How will harvesting work?


Pathfinder Online

Goblin Squad Member

There's already been quite a bit of discussion on crafting, but what I haven't heard any talk about is how resource gathering will work, other than some of the February 1st blog:

Goblinworks wrote:
Harvesting hazards: These are opponents that are generated randomly as an effect of harvesting certain resources. The longer a harvesting operation continues at a given location, the more likely it is to attract unwelcome attention. [...] (Yes, this means that people harvesting are potentially creating content for people who want to slay monsters. Win/win!)

That sounds awesome, but what is each player going to be doing? Let's say that a woodcutter and a fighter have teamed up to go harvest logs in a forest. The woodcutter finds a good tree and starts chopping, and the fighter sharpens his sword and waits. Now what is each player doing?

-We know what the fighter will be doing: Attacking any monsters that get near him.
-But what will the woodcutter's player be doing? Sitting there watching a progress bar fill? Will it be like EvE Online's mining, where the only real interaction is switching nodes every 5 minutes or so? Playing some harvesting minigame?

That's my main problem right now: Harvesting is a major part of the game, since it supplies crafters with, well, everything, but I have yet to see a game where player-done harvesting wasn't a pain in the rear.

In fact, the only two MMO's I can think of that did harvesting in a way that didn't feel like such a boring chore were SWG and EvE Online's PI system. In both of those, you don't gather the materials yourself; instead, you just manage the machines/NPCs who do all the gathering. Set them up on a resource-rich spot, make sure they're properly powered/supplied, punch the Gather button, and check back in a day or three. (In SWG, you could also manually gather small amounts of a material, but that was really only for novice crafters who couldn't afford a harvester yet; still, it was a nice backup/supplement)

Oh, Minecraft is worth a mention here, but it's gathering system is fun because, after harvesting 5000 stone, you can actually see the mountain you leveled or the giant hole you dug in the ground. That always makes it feel like a significant accomplishment, not just "Now I can supply my guild for another week. Yay."

That's the only system I've seen where I wasn't bored out of my skull after two days of gathering. The main problem with it for PFO is, how the heck are you supposed to guard a group of NPCs for three days straight? That's an escort quest that would even give Fable players nightmares. Maybe have NPC guards to guard the NPC gatherers? But now you're really pulling the players out of it...

Can anyone come up with a good way to have players harvest materials without feeling like such a chore? We know what the guards are going to be doing, but what are the gatherers going to be doing?

Goblin Squad Member

I would like to see them borrow a page from Vanguard's book here.

In Vanguard, when Crafting, there was a mini-game where different obstacles would arise, and you had to use the appropriate response in order to keep the item from being destroyed. Each response required certain types of gear or items to be used, and the quality of the gear/items had an impact on the effectiveness of your response.

I thought it was a bit much when it happened for each and every item I crafted, but it would actually make a lot of sense when Harvesting. Maybe the benefit to going out as a large group of Harvesters and Adventurers is that the Adventurers can deal with the Harvesting Hazards that spawn enemies, and the Harvesters can deal with Harvesting Hazards that are non-combat but still threaten to significantly reduce their efficiency.

The key is to make sure it's still possible for a single Harvester to go out on his own as long as he is effective enough as an Adventurer to deal with the minor Harvesting Hazards he'll generate by his own minor actions. He might have to accept that he won't be as efficient - perhaps he'll lose a large portion of wood from the tree he felled because he can't deal with the large knot that's giving his saw problems - but he can still get something out of his efforts.

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Saga of Ryzom has a harvesting system you might be inspired by.

essentially there are two sets of skills:

-Prospecting, which means uncovering nodes. Better prospecting skills lets you uncover more and better nodes (from a potential determined by a complex multifactor system). Specializations lets you search for specific materials or qualities rather than just finding what is there. Also prospecting in each major terrain type is a separate prospecting skill.

-Digging, which means extracting materials from nodes. Better digging skills gives more material, better quality, faster extraction, less risk of mishap or even less ecological impact. Skills also lets you trade one for the other: increased rates at the expense of depleting the zone much faster for instance.
The digging itself is a minigame of juggling actions to balance yield and quality without causing explosions, equipment damage or premature node death.

note that
1. knowing best places to prospect for top end mats is guild secrets, and prime digging spots are highly contested.
2. crafting system is based on materials providing different bonuses according to quality and subtype, so that while low level crafters are happy using a range of materials, the top-end specialists require very specific materials combined with top quality - which is a challenge both to find and extract.


