Our guild progress in LiF continues, and we are really starting to hit our stride.

The big change since the last update is we relocated. Our original location was simply too far from clay and iron, two very key resources early on, so we moved north a bit, getting us closer to the mountains. The new spot is also on flatter ground, so we didn’t require the massive initial terraforming effort to get going. We are still close to forests for wood, and our distance from water hasn’t changed. We are closer to one non-Chinese guild, and I’ll be opening up diplomacy with them shortly.

I wish I had taken screen shots of our claim’s progression, because it’s very cool to see how we have grown. Right now we have our huts for bind points, a central area surrounded by a basic wooden wall should we get raided that contains a few training dummies for combat skills and our main storage, a smithing area, a few chicken and rabbit coops, and two farming fields.

In the somewhat near-term, we’d like to put up stone walls with proper gates, add some higher tier crafting stations to make better armor and weapons, and upgrade our housing from huts to multi-tenant buildings. We also need to make a barn and stable, to hold animals such as horses and pigs. I believe we will need to either trade with others or venture further out to tame and breed sheep and cows, again once we have the buildings built to hold them.

We currently have a few carts for hauling, thanks to our old guild Valhalla merging with another guild further away and leaving them behind. With a storage capacity close to triple of a player, they make moving large quantities of goods a bit easier, and will especially be useful when we head into the mountains to dig up the massive quantities of stone we will need for our walls.

From a personal progression standpoint, my main character is still working on the construction skill, which is one of the harder skills in the game to progress quickly. I’ll need to put in some serious work soon because without 60+ in construction and then 60+ in masonry (the next tier skill), we can’t build some of the buildings we really need.

My other character is working on animal lore (taming) and its higher-tier skills. This is again somewhat slow because the primary way to raise it is to find wild pigs and attempt to tame them by feeding them specific foods they like, but the females (sows) run away when you try, and the males (boars) charge you. As if all the chasing wasn’t bad enough, the real solid skill gains come from failing to tame, because when you succeed the animal goes in your inventory and can’t be released to re-tame. This means lots of time spent riding around trying to find an animal, and then praying you DON’T successfully tame it. And the higher your skill gets, the higher your chance of a successful tame, so the slower your progress. Compound this with the fact that skill gains naturally slow down as you go higher, and the grind to get 60+ is a big one. It also stinks that we currently can’t store or slaughter the tamed pigs, so they are all being dropped on the ground after taming.

Other members have been progressing as well, and we now have a few experienced carpenters, smiths, and farmers, which has opened up higher tier crafting/gathering tools. The better tools result in higher quality outputs, which is very important overall, but especially for food production, as the higher quality food you eat, the faster your skills progress when doing anything. What we all really enjoy about the game is how everything is so inter-dependent, and when one of us makes progress, it usually benefits everyone else in some way, be it better food, equipment, or town functions like higher storage.

It’s certainly still not too late to jump in and join us if you are interested, just drop by Discord and we will help you get rolling.