Coal mine.

I burn a fortune in coal with all the smelting I do, if there was a mine designed to be fairly easy to harvest I would spend a fair amount of time there. Coal is a basic enough resource that it shouldnt require extreme effort to gather.

I normally mine in solo or friends, but if there minimal monsters and enough nodes in close proximity that a large number of people could stand around and mine continually while we chat, it would be much more fun and social to mine in multiplayer.

 

This and add salt mine too, for food & curing leather.

 

I would also love a coal mine, but I do not have high hope there would only be minimal monsters there. Perhaps they could put only one or two difficult monsters there to encourage multiplayer, and it could stay dead for awhile, allowing us to harvest and socialize for a while. I agree we should have a salt mine as well. When (well, if) the coal mines and salt mines are implemented, remove salt and coal from the NPC crafting merchants to create a player market. Eventually, maybe we will even have areas with beehives where we can farm wax, or become beekeepers to "grow" our own.

 

I hadnt even thought of a salt mine, but now you point it out it seems obvious.
And wax farms as well, why not? Once the ball starts rolling we could and should eventually produce all the base materials ourselves.

 

Agreed, monsters are likeley. The flipside of that though is it will only really result in us farming the monsters as a group as well and increase the areas drop rate. That is nice for us, I would put in a special request for lots of tiny spiders and farm them for venom sacks while I mine coal, but then have to account for the constant surplus of spider parts that coal miners constantly flood the market with. Having few monsters, or like you say slowing their respawn, could keep a better handle on resource production as well and not just make it more casual chat friendly.

 

I agree that coal should be a harvestable resource, like granite. At the same time it should also be made more expensive in NPC shops, to effect a proper value on the market.

 

That would make it the same value as copper or iron ore. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, I dont know really.
Another good method might be to increase the droprate of coal only nodes by 150% or something to lower the time investment value of the coal. That would hopefully keep the coal price somewhere where it is now.

Hard to really say about the economic effects, but whatever the outcome it should be easy enough to deal with.

 

At the moment coal nodes drop 1-2 coal and there is very few nodes in any scene ... hopefully more added before it is removed from vendors heh

 

It's a mystery why coal isn't already readily available to harvest. Some scenes (like Solace Forest and its clones) have had a few coal nodes for many many releases, but not enough to go there to harvest them.

 

+ 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1

They had coal as a harvestable ressource but removed it nearly everywhere. A coal-mine would be nice.

 

Didn't realize there were some in - I've seen what LOOKS like a coal node, but never been able to interact with it.

I'm sure the devs have bigger plans than I do, and are prolly way ahead of my thinking, but I think it is essential to the economy that more resources and reagents become player-driven, for the economy, and for the value of magic etc. I know not everyone agrees with me, but personally reagents are too cheap and readily available. Increasing gathering potential and NPC price, while decreasing vendor availability will help balance, imho. However, I know there is the gold-sink issue to worry about too. I'll stop there, lest I derail this thread, but have some thoughts about this that will become a post soon. Think about what it would look like right now if ore was available for 6gp in every town.

 

I remember bringing up salt mines before, and it makes perfect sense. Something like harvest Rock Salt from the mine, and then break it down to either Curing Salt or ordinary table salt for cooking.
Also, They actually did have a couple of coal nodes in this game, I think before persistence in one of the mines ( I believe it was in Varsailles or Verdantis ). But those nodes were removed or disabled. (there may still be the odd one out there I don't know about)
I suspect that it will eventually make it back into the game.

 

I think @rild is spot on. Everything should be player harvested, farmed, and sold to boost the economy. The devs are unlikely to do it though due to wanting that gold sink for crafters.

Definitely add a solid +1 for the idea from me though.

 

Could use alchemy table for this process, another refinement. Crossing crafting tables for resources is good.

We need to come up with some great gold sinks. Thing is tho, the rich might have no problem paying vendors a high price for convenience on casting reagents, so in some situations that takes care of itself - especially if resources are almost exclusively grown or foraged - finite supply means on some days a player would just have to buy it - at least if they want to go take on that boss.

So I would prefer to see gold sinks appear as opt-ins, like purchases. Convenience and decoration are always choices a player doesn't have to make. This is where gold sinks should be targeting, imho. It gets annoying when you just feel like you're getting taxed for being an advanced player. Most games are forced to resort to this, but I'm hoping (and hopeful!) Portalarium can come up with some more elegant solutions. The COTO Exchange system has affected gold transfer between players positively.

 

Having a NPC seller for them is hopefully only temporary untill the infrastructure to do it ourselves is in place.
Not sure the price increase will be needed once the players take over, but whatever price will work itself out once it becomes a propper free market.

 

Thinking about it, there are other crafting options if we wanted to explore them. You can get salt from dehydrating sea water. You can make charcoal from timber by heating it.


I am thinking with an open economy this could be the one game where they never need to implement gold sinks or anything like them.

It is intending to be a real world style economy, and we dont have cash sinks in the real world. Wealthy people just find more and more things to spend their money on.
The major gold sink should be players themselves, we hoard resources and desire all the things.

 

Not really a mystery unfortunately. @DarkStarr has revealed not too long ago that fuels wouldn't be harvestable (assuming I understood correctly). This is one way of balancing the economy.

Personally, I'd prefer they stuck with the original thinking that ALL materials be harvestable. The "fuels" in crafting would naturally be some of the most abundant and/or easily acquired resources but they seem to want to ensure that crafting has a base cost. I can kinda see there they're coming from with this but not sure I agree. If we could harvest 'fuels' there would still be plenty of crafters who would buy them players and that would set the base prices of the segment of the economy.

On the other hand.. as they are now.. fuels are a solid gold sink. So there's that. Still, I'd prefer alternatives.

 

Who would want to harvest coal? Whew. I mean, you'd have to get up at five o'clock in the morning--up before the sun. By the time your harvest work way down, down was over you'd be too tired for having fun. So tired you'd be about to slip down. How long could this go on?

 

I dont keep up to date on everything. Can you link to where you heard that please?

If you are correct and this is simply the way it it, that would be very disapointing.
One of the major draw points was the free economy. If that is no longer an intended feature it would be quite upseting.

 

I mine in the evenings.