I have a sneaking suspicion that harvesting will be more akin to EVE, which isn't necessarily bad, but it could be enhanced a little bit.

For example, while mining iron ore is all well and good, maybe you could occasionally stumble upon some gems or a vein of more precious ore to make the collection process a little more exciting. It maintains the reliability that you will get iron ore from an iron ore vein, but you might also find some precious gems or semi-precious minerals.

Who knows, maybe you disturb an earth elemental while mining, and it spawns on your group (a fair exception to the normal complaint of bad guys spawning out of nowhere).

Goblin Squad Member

For mining/harvesting/farming in my perfect world?

Think Minecraft, and start increasing the resolution of the world.


Would love to see simple digging/harvesting machine or other tools used to mine, garden, chop wood, etc. These would be craftable themselves, made of leather/skin, wood, simple metals, etc. You would interact with the machines, inserting some resource or money component to keep them going a la SWG.

Would like to also see shifting spawns of resources with more than themepark common, rare, epic classifications. Want stats.

Eve's model is also interesting. Translating that to Fantasy could be cool too. I like Eve's mining cycles and tools. Adding crafted or natural tier components to crafted tools (like Eve mining crystals) would be interesting. What Eve is missing for me is somewhat more complex resource stats that effect stats of the crafted product.

Goblin Squad Member

The only thing I don't like about EvE's mining cycles is the same thing I don't like about mining in Runescape: There's just enough effort/attention required to keep you paying attention to the game, but not enough to make it fun. Most of my time mining in EvE is spent staring at my mining laser's cycle, keeping an eye out for pirates and gankers, and wishing that my computer was good enough so that I could play something else while keeping EvE windowed. I'd prefer a harvesting system that's either more involved or more automated than EvE's.

Goblinworks Founder

In Darkfall you would take your axe/scoop or whatever and venture to spots to start hitting at different areas with your pickax and skill up as you chinked away with pieces of stone or ore as you progressed; same as Ultima Online.

The easier materials to gather were closer to town (Wood/Stone/Certain herbs), but just gathering any material you should be able to shape it into something just like in Minecraft. Which would be the start of crafting and then having to venture further from town or home to get the less common to rare materials.

Vanguard I loved the mini-game like Nihimon mentioned, where you were active with what you were doing and then selecting another process during a certain step to either improve or change the outcome slightly; then it was on the next step.

I say it would be nice the better you get at prospecting/harvesting the easier it is to see potential areas. Just like being able to see the flaws and improve the quality of an item you inspect.

Resource availability was the hassle of a high populated numerous people trying to gather materials and how fast it "respawns". I would like to see lumberjacks getting wood and trees actually disappearing with the chance a forest to be eventually destroyed.
- Resources become scarce so you must venture further away from the safety of town.
- Seeds drop from trees you cut down, which you can plant as another skill attempt or give to someone else who has more experience in this. Trees could take 2-3 days or even a week in real time before it matures.
- The lack of resources near a town would probably drive prices up.

I didn't like ultima online solution of having the tree (but can understand for technical reasons) still there just not being able to gather wood from it, and going to other trees till you could harvest again but maybe only two chops.

Like in Ryzom's harvesting there's a degree of how you are going to harvest. What item, how far you'll dig down, how intense is the harvesting, are you going to be careful or just dig wildly till you can pull it out; with the chance of destroying parts of the plant/ore/wood.


I like the idea of a prospecting skill and tree. If I'm going to specialize in harvesting as a de facto profession, I should be able to distinguish myself from a specialized combat toon. But I'd also like to do more than just gather more resources than non gatherers. I'd like to gather our refine better resources.

That was about my only gripe with eve gathering. My skills allowed me to either gather faster or to make more of an alloy. But I felt I was always chasing basic stuff or that there was never variety or rarity.

