Ø wrote:It's 8 weeks minimum to get there, right?
. . .
Can you explain time gates for me? What am I missing/misunderstanding?
Level 6 is when people get gold, or whatever level they moved it to this world. Other than trombone chantrelle blocks, which are level 9 exclusive, you've got access to most everything at level 6. So around 6 weeks, when people have had time to exploit level 6, is when the game progression is more or less "complete" in terms of time gated content access. It takes less than 2 weeks to make MBC, and a little over 3 weeks to make Oscypki, so certain top tier cheeses would certainly become rare rather than staples of the endgame diet; they'd be bottlenecked not by mass vinegar which you could start at day 1 relatively easily by pressing apples, but by how many aurochs or sheep or whatever you wanted to try to start taming early, which would determine milk availability, which would then determine your total cheese potential output.
Lower levels just set the stage for higher availability of blood ore nodes, which you need to spiral your anvils to infinity. You need trees for higher QL pickaxes to increase speed of mining, and for branches to make higher quality stone axes, but if you really spiral, you can actually outstrip your stone axes by making ridiculous quality tinkerer's axes for mining quality nodes and shears for butchering. We had extremely good anvil and hammer in Whatever Bay, but the world leader was still about 80 ql ahead of us, because they started to spiral before level 9 - It wasn't a big deal for them because they had fully automated smelting of all their iron ore.
Level 9, or 8 weeks, isn't the end of progression, but it just starts when quality progression more or less as a matter of necessity shifts to spiraling, which not many people have the fortitude to do, much less for 12 months.
There are 52 weeks (and a day or 2) in a year, so we if we had 4 wipes per year, we'd have 13 week wipe cycles. We'd achieve content completion by major factions at 6 weeks, optional spiraling endgame by 8 weeks, then wipe at the end of the 13th week.
If all time gates remained the same, we'd have about 2 months of progression then 1 month of endgame where major factions could optionally grind for slight quality advances, and other groups could play catch-up. It'd mean that the a group could pull ahead by botting certain production goods (cheese, iron), but that these methods of production would never be a necessity to remain competitive.
There are also more catchup mechanics than ever before in Haven. This wipe introduced freely available windsown weeds, tree seeds in badger setts, and high quality rock in boreworm caves. If FEPs and credos were a little easier to grind, and your group learned to utilize these free quality handouts, any organized village even of moderate size should be able to hit the endgame rather easily every wipe.
I see no real issues with the timegates and a 13 week wipe schedule. The only issue is the amount of time that is consumed to complete these tasks. Frankly, you could elegantly handle this in a lot of different ways. But if you wanted to be inelegant, you could literally just double ALL base outputs in the world (every non-craft menu task that would produce x1 product would instead produce x2), double every stack size, double all fluid container sizes, and cut credo quests required to unlock credos in half.