Craft burn mats should be farmable

I should be able to gather wax somehow or create it.

Drop from creature... a was tree to pick.

Create creosote...

I should be able to collect salt.

 

I completely agree. Charcoal could be added to the list as well.

 

Probably intended as a gold sink.

 

Natural hives should be available as tree resources to gather wax and honey.


Beyond that, beehives could be agriculture as well (without watering).

 

Curing salts are half the cost in Ardoris as they are in Soltown...just FYI.

Edit: and now today they are the same price - ? Yesterday I was suddenly getting charged 16g for each curing salt in Soltown, but 8g in Ardoris. Today they're both 8g. Guessing the price was lowered.

Ha, and now the price is 12g in Soltown...so the price fluctuates by day I guess.

 

They could do this indirectly. So hundreds of people killing mobs in adjacent hexes and vendoring trash lowers the cost of NPC mats. Whereas hundreds of people crafting and doing nothing else slowly raises them.

I'm not sure what mechanics have been put into the game to have external events drive NPC prices. I don't care about being able to craft them myself, but I do like the thought there's something I can do to push the prices.

 

Fuels (burn mats) are on a sliding scale for how much is sold in an area. So buying more at Ardoris will raise the price there. If you can find a remote spot to purchase, and the price should be very low.

Regardless, there still needs to be a way to bypass purchasing these from a vendor. Inefficiently, of course, because they are a gold sink, but possible.

 

I would like to point out that the gold you spend for mats is removed from the economy. This is a dangerous mechanic in as much as mats are not an optional choice for us. We can keep our cash flowing in the economy by choosing not to buy this or that deco item. If you decide to build the deco item yourself, buying the mats to build it is essentially the same as purchasing the item outright. The money leaves the economy either way. Such a drain is unsustainable and will eventually quell all the excitement and expectations people now have for the game. You are 100% right. All mats should be collectable.

 

Ah, thank you! I'll try to remember to load up when I'm off the beaten path.

Totally agree. I've spent about 20k so far on just curing salts and wax, just getting to tailor proficiency 60. Only even been here a week! That's a bit too powerful of a gold sink IMO. Although partly it was not realizing what was up with the prices.

 

yes, this is a sandbox game. I think once the economy gets rolling they will/should stop selling from npc vendors and introduce the capability to mine the ingredients. I was/am under the impression they want players to run the economy and not npc's.

 

did we not be able to mine coal at one time?

 

I'm pretty sure they just didn't want every player house to look like Scrooge McDuck's basement, like in UO. They're just jelly of our freedom, though.

 

Yes please to fuels obtainable somewhere other than paying a fortune for them.

 

You can still mine coal in some scenes. I did it last week but I can't for the life of me remember where it was - I didn't consider it worth committing to memory.

That being said I imagine we'll see more coal nodes once the overland scenes get updated after/alongside the various NPC towns.

 

It isn't 'dangerous' it is essential.

If you just have mobs dropping gold and things you can sell to an NPC for gold without a sink to take it back out of the system again then you just get inflation as you see in some other games where prices just keep rising endlessly.

Managing a game economy is a complex thing, and you can't just rely on property taxes as most of us are tax free and it will be some time before there are enough players paying taxes to make a difference.

So yes, fuel should have a gold cost and no it should not be possible to harvest everything.

 

It is indeed essential if the mats are player sourced (in addition to NPC created). However if players cannot mine or collect the resources for sale, then the NPC sale is essentially a tax that removes gold from the system. This tax is crippling for the economy. This "tax" is not even comparable to the real world we know because at least in the real world, taxed money does come back into the economy through infrastructure projects and redistribution. The system that is developing in SOTA has a source of cash from mob drops, sales to NPCs of collected resources, purchased assets from the game store and COTA drops. Sinks are lot taxes, and sale of non collectable resources to players. The often ignored economic contribution is the time spent by players doing stuff. You have to ask why do players do stuff? Some RP imaginary scenarios play out off the economic grid, but most play to advance economically or obtain neat stuff (larger houses, neat deco, and etc.). The present mob drop of 10 gold or so on even the strongest and most difficult mobs is an example of what is dangerous. It is an example of where the game is ignoring the time and effort of players to "advance", which will eventually cause them to quit the game in frustration. This is what I mean by dangerous. People need a reason to participate in this economy beyond the RP. We need to support both if the game is to be IRL successful. A good quest system is loads of fun, but it cannot support the day to day activities of thousands of players ongoing unless new quests are being developed and introduced continuously. The extreme difficulty for the devs to develop even one successful quest line in three years demonstrates the future failure of the quest driven game. We need robust economic activity for the masses if we want the masses to play and buy.

 

With the difficulty in mining ore, very slow respawn rate and not many nodes available, I hope we never have to collect coal or anything else currently on vendors.

 

We should have the option to do both maybe. Gather or purchase ☺

 

I strongly believe that eventually... before the "real" Live Release... we will be able to harvest any/all fuels (or crafting materials in general for that matter) as well as purchase the fuels.

Harvesting coal is already an option (albeit in very small quantities of coal nodes in a given scene). I experimented in gathering some on the QA server and it frankly wasn't worth the time spent for the few that could be collected. It would be much more efficient to kill mobs for loot and then buy the fuels with the profits.

There is also a recipe for Curing Salt - made from salt ingots... which I've not yet found but may exist somewhere? This will likely be a valid option to gathering curing salt.

Devs have also stated that buckets of water will be able to be collected for agriculture at some point. Other options for watering may include the weather (rain) and even possibly from the /rain emote and/or the soothing rain spell in the water magic tree!

They have also said they like the idea of having bee hives so that we can make our own wax as well as honey (for brewing / cooking / other?)

My point is, they've already started to provide us options for gathering fuels and by their comments on the telethons and deep dives... they seem to think that being able to gather fuels is essential to the crafting system. We just happen to be in the early stages of game development and it's just not implemented yet.

For now, we will just have to rely on purchasing it but it won't be that way forever.