Sevenless' Guide to the New World - Now with Community Help

Ask and answer any and all questions pertaining to Salem's game-play.

Sevenless' Guide to the New World - Now with Community Help

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:37 pm


Community Contributions: March 16, 2013

Seeing as I'm not attentive to Salem at the moment, I've given permission to Magic and other mods to update/modify my guide as they see fit. Newer game mechanics since I've been in game have started to make my guide mildly dated as it doesn't mention them. If you feel something crucial is missing, feel free to post it in this thread and discuss it with mods who are keeping tabs on it. If they're willing and have the time they can work about adding it.

If they feel a need for a more major re-write, they can always get a hold of me via skype and we can work it out. Thanks to everyone who finds my work valuable enough to be worth keeping updated.

-Sevenless

Edit: Purity updates are rocking things hard: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5685

Read and realize my entire guide will need re-writing to take this into account.




Hello again everyone. Time for my effort to help our new Pilgrims find their place within the lumberwoods. As per my normal disclaimer, this work may be copied to other forums or wikis as long as a link and credit is given to me as author. The work may also be translated into any language you please, but yet again just toss me a link back to the original while you're at it. If you make any changes to these copies, please, give yourself credit and outline the sections you have added or modified so that it's apparent all the hard work you've done.

Guides are very different from wikis, and I've always preferred the former. Primarily because there's a lot more wiggle room for opinion, and as usual, the "best" course is very much a subject of personal prejudice. By all means, read the comments below the guide and see what thoughts other Salemers had/have on what I write, and take everything with a small grain of salt. Not doing things my way is usually not "wrong", just different. Except character/town safety. Please heed what I have to say on that subject if you don't take anything else away from this guide. This is not a friendly gameworld community by and large, and this game should definitely be played as such.

Caveat Emptor: Buyers beware

This is an open world, full pvp, *permadeath*, full loot game. As a beginner, you will NOT be able to protect things you buy with real money. If you are knocked out you drop everything in your possession and if you're lacking a homestead you go straight back to Boston. I heavily suggest at least getting a leanto before buying or delivering any items from the shop. The only truly safe spot for things in this game is in the hands of the banker or postman.


To HnH Veterans:

The only form of character death is murder by other players. All other forums are simply Knock Outs that send you home minus your items and 2 proficiency levels.
- Credit to Painhertz for noticing this was an issue that was cropping up.

Navigation Index

Walk Through More Work Done - Aug 13/2012

If this guide is too detailed or too long for your taste, I have a micro guide that follows a startup playthrough of noob life. You can find it here: http://forum.salemgame.com/viewtopic.ph ... 269#p23269

Hopefully this will get you started if you're a "do it yourself" type


Skills, Proficiencies and Learning Ability - Complete and updated as of Aug 11/2012

Humours and Gluttony - Complete and updated as of Aug 08/2012

Combat and Hunting

Safety - Updated as of Oct 26/2012 - You need *3* walls to guarentee braziers begin to attack! Thanks for letting me know realak.

Agriculture Updated to reflect new food gluttony values - Dec 6/2012 Thanks for pointing this out Procne!

Mines and Metals - Abandon-mini-guide (have received word that the mining system will likely receive an overhaul at some point. No further updates in light of this until the new system is implemented)

Thoughts on Running/Organising Towns and Settlements


Useful Guides/Mini Guides by other players

ShadowAtlan's Treatise on the Darkness
Last edited by Sevenless on Sat Apr 06, 2013 2:30 am, edited 18 times in total.
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
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Posts: 1727
Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:57 am

Your first Week in Salem

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:37 pm

Welcome to the New World pilgrim. It's now officially time to have a nice serious chat about the nature of permadeath and open world PvP. Although the graphics may be "cute", Salem takes after its predecessor Haven and Hearth for being a vicious game. Competition is fierce, there are Raiders and Griefers out in the world and they will try to kill you at some point. Many people see this as a game to live peacefully with a little hermitage off in the woods, but the honest truth is Salem is a land at war, and always will be. To live a peaceful life your best chances are to sign up with a powerful faction and live inside their massively defended towns. Hermitages can never afford the defenses the larger towns can, and although they are also bigger targets end game there tends to be stalemate between large factions. This can all change on a dime as defenses and offenses in the game get adjusted, but I still believe it to be generally true.

The healthiest way to play this game in my opinion is by looking at characters as tools. They are shovels for digging, swords for fighting, or rakes for gardening. When you lose a character, as you almost inevitably will, look at it as a tool that was broken. This means you should at all costs avoid making "Swiss Army Knife" characters that do everything for you. Sending your 100 Stocks and Cultivars character out to afk chop wood is a terrible risk for something that could easily be done on an alt that is an hour old. You are allowed multiple characters, so use them. Make alts and level them so that when you die you will still be useful for your settlement. That isn't to say that you will be killed, I know a couple players that have managed to avoid it (as in 1-2 out of 50-100 players I've talked to). But expecting it as inevitable will help you prepare for it and soften the blow a bit.

If any of this alarms you, *seriously* reconsider playing this game. I hope my advice on this matter is heeded. Salem follows in the footsteps of Haven in being one of the most brutal and heart wrenching games I've ever heard of or played.

Preparing for your Voyage

Login on the "vanilla" client found in the account section of this website. And then immediately close it. What you're going to need is a custom client by either Enders or Apxe. Before you get on a soap box about mods being disrespectful, the developers *fully* support this and even made a special section on the forums for it. Jorb and Loftar (I will refer to them as Jorbtar) are a very small dev team and the modding community has stepped in to fill the role of UI for them. Not to say I approve of all additions, some of the non-public clients made by the larger factions likely offer very good botting abilities for example, but it's a price we have to pay in order to have a functional game in the mean time.

Enders can be found here
Apxe can be found here

Both have advantages and disadvantages, I personally use Enders more out of stylistic preferences than anything. Definitely check them both out and see which you prefer. Apxe now has a leveling tool of his own, which was a big reason to suggest Enders earlier on. From what I understand, the Java 7 problem with enders has been solved.

Is the interface difficult for you? Not everything is fully explained. Check this post out for shortcuts to open things like skills window that apply to all clients, no matter which you use:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=507

P.S. Your Hearth Secret is found in the buddy list window.


Your First Steps

At this point it's best if you head out and read the Skills and Humours sections before doing anything else. This will give you an idea of what to do as you wander out from boston, and will let you start to see how the mechanics work.

Note: Maple leaves are used in several early game inspirationals, but the trees take a good long time to regenerate their leaves. Don't expect to find maple leaves anywhere closer to boston than a 30 minute walk directly away from the starting area. Be patient and try Rock Maracas instead. They provide a lot of useful starter skills, and flint isn't hard to find.


