Suggestions for new stuff and various changes

[Brosephine]

Here are my thoughts on what's needed to take the game forward right now. I've thought them through pretty carefully, and I can't see any glaring issues or gamebrakers yet.

Brace yourselves, this is a long post - you might want to sit yourself down comfortably with a cup of tea.

Boats
It's pretty much a given that boats will be on their way shortly, but what will these boats be, and what will we need to make them?

My suggestion for the first, most basic type of boat is a Logboat canoe, or Einbaum if you want to be German about it. It should be created from a single log, either by using a new skill or new tool on one (perhaps a chisel?)

Give chickens a purpose
There's tons of them around, but they don't seem to serve any purpose other than to increase load on the server. Same goes for frogs and rats. Either implement something to do with these things or remove them until you do.

Swimming
Swimming has a number of problems with it right now, and I'm not talking about the fact that you will drown in precisely 2 seconds if you don't have high constitution.

1. You are currently safer walking through shallow water if you can't swim than if you are. It's ironic that the second you learn how to swim, you can drown. A player who can't swim can waltz along the riverbanks care free, but a player who can swim could find themselves in a watery grave through accidentally stepping into a deep tile. Make players have to right click and choose 'swim' in order to enter water.

2.My character died due to lag rather than insufficient constitution - sliding through the ground while stuck in the swimming animation, with unresponsive controls. Don't drain stamina constantly - it could mean death for anyone, with ANY amount of constitution. Either drain stamina only when moving (and don't allow raising of stamina in water either), or drain stamina after every x tiles of movement.

Make fishing suck less
With only a tiny fraction of the old world having access to surface water, I never got to try fishing. Now, with all these rivers, fishing seems like it could be fun. But it isn't. How do we make fishing fun?
More types of fish to catch, and optional bait types to increase the chances of catching different fish

Re-work FEPs and stat gains
As it seems that stats are becoming more meaningful, it also seems that the current methods of gaining them are inadequate. My old character had constitution up in the mid 40's, but strength was still the default 10. Despite my big health pool, I still couldn't kill much of anything over level 5. Worse, this 45+ con left me in a catch 22: I needed to eat a huge amount of boar, fox or bear to gain even a single strength point - but It just wasn't possible to find and successfully kill that amount of animals. Indeed, the main issue was actually FINDING that amount of animals before I starved.

Also, actual FEP's given by various foods seem daft. Why do honeybuns make me more agile? Aren't they just going to make me fat? Why does the meat of a scrawny little fox make me strong, but a slab of roast beef doesn't?

How come my character, who spent her life chopping down trees, mining, and building palisades still hasn't gained a single point of strength? The fact that food affects your stats is awesome, but let's not get carried away.

Here are my suggestions on FEPs and stat gains:
Basic, boring plain bread should not give any FEPs. It should be mere sustenance. The whole reason my consitution was so disportionately high compared to my other stats was that I had little access to anything but bread, apples and cows.
Use of skills should give FEPs Since we can now put LP into things like farming, mining, carpentry, etc, it would make sense if every time we performed actions that checked our skill values, we had a chance to gain FEPs relating to that skill (the chance of gaining FEPs would differ between skills, too):

Unarmed combat: Str, Agi, Con
Melee Combat: Str, Agi, Con
Marksmanship: Dex
Exploration: Per, Int
Stealth: Per, Agi, Dex, (Psy?)
Sewing: Dex, Cha
Smithing: Str, Dex, Int
Carpentry: Str, Dex, Int
Cooking: Dex, Int, Cha
Farming: Str, Int
Survival: Per, Con

This would allow the guy who eats bread, fish, cattle all his life to still gain a little strength and dexterity if he spends his life doing the right things.

Fix animal corpsecamping
Yeah, I'm getting pretty damn tired of it to be honest. Often it forces me to log off. I'd probably prefer animals that were weaker but could actually permadeath you than this whole 'I'm an unstoppable force and I'm going to stand over you and keep poking you back down until you log out' routine.

Bog Iron
I saved the best for last.

I want Bog Iron. I don't want you to change the requirements to find rustroot atall. If we have Bog Iron, the requirements are fully justified.

