Our guild went from having not nearly enough wood, to cutting down so many of our matured trees that we didn’t know what to do with all the logs. It’s honestly a pretty common pattern in LiF, where one minute you desperately need something, and the next you have too much. Part of that is learning the game, but I also think some of it is either poor balance or progression not being paced correctly.

We have a similar issue with gold ore right now; there is a nearby mine we feel we should be mining while we can, before someone else gets it, but at the same time we already have ‘enough’ gold, and putting more of it inside our base takes up space we need for buildings or crops. Our solution to that ‘problem’ is to create a personal claim near the mine and use that as storage until we need to convert more of the gold into currency.

Our town is almost complete in terms of what we feel are the ‘must have’ buildings. We have all our crafting bonus buildings (kitchen, blacksmith, carpenter, schools) built or near completion (herbalist), we built our second warehouse, and we have plenty of housing (bind points). The last building we want is a large stable, and after that we can either upgrade our stone walls to castle walls, or decide on a project on our realm claim space.

On the combat side most of us are able to use tier 2 weapons/armor, and we are starting to produce those in better numbers and quality. The quality part is in large part dependent on making steal ingots, which require an ingredient from the herbalist skill. Herbalism is something I’ve gotten into on another alt, but it’s fairly time consuming. There are 40 some herbs, and each has three random properties different for each player. The way you discover what those properties are is through trial and error; mix two herbs, if they share a property, they will create something and that property gets revealed. Rinse and repeat however many times you need to uncover everything, or in my case, the 11 herbs that have the ability to create flux (the item needed to make steal ingots).

This last judgement hour was also an interesting one. Our original plan was delayed, so we initially were set to just defend and see what happens. We figured our enemies, APEX and friends, would hit our old enemy gondor, who live nearby, and they did exactly that. Gondor had a good number of buildings on their realm claim, which isn’t protect during judgement hour, and many of them ended up being destroyed. Our allies Revenant responded about 30 minutes into JH, and asked us if we wanted to come along to fight APEX. A bunch of us went, and we had a good battle that first started near the base and then moved deeper into the nearby woods. We ended up winning, and along with killing a bunch of APEX, Revenant was able to take a bunch of trade carts APEX was hoping to haul back to their base. I don’t know what was inside, but my guess is items taken from gondor.

I’m really hoping our plans come together this Saturday, because if they do, it should be a pretty serious fight. We will see.