The starting tutorial gets you out into the new world fairly quickly, and provides helpful advice along the way. I'm going to start this guide with your arrival into Boston as a fresh character. Your first task should be to leave the area and start walking away from Boston. The Boston Village claim gives protection to starting characters, and in the past when there were large waves of beginners being born, raiders would camp outside the claim to kill noobies for sport. Since we're unlikely to have very large waves other than when open beta begins, hopefully this won't be an issue. Either way be cautious of anyone you meet, *especially* if they're wearing anything other than beginner clothes. If someone starts looking dangerous or threatening to you, simply log out by closing the client and check to make sure your Javaw process is dead. If not, crash that. Also, NEVER afk in this game outside of boston claim area. Once you have a camp up, you can teleport to boston or alternatively just log off. Afking is a very stupid reason to get killed. There is a safety portion to this guide, but these little tidbits should suffice until you've made a permanent camp.

Now, we have one skill (Childish Things) from the tutorial. This little gem unlocks some very early game crafted inspirational which are absolutely crucial to your progress. Wander out in any direction you please from Boston. The first skill we're interested in is survival skills. This will give access to a free random teleport that (if you're not unlucky) will dump you someplace relatively uninhabited compared to the areas around Boston. As you head out, start paying attention to your minimap and look for items. We'll need 200 Frontiers/Wilderness and 200 Hunting/Gathering in order to nab our first non-tutorial skill. A fairly common way to level this is with the foraged curiosity Smooth Stone. However, since childish things is unlocked, we do have other options. Go take a look at the wiki found here. It's probably best that you bookmark this for future use.

Now that you're on the wiki, look up Rock Maracas, and the other inspirationals that have appeared in your crafting menu found in the bottom right of your screen. It's time to wander until you find the curiosities to level your survival skill, it shouldn't take long and remember to harvest berries off bushes as you go. As soon as you get 5+ berries, go into glutton mode and start getting those early levels of BB in order to make skilling up easier. Once you have survival skills, glutton/eat your food, study any curiosities you have ontop of what was required for Survival Skills and use the Boston teleport in the adventure menu. Until you have a leanto or claim, teleporting can only be done with an empty inventory.

Now, from here talk to a wilderness guide and get your free teleport. This will spawn you somewhere random in the world and give you a claimed leanto. Now, it's very very very important to remember: You will not be living out of this leanto. There are many things that are important for a permanent living space, and a randomly chosen spot is very unlikely to even meet minimum requirements. Now port back to boston, it's time to afk and learn how to use the Plymouth World Map.

Multi server support has finally been added, but new maps have not. For the moment all we have to work with is the plymouth map. Take a quick look anyway for when maps come out for your server, or just read on. The choice is yours.


The minimum requirements for a good living location are Autumn/Pine Forest, grassland, few ridges and water. Additional helpful biomes/features are the other kind of forest you're missing (Pine or Autumnal depending), Sand, Game Trails and Lime Deposits. Just by scanning the world map I found a spot that is literally perfect to live in:

Image

Every biome is within walking range of a fairly central location, and the forest has some lime deposits. That being said, places this ideal are very few, and there could still be ridges in the area that would make foraging a real pain. Sufficed to say, the best spots will probably already be taken, so the simple water/grass/forest formula should work for you. Also remember that the grassland and forest should be more than little spits of land. Furthermore, remember that any area closest to where you set up your home will not forage very well. Foraging is based on maps reloading after having no players in sight of them for a certain time. It's important therefor to not settle too close to sand, the biomes come in small amounts and the coarse salt that can be foraged off them is a very valuable resource. Most other biomes are big enough that the area taken out of them isn't a big deal. Settling 3 "minimaps" (1 minimap is your sight radius in all directions on the item radar roughly) should be enough to ensure good respawn rates. If you're living in a larger town, multiple foragers going to the same area can keep it from reloading quite easily though, so try 4-5 minimaps away to be safe for valuable areas like sand.

Now that we've had that discussion, you can port to your random ported leanto and take a look at the area. "Badlands" are a light brown and filled with venomous snakes. Also look if there's ridges more than 2 tiles high. If you have either of these features, you're probably better off starting from Boston. Be it from your leanto or Boston, start walking and begin your journey into the world of Salem.

It's the Journey that Counts

As you begin wandering, start collecting and crafting inspirations as you can. The first skills you'll want to get are Colonial Tradesmanship and Foraging. Both of these skills require slightly different proficiencies, just save curiosities and get whichever you can first (assuming you have space in your inventory for this). Colonial Tradesmanship is easiest to acquire by hunting chestnuts in the forest, but if that's not an option there are craftable inspirations that will suit your needs. While you're walking don't forget to keep an eye out for gluttonable blackberries to get your BB up to 10. And while we're on the topic, keeping an eye out for a place to live should be something always ticking in the back of your mind.

Once you've got Both of those skills, the next most important thing to get is Lore of the Lumberwoods. This skill is the gateway to many skills necessary as a beginning player, but it will take leveling several Proficiency bars to do it. Do remember, even Survival Skills unlocked some new Inspirationals to craft, it's very worthwhile to investigate each one to figure out how easy they are to craft and what they give for Proficiency Points.

Once Lore of the Lumberwoods is acquired, Hiking should be acquired as soon as possible. Hiking will allow you to construct new leantos, a must have as soon as you find your new living location. If you're Knocked Out (snakes and bears are both aggressive and can easily do this), you'll be sent either to Boston, or to your leanto/claim if you have one. Naturally this is why we preferred the random teleport if luck allowed. Once this is acquired, Exploration, and Indian Tracking should be worked towards in that order. Once Indian Tracking is unlocked, keep ANY indian feathers you find, but don't pick up an arrowhead until you've got a feather. These can made into Savage Charms and then sold in Boston to NPC stalls for 35s and are likely how you will get your first cash in the New World.

Thanks Shiala for catching this: Swimming now takes phlegm and a lot of it! Beginners really don't need the swimming skill right now because there's no way you'd even get across a river without problems. Furthermore, there's been 1 report of swimming in the darkness causing permadeath. Dip your toes in carefully pilgrims.


