Dawntide Beta: Day One - I'm a Lumberjack...

After two frustrating weeks of not being able to login successfully, they finally patch the servers with a fix that works! For the first time ever, I am able to interact with the game world and do stuff!

My first goal in this game was to check out the crafting side of things and see if I could manage to craft a set of bow and arrows for myself!

So I created a new character and gave them as many crafting skills as I could. Ready to harvest, I began hacking at the nearest tree. Harvesting is done by simply right-clicking on the resource. Then you get a 5-second action timer while your character performs the animation. Moving or otherwise interrupting the timer will cause it to stop without any resources being gathered. And yes, this does get tedious pretty quickly. Though interestingly enough, I saw some comments from the developers recently asking players to identify what sort of actions they would be likely to macro in-game so that the devs can work on trying to make them less tedious! They'll have to walk a careful tightrope when balancing that sort of thing, but it's good to hear that they understand the root concept of why players macro in the first place and are interested in trying to fix it.

Anyway, I chopped some more trees, and then chopped them again. You can get several harvests from each tree, but once a tree is depleted, the model is replaced with a stump. After a while the trees will regenerate, but it is definitely possible to clearcut an area. The stumps in the screenshot below were all created by myself. I imagine several players trying to harvest at the same time would wreak havoc on the natural shade in the area! Different trees not only provide different types of wood, but they can also be harder to cut. For example, there was an oak tree nearby that I hacked at maybe two dozen times, never once successful. However, all of the other nearby juniper trees fell before my mighty ax with little trouble. A nice touch to the game world. I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of role the type of wood will play in crafting.



Now that I had an ample supply of wood, it was time to get crafting. I open up my crafting window and proceed to churn out hundreds of arrow shafts. I noticed while making arrow shafts that my skill in Fletching was steadily increasing, as was the displayed success rate for making the shafts. But my success rate for bows wasn't changing at all. So as an experiment, I attempted to craft a few bows. Sure enough, this increased my Fletching skill as well as the chance I had for success at crafting that particular bow. Very interesting. This takes crafting specialization to a new level.

Checking an offline, player-made map, I saw that there was a cave nearby where copper could be acquired. So I jogged over there, found some colored lumps in the back of the cave and clicked on them to harvest copper ore.

Bags full, I jogged back to town, found the local forge and turned all of my copper ore into beautiful, shiny ingots. Now I just had to figure out how to turn those ingots into sharp, pointy arrowheads! I checked all the vendors, I asked in chat, I checked the boards, but everyone said it was available from the blacksmith. I looked at the blacksmith list half a dozen times and couldn't find the arrowhead recipe. Finally I saw it, buried deep in the extensive list of items on the blacksmith vendor. For some strange reason I had just assumed that the simpler recipes would be near the top.

So now I have arrow shafts, and I have arrow heads, but I'm still missing one component... feathers. I guess it's time to go hunting...

A couple of random interesting notes:

• Characters have a Sanity rating


• Characters also have an appearance rating that changes as you equip and unequip items

To Be Continued...