Ah, the pastoral life of a sandbox MMORPG. None of this combat stuff, just you, your tools, and a slowly filling progress bar as you fashion components into a shiny new item. It’s something I always am drawn to personally, and will be something that Fractured will soon provide, at least if you like mining and blacksmithing.
A recent preview video offers a closer look at these professions, outlining how resource nodes are tied to a city and harvesting them requires the city’s governor to set specific permissions. Nodes come in a variety of different types including copper, iron, or mixtures of materials like silver and gold. The mouseover tooltip notes the primary resource from a node, though all nodes can produce additional materials such as stone or tin.
The act of harvesting operates like you’d expect it to, of course, though moving materials isn’t simply a matter of stuffing your character’s pants full of raw ore: it involves having a cart to fill with trays of materials and a horse to move the cart. As for smelting ore, that requires enough charcoal for a smelter to hit an appropriate temperature, which is harvested by building wood piles. Subsequently, building a blacksmith shop along with all of these stations will require a lot of resources. In short, harvesting materials and crafting items is meant to be a coordinated, group-based effort.
These features will be included in the game’s next alpha, which is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, November 4th, along with a City Trading Post that lets cities haul heavy resources back and forth (with the aid of player-run caravans and carts) and the addition of three types of troll enemy types. Incidentally, the later alpha date means that city claiming is also being pushed back to Tuesday, October 20th.