If you find a feather and arrowhead, but haven't found a good spot to live yet, make a leanto anyway and claim it. Port to boston, sell the Savage Charm and buy a purse to put your money in. It can be equipped, meaning if something KOs you it won't drop your silver. Players with Larceny are still able to steal equipped items, so you've been warned. It's also not a bad idea to make a leanto at some point just so you don't lose your progress to a snake bite or bear attack. It's probably a good time to mention that picking up hollow old logs has a decent chance of spawning a snake under it. Another nice little tip for beginners is to make sure to check hollow stumps and myrtle oak bushes. These can be used for storage in a pinch, but they also occasionally spawn curiosities like chestnuts and abandoned cobwebs. "Stumping" can be a fun way to break up the monotony of foraging since it actually requires you to look where you're going and not just stare at the minimap looking for forageables. Don't expect to see stuff more than once per 5 to 10 stumps, but when you do find the nicer inspirations they are very helpful.

Credit to Princess Aurora: Stumps can occasionally spawn small amounts of silver, between 1-4 pieces. It's a rare, but welcome treat.

Greener Pastures

At this stage in your pilgrim's life, it's time to settle down. Hopefully you've found at least an acceptable place to live, but if not you may want to start looking at less attractive options. A forest is better than grassland for early game food finding, so if need be plop yourself down reasonably close to water in a forest. At absolute worst, you can forage grass by porting to boston and walking out to the edges of the claim to find some. Ridges are a real pain in the butt and I heavily suggest avoiding them if you at all can.

Once you've found yourself a spot, find some relatively flat ground to build a leanto on and set up camp. If there's really no flat land available, pick up the whittling skill, make yourself a whittlers bench followed by a shovel, and flatten out a piece of land 2x3. Once you've got a spot you know you can build on (hold Ctrl to unlock the building from the in game grid), pave underneath it and then build/claim your leanto. At this point it might be worth your time to put together a wicker basket or two. Containers (or any carriable object for that matter) can be stored in the leanto by doing Adventure>Lift on the carriable object, and then right clicking on the wood of the leanto. A simple right click on the bag that appears or the leanto will take it back out. This is your first form of "claimed" storage, meaning that it will require another pilgrim leave a summonable scent AND have the larceny skill to take it out.

While this doesn't mean much after a month in game time wise, it's better than nothing for protecting your hard earned stuff. The motto to go by here is "If it's not on a claim, it's game". Now obviously this doesn't mean take items from people's baskets while they watch you do it, but if you leave anything unclaimed overnight you should *not* expect to see it again in the morning as a general rule of thumb.

Seeing as Wicker Baskets are pretty shoddy storage containers, it's probably a good idea to aim for carpentry and a little bit of pocket silver next. You'll need 2 nails to get a sawbuck, which is required to make Wooden Crates. Crates hold 15 items instead of the woeful 6 that fit in your baskets. Now, early world the only real way to do this is by either drying skins and selling them to NPCs, or by collecting savage charms for NPCs. Drying skins without a claim is usually a very frustrating endeavour, so the likely chance is you'll need 2 savage charms to do this. Once the world has been rolling a bit, often beginners can do things like make hay (5 grass + 1 crafting action) and sell them for 5s each. The newly added player vending stands, or a player trader, will allow you access to cheaper nails than the 30s ones in the NPC stalls. Make sure to ask around, at the writing of this guide nails were selling for ~20s each from players.

Once you've got some crates for storage you've officially got yourself a nice little start on a settlement. It's time to start diversifying skills and finally get back to working on your humours as 5/5/5/10 is probably getting quite annoying by now.

Home Sweet Home

Now that you've settled in the area of your choice it's time to hunt a proper living location. I suggest spending 1-2 days in the area looking for a good final location to settle in. Remember you don't want to be too close to any biomes that are small (sand or small forests). Three minimaps minimum. You'll also want to be within a minimap of water if at all possible. However, do keep in mind that flatness of the area you're moving to will make an incredible difference in the amount of work it takes to make a decent sized settlement. For a hermit, 20x20 is about the smallest area you could expect to live in comfortably if the farms and coal piles were outside the initial walls. Digging as a hermit is a very very large project when done solo. All buildings need flat land, but farms can be built on uneven land to save digging requirements. The big key here is that walls will need flat ground to be built on (not quite, but it's safer and less hassle if they're just built on flat areas). What this basically means is you're going to need a flat 20x20 square made to build your settlement on, and the wall should have one row of tiles beyond it flattened to prevent issues when building it.

At this stage of the game it's time to start thinking about the long run. No longer a fresh faced noobie, it's time to deal the dangerous realities of this game. Getting the settling skill and amassing enough silver to get a small claim going is absolutely essential to start getting some meager protection for your items. It's also the start of getting a full claim up on your 20x20 plot. The initial 5x5 claim costs 150s, and after that it will be 1s for each tile claimed. This means that a 400 tile 20x20 claim will cost a total of 525s. While you're working on saving for this, perhaps now's a good time to take a full read over the safety section of the guide.

As a beginner with low phlegm, always claim 2-3 tiles outside the outer wall you intend to build and do it first. If someone decides to grief you, they can build a gate across your own, but with a claim this is a very expensive and difficult thing to do. Claim first, wall second until your phlegm is above that required to nuke any walls you make.


Your stuff won't be even remotely safe until a *triple* stone hedge wall, fully claimed, is setup with at least 9 braziers guarding it. This triple wall + braziers is a good goal to attempt to achieve within 2 weeks of settling on your final location. A lot of course depends on how much you play per day, but an active hermit should be able to finish this off within roughly that time.

Note: At no point does this mean you should attempt to actively defend your claim. Warriors will always have better stats and better familiarity with the combat in the game. It's far safer to do your best to discourage them and simply accept what losses you get rather than risking your character.

Deciding on a way to generate silver isn't a bad idea at this point.

Living off the NPC:

The "Hudson's Bay Company" has NPC stalls in Boston that buy certain things for a set price. Everyone makes a little money by finding indian feathers and producing savage charms of course. But drying and selling rabbit and beaver skins is an option for money that can be brute forced to produce silver if you're willing to put the work in. The other option from this is producing cricket teams by killing 11 warbite crickets at a time. All of these are reasonable forms of income, but generally speaking selling items/forageables to players tends to be better silver per hour.

Selling to established players:

Many inspirations/forageables can be sold to other players for example. Pine Forests and swamps have the very valuable Witch's Cap which is a great black bile food / healing food and often in demand by more settled players. Lavender bluets found in pine forests/swamps and grasslands are also something that is likely sellable to other players. Singing old logs, brains, hay. All of these and more have value to players. Head over to the trade section of the forums and have a look to see what people are buying.

