Gathering Materials, Crafting, and Labor Points
Materials were either dropped from mobs, or obtained from various resource nodes (this includes cows/sheep). Each resource node is pretty intuitive as to what it gives, sheep can be either sheered for wool or butchered for meat, trees give lumber for crafting and sometimes acorns for use in food recipes, mining nodes give ore and gemstones, etc.
There are a ton of craftable items in ArcheAge: all your gear, gliders, boats, houses, potions, food, furniture for your house, siege weapons and lots of yet to be added items. In most cases you will need to refine the resources into higher tier versions of those resources in order to craft your item. Some components also need to be bought from the NPC's.
In order to craft an item or refine it, you must bring it to the appropriate crafting station (anvil, smelter, oven, workbench, etc.). Each of the main towns has what you need to craft everything, while the smaller towns provide only some crafting stations. On the third continent there are no crafting stations so players have to purchase the recipes for the crafting station, place them, transfer the required packaged resources, and build the crafting station themselves. At the moment players can only create the crafting stations necessary to refine and package resources. Thus all crafting of gear/potions/food needs to be done on the starter continents.
EVERY player can craft any craftable item in the game. There are no previous skill requirements and no class/race restrictions. The only requirements are that you have the correct ingredients, enough labour points, and a suitable crafting station.
All of the crafting recipes are viewable to anyone at any time by pressing "O" so you can plan out what you need and quickly check it while you're out of town (very convenient).
For the first 15 to 25 levels, it does not make much sense to craft gear as dropped/quested items are quite sufficient. Quest items are NOT repairable so if they get down to 0 durability, you need new gear.
Previously XLGames mentioned that only crafted items could be upgraded, but that's no longer the case! The crafting system for gear requires the previous tier gear as an ingredient for crafting. If you take a rare item (only available as a drop) and use it as an ingredient, the resulting item will be a rare item of the next tier (common turns into common, uncommon into uncommon, etc.). If you have placed any enchantment stones on your gear and decide to use it in a craft to bring it to the next tier the enchantment is lost.
Labor points regenerated at 1 every 5 minutes (giving you 288 for each day). Your maximum labour points start at 50 at level 1. At every 5th level you get an extra 50 maximum labour points (at level 45 I have 500 max). When you use labor points you gain experience relative to how many labor points you use for that activity and this amount increases with your character level (at level 45 I get 160 exp per labour point, meaning if I use all of my day's labour points I get about 21% of a level). Any sort of crafting, gathering, refining, building, or repairing (boats, not gear) requires labour points. The amount of labour points required varies depending on the task. There's a large number of categories that each of these tasks fits under and for each labour point you spend doing that task you get 1 "point" attributed to your skill in that area. Each labour skill area goes up to 1000 points. At 50% and 100% the amount of labour points required for the tasks decrease. The amount that the labour points decrease varies depending on how many the task was supposed to take, but we haven't found any good description for this. However, a Korean fansite posted some detailed information on gathering crops with 100% labour skill. If at 0% gathering took 1, at 100% it would be 0, 2(0%) -> 1(100%), 3(0%) -> 1(100%), 5(0%) -> 2(100%), and 7(0%) -> 3(100%).
Building Houses and Boats
The small houses are relatively cheap at 10 gold. There are larger houses available for 100 gold and much larger houses (meant for guilds and have multiple floors) for 2500 gold. There are several types of each that give you the option of choosing the roof color and siding type of the houses.
The resources required for building the houses must be put into a package (each package contains 100 of a type of resource) at the appropriate crafting station. These stations are provided in most of the housing areas, but must be built by players on the 3rd continent. The amounts required vary depending on the house/boat. For the small house it's just a simple 200 wood and 200 stone, while for the guild house it's 6000 wood and 6000 stone. The quest given sailboat requires 200 wood and 100 cloth, while the galleon takes 1000 wood, 1000 cloth and a special log from a raid boss.
