Time for another LiF guild update.

The big piece of news is I visited a neighboring guild, one of the largest on our server, to open up diplomatic channels. The visit was well-received, and I got a small tour of their very advanced holding. It was really interesting to hear that their stone wall design isn’t to maximize space, but rather so that there aren’t blind spots for attackers to hide in, which I guess is a common raiding tactic where people hide along your walls and wait for someone to exit and attack them.

They also had extensive piles of gold, silver, and iron ore, along with advanced and massive production areas. Perhaps most surprisingly, given their size and game knowledge, was that they were still working towards a lot of key building, including a siege workshop and school. It just reinforced that our guild has a long way to go before we max out our holding, and that’s a good thing.

The agreement we came to was to set each other as friendly, which means we appear blue to each other out in the world, but doesn’t grant any access rights to buildings or gates. It also doesn’t make us officially allied, so we don’t inherit their wars. I was also granted access to their Discord server, to make communication easier going forward. Longer-term, once our members are a bit more combat-ready, we could assist them on attacks or defense, and call on them should we get attacked.

Finally, I was given a male horse to put in our stable for breeding with our female, which was a valuable gift considering I had never seen a wild horse to tame, and had previously gotten very lucky to find the two tamed females I did.

Speaking of horses, I did end up losing one of the females due to a game bug. I was crossing a zone line and bugged out, going into an odd infinite loop of rubberbanding. I had to force-quit the game, and when I logged back in, I was not only in a different spot, but the horse was also gone. A guildmate and I searched a large area, but no luck. A support ticket to the game was answered after a few days, but as is usually the policy in MMOs, they don’t replace the item lost. That was unfortunate, but things balanced out not only from the gift horse, but a guild member also found two wild horses, and I was able to tame both without much trouble.

We built two small stables in our town, one for cows that we found/tamed, and the other for horses. The cows have started breeding, which means we now have a steady supply of milk and beef. Our only female horse right now however is still young, and so must remain in the stable to age until she is old enough to breed. Animals, oddly enough, don’t age or need food if they are in your inventory, but do when in a stable. Perhaps this gets changed at a later date, but for now is an odd quirk.

In addition to the stables, we have also started harvesting flax, and I finally opened up the skills to convert flax into cloth. This required a few new tools, including a spinning wheel, a loom, drying racks (for skins/leather), and dying tubs. It all makes for a fun-looking production area in our holding.

Right now I can only produce basic clothing and guild tabards, so not much in the way of armor, but at least we can easily recognize each other based on look from a distance. In a day or two I should have the skill to start crafting leather armor, and along with our smiths getting close to metal armor, we are inching closer to really get going on being combat-ready.

The ability to produce cloth also means we can create linen rope, which is an annoyingly key component in many important items and buildings, such as even the most basic wooden gate. Since we finally can make the rope, we put up a gate to properly fully enclose the inner section of our guild area, which is a good feeling.

Speaking of defenses, we have our first guild event set for this Saturday night, were we will go as a group up into our local mountains and mine for the massive amount of stone we need for our stone walls. The plan is to mine up in the mountain, convert the raw stone into shaped stone on-site, and once we have a large quantity of shaped stone, bring up a few of our carts to haul it all back, while others travel along to protect the carts should they be threatened by wild animals or enemy players.

It was a good few days for our guild, with many of us hitting some key milestones for skills, making a new friend to assist us, and getting started on the path to having horses available for more regular guild use.