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Forest for the Trees..

Discussion in 'Wishlist Requests' started by Omnedon, Jul 28, 2022.

?

Should trees and wood get some love?

Poll closed Aug 11, 2022.
  1. Absolutely! Love on that wood!

    85.7%
  2. Best Idea ever!

    21.4%
  3. Um no.. we need more fish first.

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  4. Everything is fine how it is stop changing things!

    7.1%
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  1. Omnedon

    Omnedon Avatar

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    OK, I'm sure this has been brought up many a time in different ways, but I'ma give it my own shot, being inspired by the recent change in Solace Bridge Outskirts...

    Trees are an issue IMHOP. Here's the things I find bothersome...

    1) Its confusing to new people starting out that they can only chop the orangish trees

    2) there's lush forests everywhere but only a handful of choppable trees in any given scene. (unfinished feel and frustrating)

    3) There's almost always some kind of mob around a tree.. why do I always have to fight? Sometimes I just want to be a lumberjack, and that's OK!

    4) Only two types of wood FROM trees. Maple and Pine.

    5) We have Oak furniture, no oak trees. Now we have Redwood furniture, no Redwood Trees. We have green Elven furniture, but no green type of wood/tree (wood with emerald spinkles.. really?)

    6) We have different tree types we can see but are useless, which big time makes things feel unfinished.. here's a few off the top of my head...
    6a) Palm Trees (sometimes a coconut on the ground near it)
    6b) Apple Trees (is there ever any apples?)
    6c) Tropical Trees (can see bananas on the tree but where are the bananas?)
    6d) Oak trees (unchoppable)
    6e) Ash trees (unchopable)
    6f) Yew Trees (unchoppable but hey they should be listed as endangered, am i right?)
    6g) Burned up trees

    7) I seem to recall a long time ago being told don't worry, we'd be getting more trees... what we got were variations of wood on pine and maple that we have to create ourselves and ashen wood that drops as loot..
    THIS really feels like the devs at the time were taking a short cut, and throwing us a bone hoping we'd forget the trees..

    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    Now I'm not going to pretend I know how involved it would be to change up the code some or how time consuming it would be to change trees, or how much it would impact performance to *spruce* things up a bit.. but here's what I'd like to see

    1) remove the orange color from chopables, maybe have them flash green like ore.
    2) increase the TYPES of trees that can be cut, don't be silly about this. and it's ok if certain trees can only be found in certain scenes.
    3) remove the hard maple, crimson pine, etc from being *created* in milling If I find like a hard maple tree, I should be able to chop it down, then mill that into timber and boards, its ok if I have to add an ingrediant to mill properly.
    4) fruit or nut bearing type trees, instead of chopping them for wood, at least make them harvestable. whoa speaking of which, we get Pecan nuts all the fricken time in game, where's the pecan trees?!?!
    5) Give trees regrowth timers.. Chop a tree down.. stump. 5 mins late it pops up again.. BUT if you try to chop it, it says not grown enough to be forested. 5 mins later it can be chopped but maybe only give 1 wood, then in increments of like 5 - 10 mins gives +1 more wood and a possible meticulous of +1.
    The older a tree the more wood, resin, bark etc it can potentially produce. you get the idea..
    6) If a scene is named woodland, or forest, or timberland etc.. MAKE SURE THERES A LOT OF TREES
    7) of course with great variation comes great colors!! wood furniture the wooden parts are based on the color of the wood used.
    8) at some point introduce stains/paint to change the color of the wood on furniture.

    Seriously, if it takes a dev cycle or 2 to do this, or just a few scenes / tree types per release.. totally worth it!
     
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  2. FBohler

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    I remember a dev (Chris or Garriott? Not sure) describing on stream the following emulated player reaction:

    "Wow there's a forest here, nice. Oh, a different tree? Maybe I can chop that one. Nice, I can!"

    How it really went (at least for me):
    "Okay I need to chop trees. Why can't I chop any tree in the first place? Why only a handful seem to work properly? Is it a bug or my skill is too low? That sucks!"

    My suggestion to work around this issue is making every tree harvestable and having the current "orange" trees yield special/noble wood and the "decoration trees" yield regular wood, scraps, barks and the such.