To build a boat you must click the blueprint and select a place to build your boat on water that is deep enough. As soon as you do, a partially built dock appears. As you bring resource packages to the dock, the dock becomes fully built and the boat begins to appear. When the boat is complete the dock lowers the boat and splashes rise up as the boat enters the water. The boat is then unsummoned into your inventory as a little paper with a boat icon on it. You can resummon/unsummon your boat later using this item.
Placing your house is a little less simple. You can currently only place your house in areas designated by XLGames. When you click the blueprint you see a preview of the house as you are sliding it over the ground. Each house a circle of influence around it where you can place things and have them be protected from theft. The circles must not overlap with other housing circles. If everything is good and it is an acceptable location to place your house, the house preview will turn from red to the house's normal colour. When the house is placed you are greeted with the foundation of it that you can build upon.
Crops, Livestock, Etc.
ArcheAge is one of the few games that lets you change the world around you. Other than by making houses, you can do this by planting crops and trees and placing livestock around the world.
From one of the quests you are given a scarecrow that you can place in one of the housing areas. You cannot purchase another. This takes 200 wood to construct and, like a house, it has a circular area of influence that protects from theft. Each crop/tree/livestock has it's own circle that cannot overlap with each other and aids in guiding the placement of the item. You can place your crops/trees anywhere (other than inside towns, on roads, steep slopes, inside houses, etc.), but livestock have to be placed inside the protected zones. If the trees/crops are outside of the protected areas, they can be stolen by other players.
There are currently 37 crops and 25 trees to choose from so there's lots of variety. For livestock you have the standard roosters, cows, pigs, sheep. Trees are essential for gathering wood but some varieties can also provide you with fruits and nuts for cooking meals. Crops are important component in meals, but a few are also used for making potions. Livestock produce eggs, milk and wool while alive, but you can butcher them if you want meat in your meals.
When you initially plant a tree or a crop, they appear in a very early stage in their development. As time progresses, they grow through various stages and can be harvested. You halve the growth time by dumping water on them (obtained from a well). Roughly 1 in 10 crops will give you a seed to replant when you harvest them.
Neither your crops or livestock are permanent. Crops wither (disappear) if they are not harvested in time (crops mature at 1/2 life, wither at full life). Livestock will become sick if not attended to. If they are left sick for too long, they will die!
All seeds and livestock can be purchased from NPC's in town. They can all be sold for different amounts and take different times to grow/mature.
So to summon it up: everyone can craft everything, you get xp for spending labour points so you can lvl up with farming and crafting
I also found out that you can design your capes and ship's sails. check out the white cape on this pic:
Everyone can wear any type of armor but they are designed for certain roles: cloth ==> +speed, leather ==> +crit, plat ==> defence.
Everyone can wield any weapon, no restrictions.
Got some info on sieges, the info is from CBT3 I think, the castle influence range is expended from 250m to 300m for example:
Quote:
Here's what we do know.
In order to be able to declare war and participate in a siege you must obtain a special drop from the raid boss on the third continent. Sieges only take place on the weekends and last for two hours. You can only have one attacking and one defending expeditionary force. Each side can currently have only 50 players participating. If you're not signed up for the siege or if the player limit goes above the allotted amount you will simply be teleported back to the nearest resurrection shrine if you try to enter the siege area.
Right now there's no real benefit to owning a territory. Just the chance to take part in sieges. XLGames mentioned that each claimed territory will have an area of effect around it that will let the owners charge taxes to whoever placed their houses in that area. When a territory is owned, the giant stone sword in the ground goes up into the air and glows. This is the central point of the territory and what everything is based around. For 100m around this sword, territory owners can demolish anything and claim crops without any penalty. This area is generally used to build the defensive structures like gates, towers, and walls to protect the sword during sieges (not 100% sure, but I believe you have to destroy the sword when attacking in order to win the territory). The walls, gates, towers and the big sword have 500k-2mil hit points so you'll have to bring a lot of firepower. These, like the houses, are also placed freely by the players and so you can design your own custom castle. The price of the walls, gates and towers vary from 1 gold to 10 gold. The territory area of effect is 250m around the sword. Both of these circles are displayed on the map to aid players in knowing if their constructions are safe.
