v0.2.14 - Life Skills

Life Skills

Four skills gather:

• Mining — copper and iron in the forest, down through deepstone and runestone and voidglass, to tideglass and loomstone in the Sundering
• Woodcutting — birchwood up to weavewood
• Foraging — sunpetal, bittermoss, gloomcap and the rest, growing where you would expect them to
• Fishing — riverfin and silverscale in the shallows, abysspike and sunmaw in worse water

And three make something of it:

• Cooking — hearty stew, scholar's tea, hunter's skewer, angler's chowder, misty grog, cleric's broth, tidewater tonic, emberwine. A dish is a real buff, not a snack, and it shows up in your active effects with the food's own icon
• Construction — cut blocks, iron braces, reinforced beams, for the guild hall
• Refining — turns raw ore into what the Potential board eats

Each skill levels on its own, 1 to 45, and each node has a band — you cannot mine loomstone at Mining 1, and copper stops teaching you much long before the cap. Nodes sit out in the world where they belong, so gathering takes you somewhere rather than parking you at a station.

Stamina

Gathering spends stamina — one point per swing, cast or cut. You bank up to 1,000 of it and receive 100 a day.

The other source is Eloria's Favor. Every point of Favor you burn while hunting now also banks a point of stamina, one for one, and Favor stops burning entirely once your stamina is full so nothing is wasted. In practice that means the people who fight have plenty to gather with, and a day of clearing your dailies is worth far more than the daily hundred on its own.

Level cap is now 50

Five more levels, and with them +10 stat points.

To be clear about what these levels do and do not give you: 46 to 50 grant stat points and nothing else. Talent points still finish accruing at 40 and Ascension points still finish at 45 — those trees are not getting deeper, and the five new levels are not a new power tier. They are room to keep earning, and the stat points to show for it.

The experience curve past 45 has been sitting in the game since August waiting for this, so there is nothing new to learn about how the climb feels — it just continues.

Potential

Four pages — Awakening, Tempering, Deepening, Creation — each with three lines to choose between: Might, Ward, Precision. Thirty nodes a line, filled by refined ore.

A page opens when you have both the character level and the mining level for it: Awakening at level 15 and Mining 5, then 25/15, 35/28, and Creation at level 45 and Mining 40. And a page unlocks when any one of the three lines on the page before it is finished — you never have to complete all three to move forward.

This is where endgame ore goes. It does not finish.

Fixes and smaller things

• The world map's "click to drop a marker" hint had been silently going missing every time you fast-travelled. It stays put now
• Fixed a crash source around other players' leaderboard auras
• Crash reports that arrived empty now actually carry their log, so the next one tells me something
• Shadows tuned across every map, filmic tonemapping and ambient occlusion, and about 16 GB of video memory handed back — the game should be steadier on modest hardware

One honest note

Life Skills is brand new and nobody has played it yet, which means the numbers are the part I am least sure of: how fast the skills level, how far 1,000 stamina goes in an evening, and whether Mining 40 for the last Potential page is a fair ask or an unreasonable one. Those are all values I can change without another update, and I would much rather change them in the first week than leave anyone grinding toward something mistuned.

If something is off, the Options menu has a report button. I read all of them.

— Tipreth