Crowfall Design Lead Thomas “Blixtev” Blair has a new dev blog out this afternoon on the resource harvesting slice of the big world testing going on right now. To understand how it’s changing, you need to understand how the resource system was planned to work originally.
“The most important aspect of resources in Crowfall is that every resource type is important in the crafting system. We are not making a standard resource progression where copper is replaced by a higher tier material, thus turning copper into a low- end trash resource only useful for new players. […] Crafters will combine multiple resources types in meaningful ways to produce crafting components or items with interesting stats.”
Blair says that while the crafting design is working, the resource design wasn’t — chiefly because the models used for each don’t match up and the progression of different materials vs. tools was opaque to players unless they had a chart sitting in front of them.
Consequently, ArtCraft is altering the armor and armor-bypass scaling of nodes and tools and putting indicators smack into the UI to clarify what’s going on while you’re hacking away at a resource chunk (and clarify why you can’t hack away if the node is the wrong rank).
“We made our first big iteration pass on harvesting,” he concludes in his tl;dr. “Node difficulty is now based on the rank of the node. How easy nodes are to harvest is roughly based on the quality of the tool. Crafting of tools is more important. New crafting recipe combinations to make tools with magical stats. All available in the next big update to Big World!”