Now this was far better than watching my toon pick a flower from a single node as in wow whack a rock even in MO. Don't get me wrong, but I'd like to see things shift. It would be fun to do more a bit more than arbitrage a billion basic units of crap ore for a penny. I'd like my specialization and risk to net me a resource that may be potentially or temporarily rare.

I understand the underlying database of resources and stats may be difficult, and I'd agree that swg probably took that too far from a game maintenance standpoint. But the basic effect on rarity and scarcity, crafting and planning was incredibly immersive.

I experienced belt mining and moon mining in eve. Both were very rich and complex but unfortunately unrelated. Belt mining with a mixed group of miners and security was very interactive socially. Skilling up, getting and upgrading a ship and lasers was rewarding. Fending off can tippers was a blast. Would have been even better with more complex resources or at least changing resources.

Moon mining was great from a tools and ui perspective. Factories and logistics are amazing, but because you were not at the location there was no risk. It also seemed to lose the social aspect. Although you could use skills to get the hot spot and there was depletion, the resources didn't vary. Making higher tier components is fun but the lack of variation isn't. Everyone makes them. Low sec or highsec you are still chasing that penny.

Heres hoping fpo is as rich but can mix things up a bit.

Goblin Squad Member

I'd like to see a situation where more skilled harvesters are able to extract a greater quantity and variety of usable resources from a given base.

For example, when I first start mining, I get a chunk of ore and I can extract 10 units of Iron and 10 units of waste from it. If I'm a skilled master, I can get 15 unites of Iron and 5 units of Nickel (or whatever) with no waste.

Goblin Squad Member

I want to see anyone able to get any quantity of ore with minimal training. The training combined with equipment determine the quantity over time.

Once you have ore, you either extract the raw metal your self or sell the ore to someone who can. This act is also governed by skill= output/time

Now we start to see skill=quality

Metalcraft: Creating alloys, the higher your skill the stronger your metals, which you sell in the form of bars to metalworkers

Blacksmithing: Creating weapons/armor from metal. The higher you skill the better you ability to properly treat the metal with certain processes, the higher the metalcraft skill to make the metal, the higher the blacksmithing skill required to treat the metal. The higher skilled blacksmiths produce tougher, armor and weapons that hold their edge longer.

Goblinworks Founder

Valkenr wrote:

I want to see anyone able to get any quantity of ore with minimal training. The training combined with equipment determine the quantity over time.

Once you have ore, you either extract the raw metal your self or sell the ore to someone who can. This act is also governed by skill= output/time

Now we start to see skill=quality

Metalcraft: Creating alloys, the higher your skill the stronger your metals, which you sell in the form of bars to metalworkers

Blacksmithing: Creating weapons/armor from metal. The higher you skill the better you ability to properly treat the metal with certain processes, the higher the metalcraft skill to make the metal, the higher the blacksmithing skill required to treat the metal. The higher skilled blacksmiths produce tougher, armor and weapons that hold their edge longer.

Agreed can see people doing this being the gatherers and others being the ones who turn that raw material into something and so on.

Goblin Squad Member

I would like to see the skill trees in all aspecs of the process from harvesting to merchanting the products.

Harvesting -- People who harvest more get the achievement and a skill to harvest a higher quality resource. Say, who harvests 50 iron ore, now know where and more veins are, and able to extract more ore per vein. After 100 ore, the person has learned theres not just iron there, there might be a gem in there.

Craftsmen -- People who smith 50 iron items learn a process to make it tougher. After 100 items they learn to to be more effeciant with it, creating more items from the same amount in less time.

Mearchants -- People who buy/sell items from/to NPCs get better deals. After 50 they can find or sell thier items faster. After 100, they can sell/find rare items for sale that others can't.

As for resolving the gathering interaction I think this idea might work well. You find a location with a resource, you need supplies to extract it. It takes you say 30 seconds to set it up, in which you could be interupted and have to start over. Once the operation is set up, you need to resupply, maintenance it once every minute or two or it extracts at an extremely slow rate. If its resupplied and maintained, it extracts alot faster. Meanwhile, theres a chance something could happen upon it and try to destroy it, which you will have to kill. This could interfer with your schedule. Also once it is set up, it should have a hitpoint cost to destroy. The higher your skill at harvesting, the more hit points it has, taking longer to destroy it. The longer the harvest is in operation, the more it is noticed, and more things show up. All the resource harvested should be left on site in a secure chest or crate etc., that could be subjected to theft.