Setting up your own trade depot

Having had a look at the trade section, you can probably guess what other players are buying. This is perhaps a little early on in your life, but opening a trade thread of your own and hawking your wares in Boston is by no means an impossible dream. Beginners need backpacks, nails, metal and these are likely going to remain popular staples in the long run.


~~~


Now that we're done looking forward, it's time to consider the present again. I'm assuming there's probably just a basic 5x5 claim up with a leanto and a couple crates. Mushroom Hunting and Flowers & Berries are two skills that will likely make your life much easier. Flowers unlocks the delicious Wild Salad recipe which is a great early game phlegm food, and Mushrooms unlocks Shrooms on a Stick, a good Yellow Bile or Black Bile recipe depending what it's combined with. If you're living in a hilly area Hill Climbing is definitely a skill that will be worth your time to acquire (I suggest picking up essential minerology first for the Minerological Surveys that make Mines and Mountains a much easier proficiency to get).

From here on out, skill paths start to diverge significantly depending on what you want to do. Hermits will need a smattering of everything, but people living in small groups will want to specialize. All of the skills are in their own way equally important though so it's tough to determine what should go first. I'll be splitting the three primary paths: Farmer/Cook, Miner/Craftsman, and Hunter/Warrior. The requirements for each of these professions will be covered in their own section as linked.
Last edited by Sevenless on Fri Aug 24, 2012 2:40 pm, edited 15 times in total.
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
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Sevenless
 
Posts: 1727
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Skills, Proficiencies and Learning Ability

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:38 pm

Complete and Updated as of Aug 11/2012


Skills and Proficiencies

In Salem, there are two main aspects to character "skills". There are the skills themselves, such as "Childish Things" which was purchased during the tutorial. These provide static benefits such as the ability to make curiosities in the case of the tutorial skill. Other skills will unlock building, abilities and food recipes, as well as give static bonuses to your ability to perform various tasks. Several skills help you forage and see specific plants/minerals more easily as well. Naturally speaking, acquiring these skills will be your goal, but getting access to these skills requires more than just unlocking pre-requisites.

The second element of skills is your Proficiencies. When you hit Ctrl+T you see your study window and a long list of numbers. Starting characters start with lvl 5 in all proficiencies, meaning the proficiency skillbar has room for 500 points. Consuming inspirations will add points to different bars, depending on the inspiration of course. Once a bar is full, it will turn green. Clicking on the bar will level you up in that proficiency, but all proficiency points will be burned. Leveling Arts and Crafts will still use any points you have in Frontiers and Wilderness for example. The same goes for skill purchases. But back on topic, to unlock a skill for purchase, your bars have to be sufficiently leveled in order to have enough proficiency points to buy it.

Proficiencies also have/will have smaller but helpful side effects on game activities. Levels in Stocks and Cultivars increases the potential plenty bonus you can give when planting fields. Frontiers and Wilderness gives what seems to be roughly a 7% reduction in fishing tackle/rod wear for going from 10->20 points in the proficiency level. None of these effects are crucial to gameplay, but they make life easier in the long run. More proficiency uses will be added in the future we've been promised.

But back to skills: Usually the first skill requiring leveled proficiencies for a new character is Lore of the Lumberwoods, which requires lvl 8 Frontiers and Wilderness, lvl 6 Law and Lore and lvl 6 Sparks and Embers. Overall, you'll need to advance 5 levels to get these requirements, then fill up the bars again in order to purchase the skill. At this point you'll probably be noticing that each inspirational consumed isn't giving as much as the previous one. This is because of your "Learning Ability", found in the bottom left corner of the skills screen.

Learning Ability Explained

Learning ability starts at 100%, and is refreshed back to 100% whenever you level a proficiency, buy a skill, or hit the reset button. When you consume a new curiosity that you have not yet consumed this learning "session", the curiosity will give 100% of the proficiency points that it can. You should see your learning ability drop to 70% when this happens. If you consume a type of curiosity you have already used this session, you will get 70% of the learning points and your learning ability will drop to 50%. After 14 curiosities of the same type, your LA drops to 0% and you cannot gain any further points without using a new curiosity.

Consuming a new curiosity will cause *that* curiosity to give 100% of its proficiencies, and reset your LA. However, since you already used the curiosity on the reset, your LA for the next not-new curiosity to be 70%. Lets see some examples to help you work this out.

Example One: I accidentally my Learning Ability

Study Chestnut 1 - LA 100%
Study Chestnut 2 - LA 70%
Study Chestnut 3 - LA 50%
Study Chestnut 4 - LA 35%
Study Chestnut 5 - LA 25%
Study Chestnut 6 - LA 17%
Study Chestnut 7 - LA 12%
Study Chestnut 8 - LA 8%
Study Chestnut 9 - LA 6%
Study Chestnut 10 - LA 4%
Study Chestnut 11 - LA 3%
Study Chestnut 12 - LA 2%
Study Chestnut 13 - LA 1%
Study Chestnut 14 - LA 1%
Study Chestnut 15 - LA 0% - Not quite 0, but close enough that you still shouldn't study it

As you can see here, the 15th chestnut we studied would have given literally 0 proficiency points. The total amount that you can grind out of a curiosity this way is 3.34x the base value of the curiosity at 100%. And that is of course only the theoretical amount, some is lost due to rounding in game. The reset button is there for cases where you're trying to level something but have completely destroyed your LA in this manner and have no variety curiosities left. Try not to click it, it doesn't give a confirmation option at all, but I have used it myself (for example, when studying wood chips to get these numbers).

Example Two: I Love Variety!

Study Chestnut 1 - LA 100%
Study Lumberwood Figurine 1 - LA 100%
Study Simple Crucifix 1 - LA 100%

