[Suggestion] Mining-/Craftingsystem and timing

Hi,

[Look at the bottom for german translation]
[german translation removed] - 17JUL15

I know that there are plans to introduce andvanced mining and mineable ressources later on.
After playing the first few hours of this game I am already positively touched by its current state and the features planned.

I still would like to suggest a few things, which might be already considered by the developers or mentioned by other members.

1. Deactivatable skillsystem and six to ten-fold increased time to farm ressources.

• drastically increased necessity for coordinated teamplay in mutiplayer
• deactivatable because there are always players favoring less challenging gameplay
• specialization for each individual is requiered

2. Ressources like iron, copper, etc. (if implemented) should have different levels of quality/purity.

• To create high quality products ressources with higher quality are required
• increase of difficulty
• increase of time needed for a village to grow larger

3. Make tools like pickaxes, axes, weapons or others dependend of what quality the ressource was when crafted.

• Tools of less quality should become unuseable faster

4. Tools should not "break" they should become less effective until a degree is reached that they become useless.

• The local blacksmith for example could try to refurbish an overused iroin-pickaxe/sword/axe
• If not refurbischable anymore, the tool should be able to be destroyed gaining something like a "used pickaxehead" which could be thrown into the melter or sold to the local blacksmith.

5. The quality of a f.e. piece of iron should be consistent throughout its existance and recycling processes and should only change by wrong usage, handleling by unskilled players or recycling.

• F.e.: A dude finds ironore or sand close to the surface. He farms it and takes it home to filter the sand for increased purity of the product.
• He melts the ironore/sand as he as well got pretty ok melting skills
• The end product is a bar or iron of mediocre quality which he sells to the blacksmith
• The blacksmith can now f.e. produce two pieces of iron sickles by using charcole of mediocre quality produced by the local lumberman when he has at least mediocre blacksmithing skills.
• Higher skills increase the tiny chance to produce higher quality products even when one of the components is of less quality
• somewhen the sickle is rusty and stump and the farmer can not use it anymore so he goes to the local smith and asks him to refurbish the sickle. He does that a few times.
• After some time the sickle of mediocre quality will not be able to be refurbished/repaired anymore so it will be taken apart and the iron can f.e. be reentered via melting if not too rusty

In human history copper was one of the first ores which were mined in environments which could be described as industrial as gathering, sorting, cleaning and smelting usually took place at the same site. With this section I want to offer a way how one COULD form a nice entrance to mining in early stages of Rising World. Keep in mind while reading this that this is connected to the previous changes suggested in this thread which are:

• quality of ressources
• necessity for specialisation
• increased timings
• skills

Some basics:
Cooper is found in 2 states. Natural copper and copper that is mined deep in the mountains. We, for now, will only cover natural copper, as one is unable to build a mine in the early stages of game, as it is simply too hard with out the necessary manpower and tools. As far as archaeologists can go, natural copper was gathered in areas where flat land went into mountain formations; the best chance to find natural cooper was around areas of prehistoric vulcanic activity. There are a variety of sites where mines where found, which were digged into the ground not deeper than 3-4 meters. The heaviest documented found of natural cooper weights 420 tons and were made of 90% pure copper.

Here one example to quickly show the difference:

native copper	copper rich stones / ores

It should be obvious that using native copper (which is and was found in purity rates of guessed 70 to documented 92 percent) was definitely the easiest way to obtain metal for making tools or to enhance it via advanced procedures (as copper itself is a very soft metal and was rather used to create alldays religious stuff and jewelry.

Smelting and Forging:

Multiple ways of purifiying copper where developed.
The upper left picture shows a native copper mine that had been diged in soft or good removeable layers of stone or earth. Where the sone itself became too strong and thick to be removed, or even solid, a fire was lit to heat the stone. After that water was pured over the heated stone what caused crackings all over it. That simply set free ore veins that could otherwise not be mined.
Some archiologists also assume that larger groups over miners lit thoose hot fires from time to time in hope to set free copper that would have been left layers of earth and stones by liquifying it. Signs were found that some of the fires lit would have been able to reach enough temperature to actually reach the melting point of copper, that theory has yet to be proven.

