Hardcore Casual

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.

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.

Apologies for the delayed “What we are doing” update in Life is Feudal. The cause of the delay? Um… playing it too much.

The big update is that we formed the guild (Supreme Cream) and have been busy setting up our holding. While we were waiting to get 10+ characters into the roster so we could actually drop a monument (city center), we were clearing a spot we thought would work well. Once we had 10+, we found out that spot, which we had done some teraforming to already, was too close to the edge of the server (map square) line, and we had to move more inward. To our surprise, we had to move a good bit away, and ultimately ended up inside the nearby forest.

The forest spot is nice for the obvious reason that wood and all other forest-type resources are abundant. It’s less ideal because we don’t have clay nearby, and we have to travel a bit north to get to mountains for ore, or south to a ridge for stone. And since we can’t make carts of any kind yet, long-distance hauling really isn’t an option for moving large quantities. We are pretty close to water, so fishing is easy as a steady supply of food at least. Part of the fun is discovering what works and what doesn’t, and claim location is certainly a huge aspect of that. Will our spot ultimately be great or terrible? We will see.

The actual ground around us isn’t perfectly flat, but it’s not terrible either, and we already have a large section of the initial guild territory leveled out. I’m not going to admit I did close to 7 hours of digging one day on vacation, but I’m also not denying it. It at least motivated me to set up a second monitor finally, and I put my old Dell 24” monitor back in use.

In addition to flattening land for housing and farming, we have also built up a natural dirt wall as our early form of defense. The defense was put up early because on our third day, a Chinese player came to us and, through some rough English, told us another group was coming to attack us. So far no one has declared war on us, but better safe (ish?) than sorry.

Our current focus is on everyone getting their initial skills up, and to start doing some mining/smelting to get access to iron. We need that because almost everything we need next (bigger storage, weapons, non-basic tools) takes nails, which can only be made at a smithy from iron. One of the rough spots of LiF right now is the crazy demands for even the most basic items. For example, we can build wooden walls right now, but in order to build a wooden gate, we need a linen rope, which is basically a 4^th tier item that has a dozen pre-reqs we don’t have yet. The game is still in Early Access and all that, but that’s a pretty basic mistake IMO.

Reminder: If you are interesting in joining, here is out Discord to ask further questions.

Edit: Also here is a Twitch link to a member of Valhalla who often streams the game, in case you’d like to see it that way. He is very knowledge about the game, so ask what questions you might have in chat and you should get an answer.

The guild has been created on Telmun, name is Supreme Cream (SCR).

Post your in-game name here and I’ll send an invite. The character that created the guild is named Syn-Alt Godhand.

Lets go!

Edit: Here is the Discord link: https://discord.gg/rnPykH4

Sorry for the delay, got hit with a real bad cold today. Tomorrow a post should be up about the guild, so sit tight.