Where next?

[Mannimarco]

Hello there, I have a small village with several friends, we have a palisade, crops of many kinds, and a leatherworking industry set up. We are currently working on expanding our palisade to make room for more crops.

At this point, I'm not really sure where to go next. We don't have access to Rustroot or any other things for prospecting/mining, or any other high end foragables. My character is fairly developed, I have a Q15 sling, 20MM, 15UC, 1MC. I think now this the time to start focusing on combat. I'm wondering, should I focus on levelling up my MM to 100, and getting a decent quality bow?(I have a Q20 bow set aside for later now.) MM100 seems far away, and Q40 bow quality seems impossible, are these really the minimum for using the bow?

What is the general consensus on what is needed to tackle your average player, should I focus on UC, MC or MM now? Should we work on our exploration skills and try and forage for metal instead? Melee Combat seems useless without swords or axes.

[MagicManICT]

Mining is a good target for a next major goal. Silk production could be. You could become dedicated foragers looking for high end curiosities and pearls. If you don't want to get all of it going at once, you'll definitely need to get to trading for what you're not going to produce.

[bitza]

it sounds like you have a lot to do before focusing on combat skills. do you have a village idol? if not you should consider one as among many other benefits, it offers the ability to exit your place without having to use keys. marksmanship and survival will help you towards the goal of killing bears and deer (for idol materials)

is anyone planting trees? planting trees allows you to increase the quality of your lumber which has many many applications towards making other higher quality goods from food to leather to metal to silk and so on (including a higher quality bow!)

with 100 MM and a q20 bow, you're still more or less useless at pvp. archery can be a viable combat build but without access to certain high quality goods and a specific character build (a ton of perception and survival in addtion to MM), any old swinging dick in a bronze plate is more or less impervious to your arrows. for the average player, MM is more useful for hunting animals, and UA and melee are what you use for pvp. but remember that all the UA, MC and gear in the world is useless if you don't understand the combat system (and it is a bit daunting at first)

i notice you didn't mention your exploration level. raise exploration and perception and you'll find rustroot and then there's plenty of opportunity to prospect metal deposits.

[Mannimarco]

it sounds like you have a lot to do before focusing on combat skills. do you have a village idol? if not you should consider one as among many other benefits, it offers the ability to exit your place without having to use keys. marksmanship and survival will help you towards the goal of killing bears and deer (for idol materials)

is anyone planting trees? planting trees allows you to increase the quality of your lumber which has many many applications towards making other higher quality goods from food to leather to metal to silk and so on (including a higher quality bow!)

with 100 MM and a q20 bow, you're still more or less useless at pvp. archery can be a viable combat build but without access to certain high quality goods and a specific character build (a ton of perception and survival in addtion to MM), any old swinging dick in a bronze plate is more or less impervious to your arrows. for the average player, MM is more useful for hunting animals, and UA and melee are what you use for pvp. but remember that all the UA, MC and gear in the world is useless if you don't understand the combat system (and it is a bit daunting at first)

i notice you didn't mention your exploration level. raise exploration and perception and you'll find rustroot and then there's plenty of opportunity to prospect metal deposits.

No village idol, though we have brought down a couple of boars and aurochs, so I guess it might be time to start working on getting the materials. We have all the necessary materials for tree farming, but we haven't started yet. We're waiting until we have a larger area palisaded off, so that we have more space for tree farming and such, it's what we're working on now. I have 25 exp, and grabbing another 25 Exp is also fairly daunting. (We have access to practically no perception foods.). I am thinking maybe of becoming the dedicated Forager rather than Fighter, then, and work on getting my exploration up. But I am curious, in terms of PvP, is UA or Melee generally considered better? I've watched a few videos of raids, and they all seem to be using UA all the time, is it generally regarded as the preferable late game combat set up?

[ImAwesome]

a side note, you don't need rustroot or prospecting to mine. rustroot is used to find nodes you can't get to from a cave. if you're near a cave and have a stone axe, get in there and start prospecting manually. as you mine into the wall of the cave a bit you'll get ore in inventory or stone will fall on the ground, if stone falls on the ground check the quality(good way to get better stone axes if like me your closest mountain is a 30 minute trip with no stone node). after you get setup mining and hopefully find some iron building a brickwall so you're actually protected should be your next goal.

goal summary: quality->village idol->mining->develop your character to a basic level->spar with friends to learn combat system

a q15 sling only has a max damage of 73, raise it
at 20 mm you probably take well over a minute to aim each shot, raise it
at 15 ua you can barely fight ants, raise it
if you're thinking a q40 bow is 'in range' you're softcapping your string quality too much its based on survival(very important skill), raise it alot

I would probably add more advice here, but I don't know just how your stats look, or what you'd like to do in the game(2 very important factors).

[Mannimarco]

a side note, you don't need rustroot or prospecting to mine. rustroot is used to find nodes you can't get to from a cave. if you're near a cave and have a stone axe, get in there and start prospecting manually. as you mine into the wall of the cave a bit you'll get ore in inventory or stone will fall on the ground, if stone falls on the ground check the quality(good way to get better stone axes if like me your closest mountain is a 30 minute trip with no stone node). after you get setup mining and hopefully find some iron building a brickwall so you're actually protected should be your next goal.

goal summary: quality->village idol->mining->develop your character to a basic level->spar with friends to learn combat system

a q15 sling only has a max damage of 73, raise it
at 20 mm you probably take well over a minute to aim each shot, raise it
at 15 ua you can barely fight ants, raise it
if you're thinking a q40 bow is 'in range' you're softcapping your string quality too much its based on survival(very important skill), raise it alot

I would probably add more advice here, but I don't know just how your stats look, or what you'd like to do in the game(2 very important factors).

UA - 15
Melee - 1
MM - 20
Farming - 10
Survival - 20
Exploration - 25

Nearest cave for miles is inside an abandoned claim, and I don't have trespassing. Having better quality axe would be awesome, no mountain we've found so far, despite exploring almost every river system nearby to dead end. I could make a minehole, but don't those need metal?

Thanks for the advice everyone, it's much appreciated!

edit: No metal, needs wax though, which is beyond us. Our first returns from our wheat crops haven't come back yet, so we're not in a position to gain access to beehives.

[bitza]

afaik nobody does a pure melee build anymore (if anyone is, let us know how it's working out for you!)

if you see someone carrying a sword, they are most likely to be a UA/melee hybrid. people without swords are probably pure UA builds.

to go off ImAwesome's post: it makes more sense to prospect and find a metal deposit before you build a mine hole.

[ImAwesome]

UA - 15
Melee - 1
MM - 20
Farming - 10
Survival - 20
Exploration - 25

if you're a farmer you should be full nature and never try mining. if you're a miner you should be full industry and never farm(some very minor exceptions to this that I won't even mention).

your survival is horrid, an average boar should get you q50+ goodies, you're bringing them back in the mid 30's at best. if you're planning to farm you need much higher farming or your crop quality will plummet. if you don't have perception food boost your exploration so you can actually find foragables. if you have 25 perception(going to guess modestly) thats only 625 sight value, meaning you can't see most of the good foragables.

once you've gotten your survival up a bit I'd say work on your carpentry and make yourself a better bone saw since it will allow you to make better boards and from those boards better equipment(example: tanning tub quality counts in leather quality and you mentioned tanning).