A siege just wouldn't be complete without siege weaponry. Two of these are currently implemented in the game with hints of more to come. The siege tank has a cannon on board and moves at a decent speed. The siege tower is very useful tool for getting up on the castle walls. Early concept videos of ArcheAge showed some battering rams, but these are currently not available. Some of the recent images from the official ArcheAge page also show a catapult.
For some reason the siege tank does not require a blueprint so the ingredients required are easily viewable using the crafting recipe window. It's expensive and requires some hard to get components. Arkhium trees require arkhium water to grow (so it's only useful to plant these on the 3rd continent) and cost 5 gold each. On average, when chopped down, an arkhium tree will yield 2 arkhium logs (1~3 random). The siege tank requires 5 of these logs and 10 branches from trees that were struck by lightning. As you can imagine, these branches are the bottleneck for the production of the siege tank. On top of that you're going to need 900 iron ore... Then smelt that iron ore into iron ingots and then smelt those iron ingots into higher tier iron ingots. Since ore nodes yield 1~3 iron (or average of 2) you can quickly see how much work it is to craft a siege tank. They keep tweaking the damage and range of the siege tanks so I haven't gotten a chance to see them action in their latest implementation (darn branches struck by lightning are hard to get so I don't have one of my own) but a ranged AoE is always a good thing to have, especially when you have multiple people with them (the tanks are also useful outside of battle to help you ferry arhkium water across the land on the 3rd continent since you don't have to be in a siege to summon them).
The siege tower requires a blueprint that costs 10 gold and is placed just like a boat except on land. This is expensive to build as you have to create 4 packages of arkhium logs. Arkhium log packages require only 5 (instead of 100 like other resources) to create. Since each arkhium tree gives an average of two logs you're looking to spend 50 gold just for the logs, or a total price of roughly 60 gold for the siege tower.
Edit: I also found out why you see castles in sieges with hardly any houses in it. 100m around the sword icon can be destroyed in a siege. Also the owner (GM) of an area can move and destroy any build objects within that 100m and take the the crops or whatever belongs to that building. So outsiders won't build any building within that 100m.
300 meter arond the sword is the max influence range of the territory that you own. Building within it can be taxed by the GM (tax not implemented yet)
So if you loose your castle your houses and other buildings you build are still there. You just get taxed by someone else. So it's saver atm to have your castle and guild city seperated. So if you play this game for long and alliances and "frontlines" shift you might end up having your house deep in enemy territory. You can dissemple your house by removing ownership and then attack and destroy it. You loose the matz but get the blueprints by mail to build your new house. Not sure if you can build more then 1 house for yourself.
- You can't carry unlimited ammount of resources like in most games, the max is 100 resources, you carry them in a big bag (incase you have seen it on video's, the big boxes on ppl's back)
- A minimum of 5 ppl is needed to start a guild city/castle, so the foundation of your castle/city can't be more then 500 resources...
- You can't gather 24/7, you have labor points, each action you make with gathering or crafting costs you labor points. I've been reading through most beta info on forums and no complaints about the ammount of time that is needed to build stuff or the labour points respawn rate.
- Cutting down a small tree will give you some ammount of wood, cutting down a huge tree will give you alot of wood, cutting down a tree and collecting it immediatly gives you a big bulk of standard wood, cutting it down and you wait a while you get the option to gather a small amount of rare wood. so the thing is to think about what trees or rocks etc to gather and what you need to resources for, a big city wall or a good crafted bow or something.
- Beta testers spent the majority of their time exploring the continents and building stuff to test it out.
- Atm best crafting gear is better then any npc drop or quest reward.
- Best crafting gear can be crafted while playing the game solo, there are no rare items/resources/weapons that can only be obtained by group effort.