Communal Harvesting

A Circus with Wi-Fi

While yesterday was considerably better than Wednesday, it was still pretty freakin stressful.  It just seems that after essentially five days out of the office so much crap has stacked up that I absolutely have to deal with.  I keep threatening to run away and join the circus, but I don’t think anyone really takes me seriously at this point.  Afterall I would have to find a circus with wi-fi and fiber…  because really satellite internet sucks.  My boss asked me what exactly I would do at the circus, and I guess probably the easiest role to play would be “bearded lady”.  All I would really have to do is cross dress… and I guess I could deal with that.

Yesterday I managed to get over 10,000 steps with my fitbit for the first time so that is a little bit of a personal goal met.  In part we only managed to do this because we spent most of the evening shopping for a refrigerator.  The problem being that our house has one of those damned annoying “over the fridge” cabinets.  This means that we have a fixed amount of space that we can slide one in.  Problem being that if the numbers are not lying horribly… everything is about half an inch too tall.  We think actually the fridge we are looking at will fit just right, but if not we might have to do some “day of arrival” modification to the cabinet.  I was going to try and doctor this with a dremel, but yesterday one of my friends suggested a hand planer.  The fridge is still mostly functional (except for ice cream) so I think we have a little bit of leeway.

Bigger Claim

Landmark64 2014-03-28 06-13-28-23 I made it home well before my wife last night as is usually the case, so I ended up popping upstairs to play some Landmark.  In truth I first tore apart my computer and installed a brand new Geforce 750 ti 2 gb superclocked card that arrived.  It dropped into the machine without any issue, other than a little bit of confusion windows 8.1 had when I first booted up.  However as I was re-downloading the geforce drivers it seemed to magically right itself, so I am guessing behind the scenes windows was doing something.  I love my wife dearly for not balking at me wanting to pick one of these up, but overall she is super supportive of my obsessions just as I am of hers.  She also got a care package full of jewelry yesterday, so she also got something nifty in the mail.

I have to say that if I thought Landmark looked amazing on Medium or High, it looks all the better on Ultra.  My early evening obsession was in getting the two claim extension flags crafted so I could expand my hold on Liberation/Shield.  With the help of my good friend Rae I managed to gather up enough Elemental Tin to craft two of these flags.  Thing is… while applying them I realized that the upkeep costs are not weekly like I assumed, but daily.  Before adding my additional claim flag the upkeep cost was 300 copper per 24 hour period.  Adding one claim flag doubled this.  So while I don’t really see a problem harvesting 600 copper per day (and you can keep a stockpile of 5 days worth on your claim), I am not sure if I really want to do 900 a day and add the second flag.  So right now I will just sit on that for the time being, and if a friend needs it to expand their claim I will mail it their way.

Communal Harvesting

Landmark64 2014-03-27 21-24-28-84 When I finally got home in the evening from our whirlwind tour of the various appliance stores in town, I sat down with the purpose of working on upgrading my tools.  However my friend Rae and my friend Lethbridge were already grouped together in search of the illusive “thistle seeds” that only come from a super rare desert tree with purple flowers.  One of the coolest features of the Closed Beta that was not in the previous Alpha incarnation (at least that I know of) is the way grouping works.  If you and I are grouped and in the same area… essentially you have to be in visual distance of each other…  when I harvest you get a copy of everything I loot, and when you harvest I get a copy of everything you loot.  What makes this awesome is that while someone is harvesting one node, you can pop over and harvest a completely different node and share the benefit.

I am not entirely sure if this is a “feature” or a bug, but Audrae was way more progressed than me tool wise.  She and I played early in the evening, and then two hours later when I got home from the fridge-go-round she was still playing.  During that time she had progressed to a tungsten pick, and as we wandered around the their two zone looking for these trees she was able to harvest… and therefore transfer a copy to us of much higher materials than we could ever do on our own.  Essentially this means you can leap frog your friends over hurdles by wandering around and harvesting with them.  So while at the time I could not harvest the tungsten and gold, I could do iron or stone or a tree and still be somewhat useful.  Towards the end of the evening I arrived with a lot of help at the same place she is in the progression:  Tungsten Pick and Gold Axe.

Currently we are tag teaming the harvesting of cobalt in trying to get those picks, as well as wandering around the “old growth” forest biome looking for the illusive “Ancient Rootstock”.  This then gets refined into Vital Heartwood which is used to craft the haft of the Cobalt Pick we now lust after.  At this point honestly we are mostly focusing on item progression, and at some point soon hopefully I will have compiled a stockpile of materials to begin rebuilding “Belgarde Keep”.  The new version will be considerably bigger as I have two claims to work with now, but for the most part I plan on using the same sort of construction. This means I am going to need millions and millions of stone, which luckily I am getting while I wander around the world harvesting other things.

Landmark64 2014-03-28 06-41-04-00

In the curious footnote department… I noticed that in closed beta the loading screen has now completely dropped the “Everquest Next” verbiage from the logo.  It is now identified as “Landmark” and so is the client itself.  I am wondering if this is an attempt to start trying to clear up the confusion of how this connects to Everquest Next as a whole?  They have been up front about their intention that this is a completely separate game, that will share tech with Next, but have its own objectives.  So I guess this is the beginning of trying to divorce the two brands in the minds of the players.

4 thoughts on “Communal Harvesting”

  1. On the Party Window there’s a little icon at the bottom left of a person’s name (looks like 3 people standing together) that is on when you’re close enough to share harvested resources. That’s the easiest way to tell if someone has wandered out of “Harvest Range” or not.

    The only tiny downside is if you’re grouped with someone and at a crafting station, and the person you’re grouped with is harvesting, it can cause issues with the little crafting counter. If you’re trying to make gold ingot and want to make 20 and you’re still getting gold ore via a friend harvesting, the counter keeps resetting to 1.

    It’s a minor bug and i’m sure they’ll fix it, but when it first happened to me I was confused as to why my counter-thingie wasn’t working.

    • Awesome thanks for the tip, I noticed that icon but had not given it the thought to try and figure out what it was indicating. That is useful! 🙂

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