All this leaves the player with choices, start extraction and leave it alone, producing the minimum and subject to theft and being destroyed. Or help it process faster and protect it.

Goblin Squad Member

Scarlette, increasing skills will be from allocating time to training, so that your mining skill would be a function on how much training you allocate to mining and not dependent on how much ore you have actually mined. 'Merit badges' for harvesting/crafting may be different though.

There certainly is a wish in the community to have 'harvester' as a viable specialisation for a character. There is a myriad of ways to arrange that.
A simple solution could be to assign a difficulty number to each resource, and have harvesting rate, amount, quality and risk depend on the skill vs. difficulty. Any new player might be able to mine mithril, but without high skill it would be very slow, give only a handful of poor quality material, and is likely to spawn nasty monsters.

If GW consider such a system, I would suggest that the node difficulty increases while harvested - up to the point where it cannot be harvested any more. Rare resources do not necessarily need to start with high difficulty but may instead be implemented as rapidly increasing difficulty. The rookie miner the can always get something, but afterwards the expert miner can squeeze out some more from the leftovers (but at much lower rate and quality than if he found it first himself).

This simple mechanic can have important consequences. In typical MMO systems, high harvesting skills only give an edge in dangerous zones, while poor harvesting skills are only usable in safer zones. Harvesting (and to a large degree crafting) then becomes a function of total level and everyone end up looking alike.

With 'dynamic node difficulty', sandbox characters flourish. The rookie miner/expert fighter can run a side business finding rare materials in dangerous places, while the expert miner/rookie fighter has the edge in the safe areas or when protected by a party. New players thus have two paths (rather than one) to play successful harvesters.

Goblin Squad Member

randomwalker wrote:
Scarlette, increasing skills will be from allocating time to training, so that your mining skill would be a function on how much training you allocate to mining and not dependent on how much ore you have actually mined. 'Merit badges' for harvesting/crafting may be different though.

Yes, I understood that and agree with the rest of your statment. I just didn't state my concept well. You have to have the skill <time spent trained> and action <amount actually mined> to recieve the merit badge <gaining added abilities>.


I'd be okay with temporary structures.

Say you are a miner and you find an iron node. You have the skills to construct a temporary structure (in this case, a mine shaft) from available materials in the wilderness. The quality of the shaft is determined by your skill/badges, and it provides you with limited local storage. As you continue to mine, the node will naturally deplete at a rate consistent with your skill as a miner, but the ore will be stored in the limited local storage next to the shaft (of which anyone may access). A group of player characters could then haul ore from the limited local storage to a settlement while others mine the ore in the shaft, keeping the limited local storage from being maxed out.

Shafts (and their associated storage) would also have hit points, and if the shaft was destroyed, the node would be destroyed as well as the limited local storage (and all the ore within). Wandering monsters or player characters could attack the shaft and destroy it or other miners could repair/reinforce the shaft. Either way, once the mine is depleted of resources, it could still be used for temporary limited local storage, destroyed to prevent others from seeing where the mining operation took place, or left to maybe be populated by wandering monsters, bandits, or whatever. Such structures, however, would only last about 24 hours (without maintenance) before they collapse upon themselves.

A single player character could construct the shaft, mine the ore (filling up the limited local storage), and haul the ore back to civilization, but they aren't going to be as efficient as a team doing the same three jobs simultaneously... especially if wandering monsters are involved.

Goblin Squad Member

Just going to say it again:

Minecraft

Take the sandbox to the n'th level. Let us move the sand around. Skill training determines the rate of digging through certain materials and quantity of the materials we can recover.

Goblin Squad Member

I would love a minecraft type crafting system, especially for buildings. Optionally, I just want to point out the Saga of Ryzom has the best harvesting system I have ever seen...many of the players (including my wifee) harvest all day.


Valkenr wrote:

Just going to say it again:

Minecraft

Take the sandbox to the n'th level. Let us move the sand around. Skill training determines the rate of digging through certain materials and quantity of the materials we can recover.