Because each inspirational we're using is being used for the first time, we get the full proficiency points out of each. Where possible, this is the least wasteful way to level skills. However, the difficulty to create/get each curiosity can be quite different. For someone living in a pine forest with not a single maple tree to be seen, making Lumberiwood Figurines is not a cheap investment time wise.

Example Three: The Long Grind

Study Singing Old Log 1 - LA 100%
Study Singing Old Log 2 - LA 70%
Study Singing Old Log 3 - LA 50%

Study Chestnut 1 - LA 100% - Variety bonus!

Study Singing Old Log 4 - LA 70%
Study Singing Old Log 5 - LA 50%

Study Devil Wort 1 - LA 100% - Variety bonus!

Study Singing Old Log 6 - LA 70%
Study Singing Old Log 7 - LA 50%

...

Here we see an example of what end game skill grinding looks like. Obviously for such a small example, variety curiosities would probably be cheaper to acquire than the extra singing old logs. Your level in any proficiency is only limited by the number of different variety curiosities you can get, and the highest value curiosity you can find for the proficiency you are trying to grind. When variety stops being cheap (having to use a lovers locket as a variety item is brutal because that would mean a wasted iron bar essentially), you can move down the line and start using 2, 3, or 4 of your main grinding curiosity.

Now, if we were looking to level Stocks and Cultivars in this example, assuming 1.00p for all items, we would have earned 1500 S/C x 4.6 points from the Singing Old Logs alone, or exactly 6900 points. This means we could get to lvl 69 of S/C without needing to use more than 7 singing old logs per level. That last sentence turned out hilarious completely unintentionally, I actually wish I could have planned that.

Example Four: Remember which Variety Curios you use


Study Singing Old Log 1 - LA 100%
Study Singing Old Log 2 - LA 70%
Study Singing Old Log 3 - LA 50%

Study Chestnut 1 - LA 100% - Variety bonus!

Study Singing Old Log 4 - LA 70%
Study Singing Old Log 5 - LA 50%

Study Devil Wort 1 - LA 100% - Variety bonus!

Study Singing Old Log 6 - LA 70%
Study Singing Old Log 7 - LA 50%

Study Chestnut 2 - LA 35% - Oops!

Study Singing Old Log 8 - LA 25% - Remember to watch your LA when studying like this!

Study Smooth Stone - LA 100% Variety bonus!

Study Singing Old Log 9 - LA 70%

The only harm in forgetting your variety curio upfront is a wasted variety curio. But if you don't check your LA, you could start wasting your main grind curio as well. When grinding for high skill levels, just remember to watch your LA while doing it.
Last edited by Sevenless on Mon Aug 13, 2012 2:29 pm, edited 7 times in total.
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
User avatar
Sevenless
 
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Humours and Gluttony

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:38 pm

Updates:

Completed as of August 08/2012


The gluttony system is by no means a simple thing. It has probability, purity, four event categories. The works. To a new player this can seem overwhelming, even with the helpful (if tiny fonted) tutorial that pops up for you. Lets start our review with a brief discussion of what humours do for you, and why you want them.

Blood

Blood is often considered to be a "dump" stat by many players. Very early on (5->20 or so) the stat is incredibly easy to get because *many* forageables and forage based recipes give blood as a primary attribute. I'll get into details of what I'm referring to by "primary" later on. Furthermore, blood doesn't have many direct uses, so the benefits are somewhat hidden.

Blood is lost when picking thorns, when failing to light a fire with a tinderdrill (this seems to be a % of your total though, so raising blood has no influence), and when taking damage in combat. The difference between being able to solo a beaver compared to someone who can't early game is quite heavily influenced by your base health and ability to take a beating. A 10b 10yb character can't kill a beaver in a straight up fight, but 20b 10yb can quite easily. By no means am I suggesting to pump any stat 10 above the others (yet again, will explain why later), but the point stands that blood has uses. PvP warriors can see the obvious requirements for the stat I'm sure.

Phlegm

Phlegm is the work horse stat of the four. This stat is drained when doing nearly any crafting action: digging, building, chopping, crafting items. Just to name a few. It's also used by the run and wander movement modes, which are quite crucial at some points in time. Without phlegm heavy duty work like terraforming is nearly impossible to do in any timely manner. For the warrior side of things, phlegm is required to bash down structures such as walls and claim defenses.

Yellow Bile

Yellow Bile is by far the most combat oriented stat in the game asides from perhaps blood. Yellow bile is directly responsible for your damage dealt with your various aggressive attacks, and is used in small amounts in some of the movement styles. Most attack moves have a fairly small base damage, so pumping this number for hunting either creatures or other pilgrims is a must.

Black Bile

Black Bile is an interesting stat. It is roughly equivalent to your "state of mind". Activities like studying inspirationals will lower it. This might seem small, but the speed of studying is directly proportional to the amount of BB you have left out of your total. So studying 1BB worth of inspirationals at 100BB will only drop you to 99% study rate, but with 10BB it's a 10% reduction in study speed. At low levels this means you're eating every minute or two and significantly hampers your ability to study effectively. BB is also used when placing structures. This can be quite draining in the case of long lines of fences, and some of the more costly buildings actually require a significant amount of BB to place (If I remember correctly, a windmill took 7.5bb to place).

In combat currently Deer and Bears are able to cast an ability that drains BB. Since hitting 0 in any of your stats is a KO, this obviously puts requirements for BB minimum levels in order to fight these creatures one on one. Furthermore, BB is the base value for raiders to use when committing crimes. All crime actions against a claim have BB costs, and claim defenses attack the BB stat of the intruders. This naturally means that raiders will not be combat weakened when dealing with claims, but they can get KOed quite easily if they make a mistake or get delayed while under fire from braziers.

I'm currently unaware if any of the player based moves influence BB levels.

