A few questions and comments

Hello all! More questions!
1. Is there any way to turn off Crash Dumps? I find that they basically take over my computer after a crash when I should be trying to sign back in.
2. Is there any way to pin a window so that it doesn't unpin itself when you quit the game or the game crashes?
3. Is there any way to change the on/off options permanently? I find that I like turning Item Hints on so that I see the stats of items and "you have/haven't learned this" for recipes.
4. Is there any way to "consume" a map (that is, add it to my list of known maps)? I bought maps of Hidden Vale cities but the map screen still shows up as "no map available". I can "use" a map but that just lets me see it (and those maps are far less useful than the M maps). Maps are also pretty heavy for paper, at 0.1 units of weight each, and tend to clutter up your inventory if you don't have a bag.
5. Is there a limit to the number of quests you can have listed in your book? I seem to have started the Hidden Vale "news" and "dagger" quests but neither show up in my quest list.
6. I notice that my Exp Pool shows 10x as much for Production as for Adventuring. Is this a bug? Is it just that Production skills cost 10% of what Adventuring skills cost?
7. Apparently some refining skills (e.g. Butchery) require higher skill levels for more exotic things. Do resource gathering skills also require higher skill levels or can one skin a meteor dragon (or whatever is tops) with a mere 40 skill points?
Thanks!

 

Don't buy maps. They are unrelated to the map feature. I believe that initially, there was not going to be an in-game map at all. The maps you could buy or find would show you the layout of the area, and that's it. People hated that. A guy wrote a map web app, and everybody was using that. Then Port bought the app off of him, and made it available in-game. But it was slow, as it still used the web to access maps. Last release they finally made the map a client-side app, but they have to manually move the maps to the new system, and they are not all moved yet. Which is annoying, becasue it means areas that had a map two weeks ago now don't, until they get ported over. There are also some areas that never had maps to being with, but not many.

 

Probably just means you aren't leveling any production skills? Production XP is usually much harder to come by, especially at higher levels. (Er, it's not hard to come by on its own, just harder than adventurer XP. The most any node ever gives is 1000 xp, but there are mobs that give much more than that. Probably more accurate to say that adventurer XP is easier to get than producer XP.)

 

There's no minimum to skin/gather something, you'll just have a really low success chance if your skill is low.

 

@Cora Cuz'avich: Thanks. I'm trying to level my producer skills but it takes so many resources to do anything that it takes a while to build up enough to, say, smelt 4 units of metal or produce a few boards or spools of thread. I'm trying to level up Efficiency in extraction and refining. I've gotten to about level 60 in every Efficiency except Thread and Wood, where I'm just starting on Efficiency. My Fishing skill still needs a lot of work before I can do the 2nd tier, let alone lava fishing. Maybe I'll just head over to Solace Bridge Outskirts and strip it of its resource nodes. Ever notice that butchery and cooking stations are almost never seen anywhere?

 

Try checking inns and taverns, they usually have cooking/butchery stations in the back rooms or upstairs. Or most POTs have a crafting pavilion with all the stations. (Veritas Sanctuary, for example...)

 

This is true. The devs seem to have recognized that in the past -- there was a reward bundle for early players that included enough mats to do all the starting recipes four times over. Of course, at that point they would have wanted everyone crafting easily so they could test the processes, but it's still a hard comparison to now, when fancy combat gear is cheaper and easier for a newbie to acquire than basic crafting mats. Sure, you can get a handful of cotton and wood and ore, etc. from the starter areas -- but the recipes require so many mats, you have to adventure for hours just to make one decent recipe. Or grind the same scenes over and over to get enough money from selling loot to buy mats. Not fun for someone who wants to be a crafter/homesteader instead of killing things. Unfortunately, I don't see any solution short of reworking all the recipes to include more sensible mat requirements.

 

@Bedawyn: I haven't looked around so I don't know what material prices are. I do know that I have about 200k pooled crafting xp that needs a home and it's hard to find some way to use it. I need to get my Enchant and Masterwork skills up so I should probably invest in those but the problem is that they require lots of gold and silver (20 ore of a material that's not easy to find) and they destroy the materials regardless of whether it's a success or not, so it's comparatively difficult to level them unless you find a gold/silver vendor (again, I haven't looked around). What's weird is that if you look at the "economy", most items are actually worth less than the materials, so you can either invest time and gold into getting materials or you can buy something for less, which sort of makes the entire producer concept (and skill tree) pointless until you get to a near Master level, which you won't unless you use the skills. On the plus side, I found a Milk vendor so now I have 100 units of butter and a reasonably high Cooking skill.

 

Your skills will still level on a failure. (You'll still earn XP, too.)