A cubic foot of soil weighs roughly 4-5 lbs (depending on consistency). A hole in the ground that is 5-foot long, 5-foot wide, and 5-foot deep contains 125 cubic feet of soil (weighing roughly 500-600 lbs). If, for the sake of this argument, we assume a player character can displace 1 cubic foot of soil as a "full-round action," they can create a 5 ft. x 5 ft. x 5 ft. hole in the ground in about 12 minutes and 30 seconds (either using an auto-dig function or clicking the dig button once every 6 seconds).

Creating a 5 foot dent in the environment could have practical applications, but think of the computing issue. Each cubic foot of soil is 1 unit of data that has to be tracked. The tracking can be as simple as "in hole," "on mound," or "in storage." Either way, every 5 foot square you walk on (that could be potentially displaced) is actually 125 units of data the server has to track.

In a square mile of game space there would be 5,575,680 individual 5 ft. x 5 ft. x 5 ft. squares or 696,960,000 units of soil that must be tracked. This is also assuming no other obstructions (trees, rocks, water, difficult terrain features, mobs, or player characters) are in the area. Even if the programmers were able to treat each 5 ft. by 5 ft. by 5 ft. area as its own unit, that still leaves 5,575,680 units to keep track of (and that is just the ground).

The reason mindcraft can do what it does is because it doesn't take into account weight or encumbrance (only "units" of items and storage space), and each block constitutes a much larger (and disproportionate) volume of material than a normal character could displace. It also works with a randomized expanding environment that doesn’t host a minimum of 4,000 active players on a single server. Enhancing the graphic quality of mindcraft and applying it to something as mechanically different as PFO, from a programming standpoint alone, just isn't practical.

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Time is not a constant, especially in MMO's. If you want digging to account for every grain of sand, you have to also accept that is going to take a year for your settlement to finish construction and you are going to have to cut and place every piece of wood/stone all while defending it from attack.

MMO's break logic to make the game fun to play and not tedious.

Goblin Squad Member

Pheoran Armiez wrote:
A cubic foot of soil weighs roughly 4-5 lbs (depending on consistency).

Not to disagree with your general point, which I think is that a game like Minecraft has to handwave away most of reality to allow its landscaping.

But 4-5 pounds per cubic foot of soil? My inner engineer flagged that immediately. Remember the old saw "A pint's a pound the world around", so a gallon of water weighs 8 pounds (approximately). A cubic foot of water weighs a bit over 60 pounds, and soil can weigh between 75 and 100 pounds per cubic foot. So Minecraft needs even more handwaving than your estimate would suggest.

Goblin Squad Member

Arbalester wrote:
Can anyone come up with a good way to have players harvest materials without feeling like such a chore? We know what the guards are going to be doing, but what are the gatherers going to be doing?

I've clicked on enough resource tiles/nodes to last one lifetime. I totally agree with your concern.

One way to do it would be to have the gatherers have some minigame. For mining, imagine a falling-block game, for example, where each tile represents ore, a gem, or different waste rock/tailings. Each row cleared yields whatever ore or gem objects were in that row, and losing the game spawns a creature. Also, each row cleared has a small chance of spawning a creature, so miners can't just play for a while and then close the game to avoid spawns.

The ratio of ore to waste tiles would be based on the mine, but could get better or worse over time as the mine found richer or poorer portions of the vein. Generally, the types of ore found in a mine would be pretty fixed.

A miner's expertise (merit badges, not skill) would affect how quickly the game sped up. So an experienced miner would have an advantage in clearing rows before the game got too fast and a creature spawned. The better miner might also have a slightly better chance of getting an ore block instead of a waste block.

A basic mine might have space for a limited number of miners, like maybe 3-4. The mine would have to be upgraded to widen the mine to allow another 3-5 miners to work at the same time. I'd think that mines should be a permanent structure. A permanent structure would be a location for players to congregate to work together. It would also be a target for ner-do-well players who might target miners working without guards, etc.

Having a limited number of ore deposits / quarry locations in a hex also provides for settlement-level conflict, reasons for players to venture into new hexes, etc.

[The falling-block minigame is just an example. I'd rather do that than endlessly click some location, or have to run around the map looking for respawning nodes. A game that was more dependent on character skill than player skill would be better, but there will always be some player skill.)

