Kidori

It only takes 11 levels to unlock stone tier structures. Assuming all materials are readily available, it will take less than an hour.

I'm seeing a lot of people getting hyped for the PTR, and likely many of those people have never participated in a test server like this. In an attempt to minimize the confusion and anguish, there are some things everyone participating should know. What to expect: The game will be broken and not working correctly. This is okay. We are not here to determine if it is broken, but how broken it is. All progress made will be lost. There may be a number of wipes on the PTR. What not to expect: A playable version of the game, or any form of stability. Your experience on the test server will have little to no correlation to your experience on the live servers. They aren't going to "get it right" regardless of how much time they have spent on it. If they were confident that they got it right, there wouldn't be a test server. So what do I do? Break the game. Find bugs, find exploits and report them. Balance is not a concern on the PTR unless it's completely game-breaking. I found a bug, now what? Report it on one of the official channels. Don't assume someone else will or already has. If you find multiple bugs, report them all, not just the most concerning ones.

For an additional tool, a skill point calculator may be useful as well. Put in a character level and you have the number of points available at that level in a pool. Then you can select the skills you want, and if it goes over the number of points you have it shows how many points over you are and what level you have to be to have that many skill points. Would be useful for people who want to test out different builds without wasting a bunch of gold on respecs or sitting there with a piece of paper and a pen doing out the math. Should also be a lot easier to collect the data for I'm glad there's someone out there that's trying to make useful tools for players.

Well that's the thing... Why would you live on an island with a crappy landlord? Before, once you had your land claimed you were pretty much forced to live there and endure whatever hardships came your way, because if you just packed up all your stuff on a ship, unclaimed the land and sailed off into the sunset there's a good chance you wouldn't find another place to build. Now, you can build anywhere on any island, most likely with a stipulation that you talk to the land owner first (which you should want to do anyway to see what they're like) so if a place doesn't suit you you're free to find any other spot that suits you better. And when you do find an island with a good land owner, if they are indeed a good landlord they're taking the time out of their day - time they could be spending farming their own resources - to ensure that everyone else is taken care of and happy. So why shouldn't they get some small amount of resources as due compensation? If they're not doing anything to earn that keep, well, there are other islands and you have more freedom than they do.

Yes, both companies have to agree, and the war lasts for the agreed upon amount of time.

In the current version of the game yes, you can declare war on companies in PvE. I don't know if there are any plans to change that in 1.5

You can PvP with them if you declare war on another company. Barring that, though, yeah cannons are for SotD and elementals and puckle/swivel guns are for dealing with aggressive fauna.

I would love being able to use higher resolution on sails. Canvases too, but you can work around that with using multiple canvases. But sails are so large and sit there right in your face in view pretty much any time you're sailing, so the sails are in the most need of higher resolution. I've had lots of people in my company ask me to make sail designs for them. The hardest part is just making something that looks half decent even when pixelated. The more complex the image is, the worse it turns out. Even 512x512 feels like it would be restrictive, but I could work with that a lot better.

Can we please get some more information about the changes coming to the vitamin system? While we've gotten some information about the upcoming claim system changes we have not heard anything at all about how the vitamin system is being reworked, and it might be good to have some info on it before the test servers go live.

I've been trying to find a source for this but have come up empty handed. Where did the developers advertise the game as a sandbox?

Right now it's 50/50. So the real question is: Cakepie? Or Piecake?

I agree, and I think it's likely the minigames are placeholders. Get the mechanisms working under the hood and then just copy and paste the graphic on it until they're at a point that they can put more time and thought into it. Likely the minigames will still work in much the same way, but hopefully with a better, more appropriate graphic/animation.

I would have preferred it not be locked behind the Kraken, but yes Kraken is definitely doable solo. My wife and I have done all the power stones and the Kraken with just the two of us, but she was mostly running around with a repair hammer for the Kraken fight. We ultimately took pretty little damage so I could certainly see having still gotten it done if I was by myself. EDIT: Just don't tell my wife that. If she asks, she was instrumental to our success.

Thanks a lot man. This will haunt my dreams tonight.

Nobody has argued that it should take precedence over more important matters. But just because it's a low-priority issue doesn't mean it's not an issue and shouldn't be discussed.

I had considered this as well. I had made a topic in General Discussions about it, and can only hope someone at Grapeshot saw it. But I posted it at 2AM and it ended up buried by morning so who knows. Basically the gist is that we need the tools to make it easier to find a place to set up. We've already seen that a lot of players will not continue to sail around from island to island to island looking for a spot of land. Sooner or later they'll give up. If we had a way to advertise and find land then that would negate a lot of the frustration revolving around finding land. With not a lot of time between now and the patch a simple forum section for it will suffice, though in the future I'd like to see it as its own UI in-game.