It's pretty much a given that getting Iron from a bog should be less rewarding than Iron from a mine, but there are two ways of doing this.

1. Put an iron quality requirment on making wrought iron, and have Bog Iron always be below this number.

2. According to the 100% accurate source that is wikipedia, real-world bog Iron is infact prized for being resistant to rust, which I suppose would mean it is essentially better quality than Iron from a mine. However, it's clearly less abundant. Have Bog Iron be high quality, but require considerable digging through to find - I imagine the process would be much like digging for clay, only you most of the time you'd just get high quality soil (peat) or worthless mud rather than iron ore. Perhaps the chance of whether you get peat or iron could be swayed one way or another by your nature/industry slider.

That's all for now!

[kobnach]

Good thoughts as always.

With regard to one point though, it's too late now but you could have gotten strength in 2 ways:

1) curds and other cheeses - intestines could be gathered by wandering around picking up discards, and the rest of the ingredients require no ability to kill
2) beer

[sabinati]

some really good ideas here

foxes give int though

[Peter]

I would like to express my whole-hearted support of all these items.

A few extensions:
It should be possible to make a small raft or boat that can be moved overland, allowing the movement from one river system to the next without building a whole new boat.

I support "Bog Iron as bare minimum" idea, even though it might not be accurate, it would allow the occasional bar of cast for chests and trapdoors.

Oh, and marksman should give Dex/Agi/Str.

[Ai_Shizuka]

I agree about pretty much everything, except the bread thing.

I was in the same situation with high con and low str on the old map, but there's an easy work-around: beer. It will take a while at first, but when your crops are in full swing you'll have a basically endless source of str FEP.
I'd agree about bread not giving FEP if we had a reliable source of butter to make apple pies. But right now cows are some kind of urban legend, so bread is the only reliable source of con FEP for new players (if they manage to get some goddamn wheat seeds, that is).

I'd like to add a few lines about apples. New players have to live on apples, wich are a royal pain in the ass, from every point of view.
First, I'd really like to know why we don't have the option to pick them on a loop like branches. For the love of baby jesus, WHY hasn't this been implemented yet? You've already coded it for branches and chipped stones. PLEASE add it for apples as well.
Second, it's utterly ridicolous that we have to eat a couple hundred (literally) apples to go through a working day. They don't give any FEP (wich I think is fine), so just make them fill some 20% hunger. This is a clear example of gameplay>realism (and 200 apples a day isn't realism to begin with). Going through the apple clickfest every 15 minutes isn't exactly my idea of fun.
There are no secondary effects whatsoever, just a crapton less clicking.

[Brosephine]

I support "Bog Iron as bare minimum" idea, even though it might not be accurate, it would allow the occasional bar of cast for chests and trapdoors.

Yes, I lean towards this too, purely because while not realistic, it's much easier to balance for the sake of the game. Some people would call this lazy game design, but I can tell you, as someone who spent several years as head GM on a UO shard with around 200 active players, designing things for an MMO is not easy, as players are naturally going to seek to exploit everything as much as the game allows.

I'm sure the devs here have probably been both amazed and infuriated (often at the same time) by players abilities to find ways of doing things that they never intended.

I know I sure was when I was in their kind of position.

[Brosephine]

First, I'd really like to know why we don't have the option to pick them on a loop like branches. For the love of baby jesus, WHY hasn't this been implemented yet? You've already coded it for branches and chipped stones. PLEASE add it for apples as well.

Can't agree with this more. Harvesting apples is tedious, and eating them almost equally tedious too.

It really goes beyond apples, though, as on the whole, food requirements across the entire game are already far higher than is realistic.

[Potjeh]

I think it should be possible to just right-click on an apple tree and select "feed". You could still pick apples the old-fashioned way if you want some for the road.

[Machenoid]

Either implement something to do with these things or remove them until you do.

This is all that needs to be said. Half-finished features should simply be disabled until the time comes up that they're either completed, or needed by something, or else they can be temporarilly be redirected into another use. Non-iron metals have no use other then to take up mine point space; since disabling them wouldn't be possible, they should be able to be mined but turned into iron... Until they can be used for what they are intended to be used for.

[sabinati]

at the pace that they develop this game i'm sure the new metals will have value very soon.