Goblin Squad Member

Or, they could have a dynamic way of shaping the terra firma. Once changed by lifting away or adding material, it becomes the new "shape", no different than the shape that was there previously (and no one is claiming that will take unreasonable amounts of processing, and I expect it will have 3-d dips and rises of various degrees). Any material carried in your inventory would be just that...numbers and an icon in your inventory, no different than carrying x number of arrows. Drop it and we return to the top explanation.

Goblin Squad Member

The only problem you can run into if you allow players to re-shape the world, is when massive changes occur quickly, but most of the changes should be small enough for the game to patch while you approach it, and every night the game would release a small patch to update the world. This could either be handled with a patch every time the game launches, or the option of a background client that is always running on your computer.

Goblinworks Executive Founder

World reshaping would either be too limited to be very interesting, too easily abused to give to everyone, or too well thought out to be included in the budget.

Not that I don't like the idea, but I like what we could have instead a lot more.

Goblin Squad Member

Well, I agree with the limitations outlined above by Urman. 75-100 lbs per square foot for soil, rock is heavier, metal-veined rock is heavier still. This combined with normal encumbrance limitations and the increasing amount of time it takes to remove each type will make any effort, not quick by any MMO standards. It would actually take a nation to build a castle...and even then it would not happen quickly...especially if you do not want your landscape waste in your backyard.

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

I think that for the purpose of gameplay, we don't want total realism. (Multi-generational cathedral construction? No, thanks.)

But if the target *median* on-line population is 100 people per hex, that would suggest a heavily populated hex, like a future settlement hex, might have 300-500 people online at a time (wild guess). How long should a basic fort, like a motte-and-bailey, take that group, including resource collection? If it is too easy, every hex will have a fort. If it is too hard*, none will.

I'm thinking of the hundreds of gamer-hours just quarrying stone for some basic fort. I do hope the resource gathering side of the game is fun, because we'll be doing it.

* There's no such thing as too hard in sandbox games. If a basic fortress takes 500 people a week of gaming 8 hours a day to build, we can expect the first fortress a week (or less) after they are unlocked. One hopes it can't be sacked by a party of 20 people in an hour.

Goblin Squad Member

I expect a major consideration when building a fort will be "can we afford to maintain it".

@Urman, I really like the falling tile mini-game you outlined for harvesting. I would much prefer to do something like that at a node, and spend several minutes there, than spend a couple of seconds at dozens or more nodes spread out over the hex.


Urman wrote:
Pheoran Armiez wrote:
A cubic foot of soil weighs roughly 4-5 lbs (depending on consistency).

Not to disagree with your general point, which I think is that a game like Minecraft has to handwave away most of reality to allow its landscaping.

But 4-5 pounds per cubic foot of soil? My inner engineer flagged that immediately. Remember the old saw "A pint's a pound the world around", so a gallon of water weighs 8 pounds (approximately). A cubic foot of water weighs a bit over 60 pounds, and soil can weigh between 75 and 100 pounds per cubic foot. So Minecraft needs even more handwaving than your estimate would suggest.

Yeah, looking at the weight I quoted (from a wiki, bad wiki *slaps wiki*) it seemed a "little" low. I should have just stated 1 shovel scoop = 1 cubic foot of soil. While that is one hell of a shovel scoop, it would have still gotten my point across.

Maybe next time I will go outside and do a practical experiment to figure out the weight of 1 cubic foot of soil myself.

*gets shovel out of trunk of car*

Goblin Squad Member

"Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man."
-George S. Patton

Granted, he was talking about a time when people were using artillery rather than swords and stones, but is it really plausible to suggest that a building crew can build a keep more quickly than a sorcerer can tear it down?

That premise doesn't even hold up historically: traditional siege equipment could tear down walls and fortifications far more quickly than the time it took to build them.

Now, whether we want it to work that way in PFO is another matter, but I see posts here trying to misguidedly flirt with logic and physics again, and I'm not so sure that's a path we want to go down.

Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:

I expect a major consideration when building a fort will be "can we afford to maintain it".

