Nitara

Part of the texture for Walnut trees looks upside down, or is missing something. Hard to describe so I've attached a screenshot. These are young trees, though I imagine the appearance is the same at whatever age. Winter season (in case you can't tell lol).

So we now have female and male bison, but they give no option to breed, regardless of which is led, whether one is tamed, or whether they are old enough (though the pair isn't mature yet, so I can't say with *100%* certainty there, but it should still show the option to breed if they're too young). Not sure if this is intentional but it doesn't seem to have been mentioned.

Since this is insanely long (it's simple since it uses existing mechanics in new ways, not so simple to explain) I'll start with this: TL;DR: horse-drawn plows could allow convenient farming that requires less user input than farming with a rake, but requires slightly more planning to take full advantage of, while requiring minimal changes to the current game mechanics and function. Didja know that's also called a thesis statement? sod off, internet... Anyway. So, it's been suggested before, but was nearly a full year ago, so it bears mentioning. Wurm would benefit tremendously from adding plows or similar animal-assisted farming implements. Farming is one of those mundane tasks some find relaxing, but most, I imagine, find simply time-consuming. While recent changes result in less material usage, I think having a convenient way of tending fields could be balanced in such a way as to make life easier, while not making the results inordinately superior to doing things the hard way. An important note: I do not advocate any degree of automation, or using the following for tending fields. As a quick foreword, I'm going to note that we're talking about very general equipment here thrown under a common label of "plow." Things would rapidly become too complicated if we began talking about throwing in tilling, or combines, or whatever - let's just use our imagination, since it's wurm, so that this is a feasible, practical addition to the game. Let's start with the tools. A plow should require an animal to pull, either a horse or bull - hitch that to the plow in order to use it. I suppose one could make a case for dragging a plow slowly by hand, but that's beside the point. The plow itself should function similar to a cart, one commander, no passengers. No inventory (will touch on this later), not lockable. Made likely from planks, shafts, a yoke, and a (steel, ideally) plow blade. The blade should be fairly massive. Perhaps a bridle could be attached as well, just to make the poor bridles feel better by having a purpose. Now, as for usage... the commander would mount the plow and move forward or steer. The plow should travel at a speed that results in tending fields just slightly faster than doing so by hand, which at present is 4-5s with timer changes and a decent rake at full stam. Maybe 3.5-4s to pass over a tile, but with no speed reduction for stamina - this way it'd be impractical for small fields but would save some time and key-spamming for larger fields. As the plow passes over a tile, it should essentially take the tile from packed dirt or ripe farm to sown field, which takes us to... Mechanics. All this stuff like fertilizer, etc - great ideas. Awesome, but they're just more complicated piles of stuff that server minimal purpose. Plows can simply serve the purpose of a) harvesting and cultivating, with sowing added in if possible. The ideal way to do this would be for the plow to have two results of passing over a tile, or nothing at all: if the tile is packed dirt it cultivates it (and sows seeds, again if possible), and if the tile is a field, it harvests the field, regardless of growth stage. Just as you take drown and thorn damage when crossing a tile border, and just as grass is packed, the plow would change the state of the tile beneath it to cultivated dirt (or freshly sown field). Now as far as harvesting, and the whole sowing bit. An ambitious programmer might find a way to include an inventory (hopper) on the plow for seed to be planted on dirt that the plow passes over. Essentially any farm or dirt tile that is passed is harvested, then sown with the first seed in inventory (similar to the fashion in which one can use items in a pouch from the toolbelt). More importantly, I think, would be an inventory where harvested plants would go - perhaps a small cart behind the plow, or something - any crops, ripe or not, that the plow passes over go straight into that container. The simpler alternative would be for them to fall out on the ground, or go into the player inventory. I mention that any field, ripe or not, should be harvested since the idea is that one would need to time their harvest properly in order to take advantage of the added convenience - harvesting too soon would result in some fields producing nothing, and waiting too long would cause some fields to go to weed. The wise farmer would harvest the handful of early crops by hand and leave the dirt for sowing by the plow the next day.. of course, the random nature of crop growth with the fairly narrow span to harvest in similar ratio to growth time could make this rather erratic; a correction could be made by either increasing growth time slightly overall, or by narrowing the amount of deviation from the average growth time to make crop growth and maturation more predictable. *whew* alright, sorry that was so long, but I feel that fleshing out the full idea and means of implementing will make this straightforward enough that Rolf might find it feasible. Let me know what you think... if you got this far lol. OH YEAH. Almost forgot. Would be great to hitch horses to catapults in the same way.