The usual way of refining copper after it was mine is shown in the right hand picture.
A small smelting oven, well able to be reused multiple times, would be placed close to the point where the actual copper source was found. Usually it would be build out of the remainings of the mining processes (small stones, clay, mud, dried grass).
These facilities were able to produce enough heat to clean out the mine copper ore of the remaining slug.

For this the orestone would be smashed and the stone parts removed as cleanly as possible. The remaining parts were as big as the nail on your small finger and would be put into the smelting furnace top opening, when the inner temperature was appropriate. After a specific time the copper was smelted and would have formed a orbish structure in the middle of the smelting chamber. Some removed it by removing the lower stone part of the furnace others removed it through the top opening. Tools for both methods have been found.

The technique of smelting metals and the used tools remained unchanged for the greatest parts throughout thousands of years until people were finally able to completely liquify metals.
Documents exist which proof the existance of blacksmithes in the asian culture being able to produce steel-like metals about 1000-1500 years erlier than anywhere else. Historians and Archiologists are still debating if asians or people of the empire of the hittites where the first to actually perform steel-like smithing.

Native copper usually was so pure that it would be sold right of to persons with enough knowledge for further use without any smelting process.

- tbc -

Kind regards
Seemax

aktualisiert/updated

Quote from Geneo

To me, there's a huge difference between "immersion" and "overly complicating things just to complicate things".

What blacksmith? I understand some of you are big on 'repairing' tools (and weapons), but when a pickaxe 'wears out' or 'breaks', how hard is it to craft a new one? Or while you're at it, craft 2 and carry a spare? Having a blacksmith in the game implies that he works in a Town. That means you have to live near a Town so you can get to it easily. People have also advocated NPC's to farm for you. To me, that means the production of more than you can eat, so you load up the excess on your Buckboard that you crafted, hitch it to your Horse you found and tamed with the Harness that you crafted, and haul the extra produce to Town to sell or trade it at a Shop or Mill there, which means there's a Miller. There's a Baker that runs a Bakery, an Armorer that runs an Armory, etc., etc..
(Course the economy thing is a whole nuther animal, cause a Blacksmith doesn't do any 'repairs' for free, right?)

Sorry, but I thought RW was about you taking on the world. You are the blacksmith, miller, baker, farmer, rancher, hunter, miner, armorer, lumberjack, etc. Isn't that complicated enough? I know some of you would love all the interactions you can have with a bunch of other characters in the game, but this isn't Skyrim. There's just you. I see it as your job to become self-sufficient. To "live long and prosper".
I guess I just see the game differently than some of you.

Where ever you have such games like RW connected to a multiplayer environment people will be faced with suggestions with defined deep level of complexity, as they try to find possibilities to deepen the multiplayer-gameplay and orientate it towards teamwork. That is for the simple reason one can observe on a varity of servers: Play 4 hours and you got all you need - play a month and you are rich, bored as fuck and you will find yourself throwing items of off rooftops into masses of jumping players. A lot of people do not see this as satisfying, that is why people make modifications when the developers miss to integrate a feature or actively decide against its implementation.
Sadly there are as well always people like you, who try to imprint a total image of what that specific piece of software was ment for and should be like AS YOU SEE IT.
Expect the software to be nothing about like you see it now Geneo, that is how one should face Early Access. That as well is why this is called a suggestion forum ;).

Quote from AndyKrause

I like this idea very much, and it sounds like something the developers have probably planned already. It makes gameplay much more complex and realistic, which is something the developers (and players) are aiming for, at least in survival mode.

As much as I like this idea, I think it is very complex and will take a long time to be implemented fully and properly. Other, more basic functions might have some higher priority though.

I expect other hopefully basic fuctions to be of way higher priority, anything else would be against development logics.

Kind regards
Seemax

aktualisiert/updated

Updated