Agreed that it breaks immersion a little, but in this particular case seems like it's worthwhile. It would be nice if sailing around from island to island was more feasible, but we've already seen that most players - especially new players - will only sail to so many before deciding to give up. A forum section is the easiest, lowest-cost solution to that possible. A UI button opening up that forum section is, again, the easiest and lowest-cost solution they could implement. The UI button isn't even technically necessary but will make it easier for new players to find what they're looking for. Make it easier for people to be happier with their living arrangements and it will help player retention. Not too shabby for ~2 minutes work.

People who want an idea of where the game is headed throughout its development process and what it will be like upon release. Streams are useful for seeing how the game is in its current state, but are useless beyond the date they're posted. The only things that I see in the product description that aren't currently in the game yet are the features I already pasted above (coming in the upcoming patch), the depth of the character creation screen (also being slightly improved in the upcoming patch) and permanent ship log books (which I look forward to one day). Everything else is there.

I prefer to look at him as someone that read in the product description for the game and it never occurred to him that if he wasn't one of the governors, lords or dictators that he might be one of the people living under them. Then when they announced that they're going to be doing exactly what they said they were going to do with the game he got worried and thought to himself "Hey maybe if I throw around the word 'slavery' enough I'll be able to get enough of a reaction out of people that the developers will abandon their entire vision for the game and make it more like ARK instead."

The two do not go hand-in-hand. The wipe is necessary due to massive changes to the map layout. This cannot be done without a wipe without causing huge headaches for everyone involved. The new claim system by itself does require a wipe as well, but even if they kept the current system because of the changes to the map the wipe would still be required. I, for one, am looking forward to the new system. It will be nice to visit lawless areas free of structures and pillars to go farm resources and animals, and it will be nice to find an island with a group of people that like playing the game the same way I do. The changes also bring us one big step closer to fulfilling the promises the developers made for the game, so I'm pleased they're making progress on that. There's still much work to do, but there's also still a lot of time left in EA.

With the new claim system on the horizon, a familiar problem will be coming in its wake: Finding an island to call home. The success of this new system is highly dependent on players finding the right island with the right land owner. Someone who just wants to build big beautiful structures and become part of a community will not feel at home on an island where anarchy rules and everyone is allowed to do whatever they want with no restrictions. Similarly, a person who wants total freedom will not feel at home on an island where land plots and structures are heavily regulated by the land owner. That's not even to mention the islands where the land owner doesn't want any new tenants building there. As we saw with the first go at the claim system, new players will only sail to so many islands before deciding that there's no land for them to build on and give up. There needs to be a way for people to find other like-minded players to live with. There's already a company recruitment section on the forums for exactly this purpose, but there should also be a real estate section of the forums for people to post information about their lands for prospective tenants, and it should have four subforums - one for each official server network. Currently, the place people have been posting information like this has been in the Marketplace section of the forums. With player markets also coming up, this will increase the clutter in that area and both people looking for trade deals and for real estate will have trouble finding what they want. A separate solution is required. Ideally, this would be available via an in-game UI, with options for searching, tagging and filtering. However, I don't see that happening before the patch goes live so perhaps that's something that can make it into a future patch. For now, a forum section will suffice. As a way to help point new players in the right direction (they're not likely to be browsing the forums on a regular basis), maybe a simple UI button can open up that forum section much like the button that opens up the Atlas wiki.

I have to agree. There are definitely more important things to worry about right now, but I can't even count how many dyes I've gone through on building parts just trying to find a color that doesn't look awful. And it's not even the color itself that's awful, just the application of it. Stone is just as bad as wood. I'm also not sure why they decided that painting a structure white should make it look no different from the base color. Please, work on the important things in the game and get the foundation working correctly before anything else. However, I think this also shouldn't be super low on the list of priorities either. People love their customization options in MMOs.

They've already explained their plans regarding wipes. They will come on an as-needed basis but will be something they don't take lightly in making that decision.

The devs don't want people living long term in lawless. We still have to see what the damage decay on all structures is like and how aggressive it is, but with no auto repair structure for lawless regardless of how aggressive it is it will likely make anything larger than a small starter home untenable.

The last patch changed how structures are streamed from the server to the client. It seems as though they allowed the structure streaming to take up too much of the available bandwidth though, not leaving enough room for all the other data the server needs to transmit. The result as I've seen it is that at my (large) base I have unplayable lag for about a full minute while all my structure parts load in, afterwards it clears up. I have not gone sailing since the patch but I can only imagine the issues that may come with it.