~~~

To erstwhile mayors: Don't forget your noobs!

Now that we've reviewed the different humours and what they do, lets talk about an over-all need to level humours. Even the lowliest of villagers should aim for 20 stats just to avoid food waste. For things like BB, you never really want to drop below 50%, because your studying starts to crawl at that speed. In order to go from 50->100%, you need food that's the right size. For a 5 stat new character, even purity 1.00 waxing toadstools are overkill and result in lost healing. Higher stat characters also regenerate more quickly (regeneration seems to be a % of your total/time unit). This is important for heavy work like digging, and for living in the Darkness, where the regeneration currently seems to have a flat penalty against it. This means where low humours characters can't survive, higher characters still could.

Suffice to say, you're saving yourself food in the long run by ensuring there aren't 5 stat characters wandering around trying to do work.

~~~

How the Gluttony System Works

Gluttony mode is activated when you fill all of your humour bars to the full. You then click on the green circle that is your humours. At this point you will get the almighty fork of feasting as a cursor, and may commence to gobble food to your heart's desire. Food may be eaten from the inventory or from an open container, but moving will break the feast mode. If you ever get to this point, another character can come along and dump food into the open container in question if you so desire.

When food is consumed, it has a static amount of time it takes to consume. This is very important because some foods are very slow to eat. Many meats fall into this category, cooked meat and plank steaks as some easy examples. Why is this relevant? As you feast the gluttony points you earn are steadily drained away. As time passes, a "varience penalty" to the right of the humours ball will start to tick upwards. The higher the varience penalty, the faster your points will be drained. It's quite easy when eating just one food type to get to a point where gluttony points are drained faster than they can be produced by eating the food. And it should be evident at this point that slow to eat foods are generally speaking a bad thing here. Each unique piece of food that you eat pushes the varience penalty down by one point. Roasted bear cuts and roasted rabbit cuts are both considered unique for example. As are Bear steaks compared to bear cuts.

So how does this earn you more humours you might be asking. If you manage to get enough points to fill the bar for one humour type, you will earn a point of humours for that particular category. The size of the bar is equal to your highest stat, so raising stats in large batches is going to cost you more food in the long run. At first there's little harm in raising humours 5 points at a time until the 20-30 mark, after that it becomes much more difficult to raise stats and more care should be taken.

Now here's the complicated bit. Each food has four different events. These events correspond with the elemental purities. That is to say, if you had a Witch's Hat that is 100% salt (purity multiplier of 10), you will always get the salt event. Furthermore, the base stats of the Witch's Hat for that event will be multiplied by the purity multiplier as well. In the case of the Witch's Hat, you're still out of luck because the salt event actually gives no Gluttony points of any kind. If we had a Lead Witch's Hat however we would get 120 points of black bile and 30 points of yellow bile. An incredibly potent food there, sadly they only come in the bland purity 1.00 variety.

This raises a second question as to what happens if you eat said mythological Witch's Hat as a 5 stat beginning character. Do you get YB or BB? Some say that it goes to the lowest stat (or random if they're equal). But to be honest, I've never noticed that. Without running specific tests, I assume that the points are distributed randomly. And this means that filling two bars at the same time is a bad idea because it might push up a humour you don't want to go up just yet.

This takes us into the discussion of reliable vs unreliable foods. The witch's hat is a reliable food. In all of the events where it gives gluttony points, it gives more black bile than anything else. So if you eat a crate of witch's hats, the only stat you will get is BB, assuming your stats aren't low enough to double fill a bar. Most reliable foods tend to be rather modest in their stats. Unreliable foods are a completely different ballpark. Usually they have higher base values, but the primary gluttony they give out varies by the event that is randomly selected. Bluebeary gives B/YB with a salt event, just YB in a mercury event, just B in a sulfur event, and just BB in a lead event. However, the base stats on these events are 17.5-35, compared to the max value of 12 on a Witch's Hat. Of course, Bluebeary is also harder to acquire, but the Witch's Hat is probably the best singly foraged food item in the game.

This is all fine and dandy for foods with 1.00 purity, like all of the forageables and hunted meats. The situation gets... well messier when you start to include the fact that as a player we can influence purity to a degree. More so as the game progresses from what we've been told. Currently we can influence farmed food purities by growing seeds and carefully selecting which purities are replanted. Now when we're looking at Oatmeal Crackers for example, their primary input is Oatmeal, which we can play with. If you started raising your cereals and pushing them to lead purity, the oatmeal crackers give a base of 9.5 BB. If we got our crackers up to 2.00 purity, that means we'd see 19 points of BB coming from them on a lead event. Mercury based crackers of the same purity would have a preference towards blood as mercury events would give 18 points towards Phlegm.

Purity multipliers influence *ALL* food events. So a mercury cracker will still give 19 points of BB if the lead event happens, the lead event is just less likely. The 2.00 purity point is reached roughly when you have 50% of one element, and a mixture of the other three. Using the example from the wiki, 20% salt, 50% mercury, 15% sulfur and 15% lead gives a 2.02 multiplier. What this means is we will get mercury events half the time, and other events half the time. For oatmeal crackers, both salt and mercury give blood, while sulfur and lead give black bile. Since our salt + mercury concentration pops up more than 50% of the time, oatmeal crackers of this type should give primarily blood. Yes I know it's complicated, I'll leave you to stew over the more intricate concepts on your own though. There's just too many food types to analyze in this manner fully at this stage of the game. Each crop type that you choose to level a certain element in takes a significant amount of work to do so. And furthermore we don't know which of the non-farming ingredients we'll be able to increase in purity yet. Hopefully I'll have more to say as the system is more developed.

Your First Sin - Beginning down the path of a Glutton

But lets bring this back to the beginning for all the newer pilgrims out here. Just started the game, how do you get those crucial first points of humours to make your life easy? Black bile is always my first target since it lets you skill up more quickly, getting you those initial foraging skills. To do this, simply keep ~10 spaces free in your inventory and wander between berry bushes until it's full of black berries. Feast when you're full up and repeat until you have 10 BB. At this stage, advanced movement modes just drain too much of your humours to really use except perhaps foraging, so a good target to aim for next is phlegm. Phlegm however is not an easy stat to get as a beginner. Milkweed roots and Wild garlic are the only singly foraged items that give P reliably. The real keys to unlocking easy P foods is the ability to hunt rabbits (roasted rabbit cuts and steaks are excellent beginner P foods) or the flowers and berries skill. The flowers and berries skill unlocks the wild salad recipe which is incredibly reliable for P gains. I would suggest aiming for rabbits if you have an option, mainly because grinding for flowers and berries at that stage in the game is fairly difficult compared to getting small game hunting and field dressing.

Now that we have nibbled some BB and P food, it's time to raise our B and YB. As I said, blood should be an easy one. Berry-on-a-Straw are excellent for reliable blood gains and should be more than enough to level you to 10 points. Lavender Bluets also give blood quite often when eaten on their own, with a hint of yellow bile. But they have a much more important use for you in raising said yellow bile. The only good pure YB food early game is beaver steaks, and those are nearly impossible to acquire with the stats your character would have right now (15B 15YB is about where you might start hunting them solo). Your other option is Wortbaked Warbites, but those are a pain to make and serious overkill for a character with 5 YB. So we're moving up the food chain and into what I call "Humour Diets".

Since there's no easy to make food that will give us YB, we're just going to have to use two foods that give us YB. If Lavender Bluets are eaten alone, they will give you 80-90% blood and a little bit of YB. If Shrooms and a Stick are eaten alone, they will give you 50% YB, 50% BB. However, at purity 1.00, both give less than a full bar of stats to a character with a max humour value of 10. If you eat one Shroom on a Stick, and one or more bluets, you will gain 100% YB. The reason being the "side attributes" each food type gives. For the bluets, it gives more B than YB, but not by much. For the Shrooms on a Stick, it gives YB and BB in roughly equal amounts as an average. But when we put them together, you get 2 doses of YB, 1 dose of B, and 1 dose of BB. The net result is that neither the B nor the BB are able to fill their bars, but the YB can without any competition. And voila, we have perfect YB gains from two foods that would give YB on average 25% of the time if they were eaten one type at a time instead.

At this point, I think you have enough information to start looking at food combinations yourself. Remember to look for foods that give the same gluttony point type across all events, and preferably the higher the better of course. Unreliable foods can certainly be used, but you'd want to have a chest with the correct foods to raise whichever humour the unreliable food gave you points in. Food combinations get easier as you go up in points since you can spread out the other stat gains into multiple categories very easily. A Fish in the Reeds and Shrooms on a Stick are a bad YB combination for example since both give YB and BB. But if they are but 2 of 6 recipes you're eating, likely that's not a huge issue. Also remember that the higher your humours, the more recipes you *should* be using as the varience penalty will become a very big issue. Any recipes giving towards the humour you want and taking away the varience penalty are very useful to you.
Last edited by Sevenless on Wed Aug 15, 2012 11:21 pm, edited 8 times in total.
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
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Sevenless
 
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Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:57 am

Re: Sevenless' Guide to the New World ~Work in Progress~

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:38 pm

Combat and Hunting reserve
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
User avatar
Sevenless
 
Posts: 1727
Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:57 am

Safety in the World of Salem

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:38 pm

Last updated Aug 12/2012 - Rewrote item safety to account for metal chests
updated 18 Feb, 2013 - Added new information about wall splash damage; change in brazier mechanics --MagicManICT


Do note: These defensive measures do *not* protect you from griefers. If someone is intent on ruining your day, what I suggest will only make it possibly more time intensive to do so. This guide is the defense against the other 95% of raiders: The ones who are in it for the profit, and the kills.


