point of reducing decay is so you can actually fill a larder in the summer by going to a nearby mountain. They need to last long enough that you can get them home.

We brought this up in the discord as well, both snowball decay and the rate at which you can get them from snow drifts (and that you shouldn't be limited to building snowmen on drifts, but that's minor). Ostentatio said they are taking it under consideration, so hopefully there will be a response soon.

"This is wrong but I'm not going to tell you why" is not an argument. Skill tick size is proportional to time spent doing the action, so this sort of micromanagement does not help with skill gain rate. Doesn't matter if you start at full stamina or not, same amount of time spent in actions is same amount of skill per second. There is a cap on the action timer though, after which a longer timer will not count for skill anymore (even though you'll still have to wait for it), so it's entirely possible you've been nerfing yourself this way. Or toss it in a cart at the end of each pass. Seems easier. The ore I found was discardable. Clay wasn't, and I agree that clay should also be discardable. Ideally, everything you get from it should be discardable. I don't think so. Base difficulty was made a bit easier, so beginners are going to get more ticks. The entire point of my post above was to actually try this claim out, and what I found shows that the advantages are *not* offset by the longer time, and in fact you're getting ahead as long as you have even a basic level CoC on your gloves. And with decent level CoC you're ahead considerably. It's all up there, with numbers and data and calculations and method. How much more of an explanation do you want? Assuming you match difficulty to the previous system's difficulty (which was still very low) and don't use CoC, you need to spend the same amount of time in a (non-capped because of stamina exhaustion) timer to get the same amount of skill. If you use even very low CoC enchants, you'll easily make up for the extra time spent moving around. If you use alcohol to properly match your difficulty to your skill, you'll get more ticks too, and you should be able to skill faster than before. It is intended that you use alcohol for skill matching, just like with the cooking system. The only way you can claim that it's a nerf is by purposefully not using the part of the new system that is specifically intended to make it easier to get ticks at high skill. If you refuse to do that, that's not a problem with the node system, it's a you-problem.

TL;DR: the extra time lost on walking is compensated easily by weak CoC enchants. Decent enchants will put you well ahead compared to the old system. Long version: The new node system involves more traveling between nodes, which is time that you don't gain skill for. The bits where you walk are too short to turn off your sleep bonus for though, so I wondered how big the impact of this actually was. I spent a little over half an hour on and around my deed, just harvesting (botanizing or foraging, whichever applied) whichever node was the closest. If none were in sight I'd get on my mount and ride somewhere I thought would have more nodes. In other words, not a structured search of the terrain, but I tried to spend my time reasonably efficiently. I harvested this same general area yesterday after the node system came out, so what I got today was largely whatever managed to spawn in the last three quarters of a day. I don't yet know how long it takes for an area to become "full" but this seems representative for an area that would get harvested regularly. If you find an area that is visited little, it might be covered more densely with nodes and your efficiency would be greater. The terrain I live in is reasonably hilly and not always easy to traverse, I had to climb a few times. If you do this on flat terrain you'll probably also get a bit better efficiency. For the calculations below I'm going to assume that what I measured is representative. Out of the total time of 30 minutes and 45 seconds I spent: 24m46s (80.54%) in a foraging or botanizing action, 02m05s (06.78%) on my horse, 03m54s (12.68%) walking/climbing, waiting for stamina to regen, and things like leading my horse and right clicking nodes. I don't know what the timings are for the old system. You still needed to walk, but less of it. You still needed to regain your stamina, that probably didn't change. I'm guessing the "uptime" in the old system was something in the 90-95% range, so for every 100 seconds you'd spend 5 to 10 seconds moving to new tiles and regaining your stamina, and 90 to 95 seconds harvesting. Let's go with 95% for now. The devs have confirmed that for the same amount of time spent harvesting, you get the same size skill tick in both the old and new systems. (This is unrelated to whether or not you get a tick, see below.) So if skilling uptime went from 95 to 80.54 percent, that means we now get about 84.78% (80.54 / 95 = 84.78% ) of the skill per time spent total. However, we now also have the ability to use CoC on our gloves. To go back from 84.78% to 100%, you need an enchant value of just under 18. (100 / 84.78 = 117.95%, so 17.95% more, so CoC 17.95.) Any higher CoC will actually put you ahead of the old system. If you use for example two CoC 70 gloves, you will get 44% bigger skill ticks per time spent than in the old system. (CoC 70 is 170% tick size, baseline old system was 117.95% new system, 170 / 117.95 = 144.13%.) For your total skilling rate, it's also important to consider how often you get a skill tick. This depends on how well the difficulty of your actions is matched against your skill. The best you can hope for with Wurm's system is a skill tick about 53% of the time there's a skill check. In the old system, difficulty depended on the thing you were getting, the tile it came from, and the growth height of that tile, but overall almost everything was pretty low difficulty, so you wouldn't get a good skill tick rate at high skills. In the new system however you can use alcohol to increase difficulty, like with cooking. So you can continue to have a good skill tick rate as long as you don't mind going around drunk. So in summary, if you want to grind you can now get more ticks and bigger ones as well.

I had a laugh about this. The two biggest detractors of the new system are you and Finn, and he thinks everyone will be 90 within a week while you think nobody will get 90 anymore.

-1 for me too, I like them.

Please don't make conspiracy theories. What do you think they gain by nerfing snow, to the point that they would have to sneak it in like that? It's vastly more likely that they dropped the patch now because now was when they though it was ready, and they just didn't balance the snow piles right yet.

They also expire by themselves over time.

Get drunk enough and you won't care. Two birds, one stone.

Got to say white works better underground.

I seem to find them faster than that. Dink some booze. That increases difficulty now. Base difficulty is lower so noobs have an easier time getting resources. What promise?

Nope. I'm genuinely having fun searching them out right now. It's way better than the old system.

This came up again in the other thread. I'm fine with needing an enchant for max skill gain, but needing two is a bit much. Can you make it so it uses the most powerful enchant on either glove, instead of the average? That way you can enchant both if you want, but you only really need one enchanted. Another option is to make it so you can activate one of your gloves as a tool, then that's the one you'd want enchanted. And if you don't have a glove activated it should still work but not benefit from any enchants, so people without gear aren't stuck.

Maybe, and maybe not. That's what the feedback thread is for. I'll clarify: Needing an enchant is entirely in line. Needing two enchants is not, which is why I prefer max over average (which is what it does now). I'm fine with that too. Edit: I've brought it up again in the feedback thread.