@Urman, I really like the falling tile mini-game you outlined for harvesting. I would much prefer to do something like that at a node, and spend several minutes there, than spend a couple of seconds at dozens or more nodes spread out over the hex.

Pokemon actually had a pretty good mini-game for mining with it's first nintendoDS release. You had a pickaxe and a hammer. You would go up to a section of wall, and that section of wall would have a 'collapse bar' This bar would roughly deplete in 8 hammer hits, or 15 pickax hits(approx), and more so if you hit a strong rock area with the hammer instead of the pickax. As you chipped away it would reveal the rewards and you had to completely get them loose before the collapse bar depleted.

But personally, I don't want to see nodes. I don't want to see a 'mining' skill. I want to see a 'prospecting' skill that buys from people with 'construction' skill to construct mines and refineries, and the level of the structure determines the amount/difficulty level of ore that can be removed. The majority of crafting should be spent on making the items, and i would like a mini game there, or a system like TOR where you 'fire and forget'. What i don't want to see is a crafting system where you have to sit there and click resources for hours, if there is a mini-game, it should be there.

Good rule of thumb: If the benefits of making a bot(macro) outweigh the time spent doing the activity, find another way to do that activity.

Goblin Squad Member

Blaeringr wrote:
... traditional siege equipment could tear down walls and fortifications far more quickly than the time it took to build them.

Yes, a medieval fortress could take 10 to 30 years to build, and fall to a siege lasting 3 to 6 months. (That doesn't mean it was the siege engines that won, it was often starvation.) The fortress gave the defending force 3 months and it was good defense against anything less than a full siege or assault.

Blaeringr wrote:
... is it really plausible to suggest that a building crew can build a keep more quickly than a sorcerer can tear it down?

I don't think anyone has suggested buildings should be easier to build than to destroy, even with mundane destruction.

I guess GW gets to answer the question: does a sorcerer's magic give him the power to reduce a fortress substantially quicker than a normal siege, and if so, why do the societies in PFO build fortresses?

Goblin Squad Member

Urman wrote:
Blaeringr wrote:
... traditional siege equipment could tear down walls and fortifications far more quickly than the time it took to build them.

Yes, a medieval fortress could take 10 to 30 years to build, and fall to a siege lasting 3 to 6 months. (That doesn't mean it was the siege engines that won, it was often starvation.) The fortress gave the defending force 3 months and it was good defense against anything less than a full siege or assault.

Blaeringr wrote:
... is it really plausible to suggest that a building crew can build a keep more quickly than a sorcerer can tear it down?

I don't think anyone has suggested buildings should be easier to build than to destroy, even with mundane destruction.

I guess GW gets to answer the question: does a sorcerer's magic give him the power to reduce a fortress substantially quicker than a normal siege, and if so, why do the societies in PFO build fortresses?

Well I'm pretty sure it was implied that many structures require specific tools/weapons to destroy

blog wrote:


Other buildings can only be damaged by siege engines—huge machines created to hurl boulders or orbs of burning pitch, or similar large-scale weapons. The process of establishing a siege is lengthy and can be attempted only by the largest and best organized groups of players. Siege warfare is therefore the province of player settlements and kingdoms.

I don't think they are going to allow a single sorcerer or wizard to simply bypass that requirement with a fireball spell, and yeah the point of defensive structures isn't expecting it to delay them for nearly as long as it took to build the structure, the point is to delay them long enough that you have a reasonable shot at killing them before they succeed.

Goblin Squad Member

I would take it a step further and say the main point of a walled defensive structure is to make it costly to attack.

Goblinworks Executive Founder

The only value of fortifications is that it makes the attackers more vulnerable while they attack.

Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:
I would take it a step further and say the main point of a walled defensive structure is to make it costly to attack.

High risk, high reward ;)

Goblin Squad Member

Going back to harvesting and its mechanics...

Reading over the ideas (minigames, terrain modification), I still think that SWG had it right. You can push a button and watch your character do some harvesting, but it's a pretty piddly amount. It's much more effective to build a harvesting structure on top of a node, and set it up to work. Neither one of these mechanics needs player interaction after they start running, though the first one also forces the character to stay there and keep harvesting.