+1. Was just thinking rare trees would be great. To say people would fight over them without them giving better resources is rather assumptive, I know folks on epic would likely care less if they don't give rare logs more often... I'd say a very slim increase in drop rate of rare materials, but it should be just as overaged is for optimum cutting - ideally, if you were in it for the resources and not the gorgeous tree, you'd still want a rare to reach its highest potential before chopping it down (if you were so fortunate as to have several and wouldn't miss its awesomeness).

this. Sure, if 30 people gank one person no one can attack - but you know, it's a whole lot easier for some of you to move away and enough to kill him stay on top of him, than it is for him to just waddle off in the midst of 30 people.

My findings coincide with Postes's, each passenger seems to add .4-.6km/h each, in the case of corb and cog. Solo speeds undoubtedly improved for both, but only by around 2km/h; the main difference is that now, solo sailboats are slowest downwind in a gale now compared to larger boats with or without crew, which is as it should be. Upwind and in light wind, sailboats will likely continue to dominate with crew, but a full knarr would be theoretically nuts (I wonder if that's what BL was up to earlier, eh? lol). In a lighter wind/breeze when traveling downwind, a larger ship with crew seems to have a fair advantage against a sailboat, but it still turns like a bag of bricks on square wheels. Overall, other than the previously mentioned rowboat issues (which I've not taken the time to test yet), speeds seem to be fairly balanced now to something that makes sense, for once. Now if we could get some other niceties on ships, or maybe at least work out a way to allow the commander to access larger ships' holds... then we'd have us a start on naval content finally!

(Apparently I completely forgot to submit this post after previewing, lol) I was actually just mentioning this to a friend. What I was thinking of was an herb garden, like the kind you might see in a barrel (gasp) or window/windowsill tray. I think it'd be pretty awesome for both decoration and a nice little supply of seasonings for those of us who like to make meals we wouldn't be disgusted to eat in real life. Maybe make a carp item, like wood trough let's say, that could be used as a container for water (...horses? something?), or if combined with dirt (maybe adding a peat, and/or ash?), form a garden box, in which you could plant a single herb like one sows a farm tile. Tending similar to farms, using... scissors? sickle seems silly. Pruning shears would of course make too much sense, so that's right out. One could leave this on the ground, or maybe use something like planting signs to lock it at a set height that is just below window-height, for use with house windows. There could also be an option to turn large barrels into gardens? An option to make it interesting could be to start with fertilizer (combine peat/ash/dirt/whatever as above), the combine that with, say, a plank to start a garden box (requiring a few more planks and sm. nails), with a small barrel maybe to make a barrelish garden? Or maybe have another option w/ a plank that takes essentially the same materials as a lg. barrel, only with dirt added. It's not quite in the same area, but I'll also throw in a little aside that fruit trees should really be something tended and harvested in a fashion similar to farms (or sprouts, adding in tending with a sickle), in that there should be available more often than they are not available (seasonal, maybe during x season it produces more or less).

I think my first involved rum, and boats. But this would be about as awesome to have! I don't think I thought of all of it, someone else mentioned the bees... but what I'm sayin' is, MEAD! From cooking honey (with fruits for flavor mebbe?). Which comes from honey, which is harvested from beehives, built from animal fat and wood scrap or dirt, maybe add a table to complete... ql of the hive could determine how quickly it accrues bees and/or how quickly they produce honey (more bees = more honey each wweek/day/whatever, maybe random ql honey capped and stabilized by beekeeping skill or tool ql?)... maintain them like farms in the same fashion (tend more = more honeyz/bees)... perhaps would require at least one (or two-three) fruit tree or flowering shrub within maybe 5 tiles?, and die off completely during winter seasons if that should enter the game. Also, one must wear a Beekeeper's Fancy Hat or be stung repeatedly about the face by Angry Wurmian Bees while tending and harvesting.