~~~


Defense in a SeaTribe game:

As a beginner it really seems like there's nothing you can do to defend your hard earned items, but this is far from true. Even without using the infamous "Alt-vault" (secondary characters who log off with items), there's plenty of tricks you can use. A properly set up camp can defend itself quite nicely from having things stolen now that the braziers have been buffed. There's multiple things that can be done to frustrate and slow raiders down to the point that they will only steal a small handful of very valuable items. And those are simple to store on your character when you log out. Do remember: This guide is for beginners, with low stats. This is not about how to protect your life if you leave summonable scents. Tresspassing and punching but not knocking someone down are the only two that aren't summonable. KO'ing someone in self defense leaves no scent if they attacked first. Murder always leaves a scent. Criminals: figure out your own defenses.

One thing worth noting: Avoiding trouble all together is often the easiest form of self defense. Walking a minimum of 2-3 hours out of boston (watch the clock, work on your stats/skills while you do it with foraging) will massively decrease the hassle you receive from raiding types. If you have 40+ stats, you can consider moving out into the darkness at the edges of the world. Life is much much harder out there, but there's even less to worry about from other players.

Golden rules of self defense:

#1 Your most valuable asset is your character. You can instantly log off (close client or type :lo) or instantly teleport upon emptying your inventory if you *don't* have a crime debuff and are not engaged in combat. Nothing you acquire will take longer to get back than the character you used to get it.

-Occasionally when logging out the game may stick you as perma logged in (crash your javaw applications to fix this), or not log you for a couple minutes. This happens about 1 out of every 100 logouts. Weigh this against the possibility of getting hit by a bullet while trying to dump your inventory to teleport. I tend to prefer the logout personally

-Get the enders client from here. This is the client I use, and occasionally there will be references specific to said client. The other popular & public option is the BDSaleM client by Apxe found here.

-Never *ever* afk outside of Boston. Logging on/off is very easy to do, use it. I don't care if you think you'll be gone 30 seconds, or if you haven't seen anyone in a full week. That one moment when a raider is near is enough to end you permanently. As a beginner to SeaTribe games, there's a decent chance you won't come back.

-Always try to log out in a safe location where/when possible. If you're feeling really paranoid, make sure to taskbar end your javaw process. Several villagers of mine have been online the whole night because of this. I personally prefer to log in Boston out of the main walkways.

#2 Trust no one you meet in person within the game

-It's sad to say, but as a beginner it's better to trust absolutely no one. I don't care if they brought you three deer. Or if they helped you chop a tree down. If they're out wandering around, it's quite unlikely they're just foraging and willing to help you out. If you want to meet players to team up with, use the forums. People's in game name is often hard to link with their forum account, but forum accounts are much harder to replace. If they're going to betray you, make sure to muddy the name that'll stay with them the longest at the very least.

-If you're about to be attacked attacked and have not yet been hit by a combat ability, log off. you can type :lo or hit the x button on your client. Other alternative is to run to your claim and port to Boston (standing anywhere you claim touches will let you port), or dumping all items in your inventory/backpack and then teleporting. Fighting as a new player who is unprepared is essentially suicide.

-When running away, run in a zig zag pattern. Low blood beginners can be taken down with a single bull rush (an attack the moves the character forward as well as attacking). This also makes it harder for them to tag you with a rifle.


#3 Never stockpile things of value that can't be stored on your character when you log out. If you do, fully expect them to be missing the next day until you have a very thoroughly defended base.

-If you have no more than 20-30minutes worth of work that can be stolen from you, raiders hitting your base will be a much less devastating problem. Use your good inspirationals as you get them, never cook food into the final edible form until you are ready to feast them.

-Never stockpile more silver than you need for your current purchase. Invest it in items that are not worthwhile for the raiders to steal. Or impossible for that matter. Braziers, cabinets, chests, a smelter. Stuff they can't put in their inventory. Anvils early game are very valuable though, so don't think that's a safe investment.

#4 For every cabinet you have, have at least one brazier

-It's just a general rule of thumb, but it emphasizes a point. Cabinets = comfort, Braziers = defense. I can't tell you how many towns I've heard of getting raided with ten cabinets and one brazier. If they'd had five cabinets and five braziers, nothing would have been stolen. Instead they lost everything. Personally I think an eventual goal of two braziers per cabinet is worth working towards once you progress beyond early game. This is a slightly outdated example now that silver is harder to get (therefore braziers are cheaper and you should have even more), but the point stands. It's far better to over-invest in defence than it is in comfort.


Brazier/Torchpost Mechanics:

Braziers

-Brazier construction is unlocked with "Blacksmithing" and "Rights of an Englishman".

-As far as I know, braziers attack over any summonable crime (knockout, murder, theft, vandelism). I'm unsure if they attack over assault.

-Braziers do 3 bb damage shot, ~1.5bb per second.

-They can fire at least 3 shots per coal. They can hold 20 coal in total. *This exact mechanism is under debate, there is no player who claims to have done extensive testing on coal use of braziers to my knowledge.*

-Braziers cost 4 iron bars.

-The range of an individual brazier is a radius of 22.7 (11 pixels/tile, total range of 250 pixels). Credit to the investigative reporting of the Tumbleweed Courant for being able to pry that tidbit out of Loftar.