Why do I like that so much? It's already autopiloted. It beats the bots at their own game, by making an already working low-maintainence harvesting option. The only issues I have are:
A) How to stop miners from flooding the market, since harvesting is so easy. SWG solved this through equipment durability and destruction. It sounds like PFO will have equipment be similarly destructable and difficult to just repair, so problem solved. An unrelenting demand for crafted goods, and thus raw materials, will always keep mining profitable.
B) How to stop a single group of players from forming a hex-wide or even multi-hex monopoly on harvesting. One solution is to make the harvesting nodes small and spread-out; it's harder to hold control over multiple small nodes than it is over one big node. Also, do what SWG (or to a limited extent, EvE Online's Planetary Interaction system) did, and have the nodes move around from week to week. Players would have to uproot their harvesters and re-establish them at the new node, allowing other players to beat them there first.
C) Now my original question is reversed; we know what the miner is doing; building a harvesting structure and letting NPC's handle it. What is the fighter supposed to do? Guard it 24/7 for a full week? NPC Guards would just make the entire thing autopilot, and that sounds wrong. Hmm, not sure what to do about this...

Goblinworks Executive Founder

The fighter goes out and patrols; if the mine is occupied by enemy troops at a controller-selected time, control of the mine transfers to the enemy. The controller sets the time for when it is convenient for them to defend, and the attacker needs to plan accordingly. Presumably the caravans from the mines also need defending.

Alternatively, the fighters can sign on during the peak times of the enemy, whoever that is, to take their stuff. Figure out when the opposing caravans go out, and 'redirect' them to the correct destination, or occupy their mines when their payroll comes up.


I am loving the minecraft suggestions. A harvesting/crafting suggestion:

1.Exploring dangerous, unsettled wilderness for a good spot to start mining (near water, solid geographic defensive advantage and of course any surface indications that good stuff lies beneath.)

2. Setting up basecamp which is essentially a very basic defensive rest-zone/crafting/storage area.

3. Mining, finding resources that a) can be used to improve the base camp b) can be used to increase the efficiency of mining its self

4. Mining and harvesting rare resources that can be used for very special/ized crafting and/or trading and selling.

5. Mining and stumbling across a "random" dungeon that is obviously quite dangerous but offers rich rewards. This could be a long forgotten dwarven palace, the 'sealed' tomb of a very dangerous lich/entity, or simply a next of underground nasties and their treasure horde.

In the end, deep mining, extensive mining, can result in underground kingdoms, or even the base camp could be extended exponentially into a castle which would attract folk (npc's perhaps) who would like to set up shop, sell their wares, provide basic services and so on.

Can't wait to see what you all come up with :)

Goblin Squad Member

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Arise, dark thread, from your slumber!

Goblin Squad Member

Shane Gifford wrote:
Arise, dark thread, from your slumber!

Then go back to sleep. There is a lot of new info since these discussions, including a blog post with its own thread.

Scarab Sages Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:

I would like to see them borrow a page from Vanguard's book here.

In Vanguard, when Crafting, there was a mini-game where different obstacles would arise, and you had to use the appropriate response in order to keep the item from being destroyed. Each response required certain types of gear or items to be used, and the quality of the gear/items had an impact on the effectiveness of your response.

I thought it was a bit much when it happened for each and every item I crafted, but it would actually make a lot of sense when Harvesting. Maybe the benefit to going out as a large group of Harvesters and Adventurers is that the Adventurers can deal with the Harvesting Hazards that spawn enemies, and the Harvesters can deal with Harvesting Hazards that are non-combat but still threaten to significantly reduce their efficiency.

The key is to make sure it's still possible for a single Harvester to go out on his own as long as he is effective enough as an Adventurer to deal with the minor Harvesting Hazards he'll generate by his own minor actions. He might have to accept that he won't be as efficient - perhaps he'll lose a large portion of wood from the tree he felled because he can't deal with the large knot that's giving his saw problems - but he can still get something out of his efforts.

Everquest 2 Has A Similar System, Except That The Responses Are Essentially Skills, Rather Than Gear.

Note - I Have No Idea Why My Phone Is Suddenly Capitalizing The First Letter Of Every Word.

Community / Forums / Paizo / Licensed Products / Digital Games / Pathfinder Online / How will harvesting work? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Pathfinder Online