When I was really low level, I would use the encounter scenes. The plains encounters have gold, and the forest encounters have silver. I don't remember what's in the desert encounters, might be just copper. (There's also a hills encounter you get in some areas, I think they had silver as well, but I'm not sure.) It's a little harder now, since defeating all the enemies results in tougher enemies showing up, but if you're careful, you can probably get most of the nodes without triggering the tougher waves. Or, stick to stag encounters, as they're not hostile. Just don't kill more than a few if you're so inclined, as some stag encounters are dragon hunting grounds, and if you kill enough stags, the dragon shows up. (If you know where to look, you can check to see if there are any sulfurous ash piles around; those indicate it's a dragon scene.) Sometimes unicorns show up- if you immediately see a "you sense a threat approaching" message as sson as you enter a stag scene, it means unicorns, which are only hostile if attacked.

 

@Justiciar

Just for fun
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...y-daily-500g-from-the-oracle-spoilers.110718/
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...a-crafter-huh-think-again.111241/#post-951836
and
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...e-an-extra-stupid-question-crafting-xp.112149

 

Yep. Even my alts don't buy from my crafters, because if I need something or want it on a timeline, it's just quicker and cheaper to buy from a veteran player with a commission-free vendor, a tax-free lot, and recipes collected over years of play. I can buy from the vet players and be able to furnish my house tonight.... or I can wait till I collect enough wood and recipes and maybe get the house furnished sometime next spring.... And that's despite using discoverable recipes whenever possible. Not to mention that most of my characters have no desire to spend their time killing things, which is the only way to get mats.

And now to top it off, Chris is talking about making recipes salvagable for XP, which means there will be fewer of them on vendors and crafters will be even more dependant on adventuring than they already are. :-(

I don't care about earning XP, I'm not trying to make fancy gear anyway. I just want Dara and Gwaithne to live simple lives on a simple lot, to enjoy making things, and to be able to make their rent without relying on that horrible Oracle. But it seems they should never have left the Hidden Vale, because the only way I see that happening is if they still lived within daily range of the Kingsroad and Valeway. I could have done it there -- would have been bored out of my mind grinding the same scenes for mats, but at least I wouldn't have been forced to be an adventurer. But no, I fell love in with Axwich and was determined to live there.... So now it looks like they're going to be permanently in debt to my wealthier characters. :-(

 

When you turn in a quest, you get both Adventure and Crafting XP as a reward.

Also, if you have all your Crafting skills turned off the pool builds until you turn one on to training.

 

Hello.

Actually I have all of my crafting skills turned on except for the intermediate gathering/refining locate/batch/speed skills which I've left at 40. I figure I'll cap my base skills at 100 and let efficiency go as high as it wants.
Even so, I'm at about 200k crafting xp pool and 50k adventuring xp pool.
@Bedawyn Well, my avatar spends every Sunday in Solace area trying to use up the 77000 producer XP he gets each week. NOT easy at 200 a use. That's, what, 6 hours game time of fishing? I have a reasonable amount of mats, mostly currently in ingots/lumber/thread/leather/misc ore/butter/garlic/corpse wax. I can stock up a reasonable amount of processed meat/fish/black pearls if you need it. Unfortunately I spent all my gold and silver ingots on zapping my crappy items with +1s. Maybe we can set up weekly trades or something.

Right now my combat is 350hp/350fp using (Dex buff + resist buff + moon sight + defensive stance + dodge + flaming weapon) and then (Blind + normal arrow or Armor Piercing 20-30 crit 60). My general annoyance is that I have no significant AOE attacks (level 10 fireball and level 10 Earthquake don't do much damage and fail a lot of the time) and tend to get beat up rather easily when 3 or 4 or 6 opponents gang up on me. Comments and tips appreciated.
Also, does anyone actually use Passive Stance? It seems worthless or maybe I'm just not thinking about all possible builds.
Btw, I got my first COTO drop from an Obsidian Cultist Mage in the Skeletons random encounter around Ardoris. Yay!

I also have a question about area tiers, which are a bit confusing.
(Minor Spoilers if you're a new Player)
A Lost Whiteguard Silver Mine (Tier 2) Whiteguard Skeleton Fighter is 200-400hp and a reasonable challenge for my level 50 archer/mage (I spent a LOT of points on sword, blunt, and polearm which I don't use and have scattered my mage points across 6 of the 9 elements so don't consider me really level 50). A Tower of the Shuttered Eye Approach (Tier 4) Grizzly Bear is 200-400hp and less of a challenge than said skeleton fighter. It seems that both creature deadliness and creature hitpoints are far more variable than just simply by tier. Are they primarily geared towards the level of the "creating" avatar?
Also, what tier are the random encounter bosses around Ardoris/Soltown? Tier 5?

Thanks!