So after doing some testing in my new knarr, I came to several disappointing conclusions. 1. wiki topspeed is way the hell off. Says 27km/h, I go maybe 12km/h at ideal angle in a gale. 2. crew has zero impact (tested with 4 f2p alts) 3. a rowboat goes about as fast. 4. sharks are way, way too close to land - coupled with bouncing from any size ship, this is just bs that makes sailing a pain in the ***. So I /dev a few times explaining, and a GM responds, quite nicely and fairly promptly, thankfully (so don't take this as a slam on them), that boat speeds have been an issue for some time, several forum posts have been made, and that there is nothing they can do about it at the moment. Mind you, a friend claims a GM flew out and fixed his boat speed somehow when it bugged on him a while back, but who knows. All I know is I'm pretty annoyed that this has gone unfixed for an obviously long time (I recall the first mention being in the second week of epic opening, iirc), and it's a major bug. I'm going maybe *half* the speed I should - in nautical terms, that is what we call piss poor. Instead, we get these random model-less poorly thought-out mobs (nogumps, etc). This isn't me disliking new game content as a rule; this is me, a paying customer, wanting something that's been very broken - that has been pointed out, and noticed, by GMs or devs repeatedly - to get fixed before throwing more wrenches into the works. I can haz bugficks nao plz?

As I said, this isn't a waa I want carebear rules thread - this is about being capable of enacting justice, eye for an eye and all that. The recourse for something like this on a pvp server should be pvp, not "ok, that sucks." To me that seems a valid expectation. I knew the risks getting in on Epic, and ground up my tracking into the 20s (and was intending to get to 70 eventually) expecting it to have some function, before realizing it's utter garbage. This is the problem! The lockpick suggestion, I'm more in favor of making them untradeable than anything else. Material, meh, was just a thought.

So I always was irritated with how short a time you can actually see back with tracking, even at modest skill levels, but now I'm flat out pissed. My compound was broken in to and my horses slaughtered, and I have jack all way of determining the perpetrator. I don't want ninny carebear . , I want blood for .ing blood. Track should be the main way to determine the identity or at least path of an invader. As it stands it's pure garbage. Also, lockpicks were changed to be less insane recently (not curved, iirc?), but there's still the problem that once you can make them, you can churn them out - it would help to make them a) notrade, and steel only. The latter for a number of reasons, primarily that at least that way there is a barrier to Joe Griefer whipping out two dozen picks and making the rounds to ruin things for kingdom-mates. The former would require someone wanting to sell legitimate lockpicking services (or picking on raids) to commit the time to grinding it, rather than being able to just buy them. Deeds, yeah. Great solution for folks with the money.

Or deed guards could actually kill said nogump.

I should add that they actually threw someone into a tile underground in my mine, which had caved in and had to be excavated. Buggy and ridiculous.

Fair enough. And yeah the drakespirits were killable with enough good fighters, but there really should've only been a few per epic server. There are just too many seemingly random, senseless changes taking place.

So, I'm curious. First we had worms spawned from Vynora, which showed up in batches of ten but weren't very strong. People whined that they were too easy. In response, we got drakespirits spawned, which aoe stun, bash walls and houses, and eat spirit templars for lunch. No model. Now, we get these Nogump things, also no model (what the hell, jumping the gun much?), with a MASSIVE aoe and dismounting knockback, that gobble up bystanders and guards for dainty appetizers. One of these moronic manifestations of poor game design spawned in the middle of a friend's home just before he was able to deed it, and now it's set up camp there, politely annihilating anyone who comes near. Attempts to dom it have thus far failed. I don't want my friend to ragequit, and I don't want to either, but he's close, and I'm not far off. Someone needs to get a (*@#ing clue and think before adding numerous (model-less) insanely powerful mobs at random in populated areas. If one appears in my compound, I'm done with wurm.