    And yeah, not being able to interact with barely any tree made me feel like the game was unfinished and buggy at the same time when I played it for the first time.
     
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  3. Sentinel2

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    It's one of the reasons I've gone to the starter zones to chop trees.

    Not to cause people problems. THAT'S where the trees are!

    Forests spawn trees horribly slow. There are some area's I like better than others. But I agree. If something is named a forest, it should have a LOT of trees to cut.
     
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  4. Anpu

    Anpu Avatar

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    You are aware that they changed Solace Bridge Outskirts and it no longer has vast amounts of fast spawning trees?

    If you want however to chop down a ton of trees, head of to the Verdantis Shardfall.
     
  5. Ysold

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    When Solace Bridge Outskirts shut down for us lumberjacks, I spent some 6 hours checking all lower level areas (or at least most of them) for trees. I found many, many areas with only 4, 8 or 12 choppable trees. Those are not useable for serious lumberjacking. There are areas with about 25 choppable trees and have the same basis map: Twins foothills, Serpent's Spine foothills, South Shattered hills, Whiteguard foothills (maybe there are more areas with the same basic map that I haven't discovered). Those CAN be used for serious woodchopping.
    On one hand is is rather boring to walk the same map over and over again, but on the other hand knowing where all the trees are makes the job very easy. When I also gather cotton, one round in one of those areas covers the respawn time of the wood. But it would be nice if all lower level areas had a nice supply of wood. There are some very small zones; I wouldn't expect to find 25 choppable trees there, but most of the lower level areas are normal size and those could use some love.

    As for more types of wood: that would chopping wood more interesting, but it would also require a overhaul of the crafting system. For now, I'm quite content with the crafting system as is, and I would rather have the devs spending time on other things.

    As for higher level areas: there's Ulfheim for wood, but there's not many alternatives. So getting some nice xp from chopping trees is quite hard. I've already suggested Ruined Keep as an area that would be good to receive a nice bunch of trees and some more trees in Tanglemire would be great too.
     
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  6. Omnedon

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    I don’t see why it would take an overhaul of the crafting system.
    In my example, for example, Hard Maple.
    Trees are assign as this wood type.
    Chop the trees.
    The change is in the milling only.
    Mill Hard Maple into timber.
    Mill the timber into boards.

    that’s it. Hard maple binding, handles etc doesn’t change. Items made from this doesn’t change, not the recipes not the values.

    just how you acquire the wood and mill it.

    As for furniture/houses..that can be done a bit at a time if possible or even wanted.

    not counting heartwood types, there’s already 6 types of wood in game. Just by adding those types trees and changing milling only, that triples what we got now.

    Fruit/nut trees being foraging, just makes them interactive. Not a single recipe would have to change.

    I think the hardest part would actually be setting the trees in the maps. Point is, more trees & more variety. Worry about new stuff like oak, redwood, etc later
     
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  7. Sentinel2

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    Yes, I am aware. I heard about the change on Lunch with Laz and Jack.

    One less reason for advanced characters to visit low level scenes.

    Other MMO games they embrace characters of all levels. Here we keep them apart :/
     
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  8. John Markus

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    I was always a fan of game logics being plausible, instead of being restrictive just to restrict players.

    It would be good if you can add scene-wide aggro value, which increases when you cut down improper (young) trees, or kill enemies that cannot fight back or are too weak. When the scene-wide aggro reaches certain threshholds, it introduces flocks of high-mobility creatures (i.e. creatures that flies and ignores walls) that will attack the offender.
    Other players are recommended to laugh at those people being attacked by "a murder of crows" (murder means "group" for crows) and is chased off scene.

    Things like that can be used to control those who abuse the game environment, while keeping the game world plausible.
     
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  9. John Markus

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    I have my backgrounds as a MUSH GM (doing mostly Economy stuff).
    The rules I go by is known as ICAICC, OCAOCC.

    In Character Action = In Character Consequences,
    Out of Character Action = Out of Character Consequences.

    To me, reducing number of tree resource nodes (while having a lot of other trees present), or erecting invisible walls, etc does not seem very IC.
    Sure it is an easy fix, but to be plausible as In Character Consequences, it should either adhere to, or create a new story to support it.
     
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