-Braziers can NOT be built or moved inside a house. This gives outdoor metal chests the dubious privilege of being the best item defence available in game. I'm assuming this will change at some point in the future as things evolve.

-Both braziers and torchposts do not have their shots blocked by objects. They shoot through walls and houses. Braziers cannot however shoot into a house.

Torchposts

-Torchposts act like "mini braziers". They do 0.5bb damage per second.

-Torches are fueled with 30 tinder instead of 20 coal

-The "expensive" inputs are 4 leather and 1 nail.

-Torchposts have a range of 18.2 tiles (11 pixel/tile, 200 pixel range)

Braziers are capped at 5 braziers worth of damage. It's my assumption that torch posts are the same. There is a diminished return in how much each additional brazier/Tpost will deal in damage when they're overlapping. I'm unsure of the mechanics, but mixing torch posts and braziers *may* lower brazier damage. This depends on how it's programmed.

Targeting: How many walls? At least THREE walls!

Last I asked jorb about it, braziers have an "aggression" value that is increased as people commit crimes on the claim in question. At the time I understood it to mean you needed 2 vandalism attempts to get the braziers to attack. It turns out, either through my misunderstanding or a ninja update, the first two vandalism acts go un-noticed by the braziers and it is only the third wall that the braziers begin defending.

This means you need at LEAST 3 claimed walls to ensure one of the walls is actively defended by your braziers. After the braziers are aggressed, they will attack anyone committing further summonable crimes on the claim.

Credit to realak for updating me on the state of affairs with regards to defenses.

mod edit: Ensure that walls are not stacked. You still should have more than one wall, but there will need to be space in between each layer so that splash damage doesn't severely damage the next layer. Also, braziers were changed so that they activate on the first waste attempt instead of the third. --MagicManICT


Of Claims, Fences and Keys Claim em, lock em, and hide the master key on an alt

At the start of the game any storage object put into your leanto (Do this by picking up the storage object and right clicking on the leanto structure to put it in, right click to get it back out) is going to require theft to steal. This isn't going to stop anyone with larceny from raiding you though. Get a claim up *and expand it* as soon as you can afford it (no excuses). At this stage you can invest in torch posts, which will make taking items out of your leanto more of a pain. Anything left in a wooden chest or a crate can be stolen via picking the chest up and walking off the claim with it. Metal chests or cabinets can't be picked up, so each item has to be individually stolen (costing a LOT more black bile, which your braziers are already draining).

It's quite important that the claim goes up, but clearly this isn't enough. Rush towards building a split rail fence, or preferably a stone hedge. The stone hedge takes simple fences + quarrying, while the split rail fence just takes simple fences to acquire. The stone hedge is much more difficult to knock down, but it takes at least an additional 50% of work to get it set up. If you don't think you can complete the hedge within a day or two, set up a split rail fence and leave room for a second layer to add the stone hedge on after.

Remember! Any fence not covered by your claim and with unlocked gates is absolutely worthless! They take a little effort to knock down, but if your braziers/torchposts can't attack them while they're doing it the fence gives you essentially no defensive bonus. Braziers also don't attack over the first attempt at vandalism. This means you ALWAYS need a triple wall to be sure your braziers will defend your walls.

Now, the fence is up and claimed, what next? Locks of course. Unlocked gates can have locks put on them by anyone, and then you're trapped inside your walls! Locksmithing is very important for the defense of your claim because it lets you lock the gate. When you make a lock you must attune it to a master key (backwards from real life, but whatever I guess eh?). Right click the master key onto the lock, and then add the lock to the gate you want to close up. Make a slave key from the master key. Now, go find your locked cabinet or a locked chest (I'm hoping you have at least a couple torchposts and one cabinet by this point) and *store it*. If you make a slave key, and attune it to someone by right clicking it onto them and waiting, they can use the key just fine. However, if your friend gets koed and has the key stolen, the raider can't use said key to get in. Master keys are the only key type that can be used by someone other than the person it's attuned to. Walking around with the only key type that lets raiders into your base is a crime against yourself. The system easily allows you to prevent this situation, use it.

*This seems to be no longer true? Copies of Mkeys can only be made by people who are already attuned it seems? Unsure - Aug 07/2012*



The ultimate item defense: How to use in game storage properly

Note: Alt vaults are a popular haven system for storing items. I personally dislike it and view it as an abuse of allowing multiple characters. As such, I always work my hardest to make items protected within the bounds of the game rules, and only "altvault" the most valuable of my possessions. Of yet, I've acquired nothing within Salem that I feel requires an altvault other than what I log out with at night on my main character.

The addition of metal chests has significantly altered how valuables storage is handled. Currently, cabinets inside a house should never store anything of high value, and they shouldn't be locked. Here's why: Cabinets are very easy to bash, but very expensive to make. The metal chest doesn't cost much more than a cabinet does if you value metal at 100s/bar, but it has significantly more Hit Points and/or Damage Soak. Currently houses have no form of interior defense other than the small amount of BB drain caused by being on a claim. What this means is, raiders are able to spend time bashing cabinets without taking brazier fire. If your cabinets are locked, there is a much greater chance raiders will bash them (obviously). Now this wouldn't be a problem if cabinets weren't so bloody expensive to make. The minimum 400s requirement to make a cabinet means they're a serious investment for your town. The same concept goes for your wooden chests, they're so easy to bash it's pointless to lock them because they're just going to get hauled off the claim and broken open. If they're unlocked, there's at least a chance the chests will be left alone when the raiders are done.

For your valuables storage, metal chests have more HP than any other storage type, and if they have items in them they can't be lifted. Plopping your locked metal chests in the very center of your town, with braziers and possibly a little fence around them if you're particularly paranoid, is the absolute best defence for your in game items at this point in time.

Yet again, this will only increase the chances at minimized loss. If the people raiding you are griefers, or out for vengence, locked or unlocked your storage will probably get nuked all the same.

Conclusion

This isn't farmville. Peaceful players will need to take precautions and change their playstyle in order to deal with the reality of this game world. In the same breath, raiders can be frustrated by well designed and deliberate defensive measures. Ultimately it's the devs job to provide players with a balanced set of mechanics to make an uneasy truce that makes everyone equally unhappy.

let me highlight this for the forum whiners of both factions:

As beta testers, it's our job to help them balance the issues so it's fair to BOTH STYLES OF PLAY

Credit where credit is due:

Credit goes out to Bait for catching some typos, suggesting beginners rush split rail fences, and being the bastard who tricked some hermits off their claim by giving them 3 deer as a gift.


P.S.

As was originally posted, someone had a small cliff "hole" that they had claimed. If you have braziers around such a natural phenomena, any chests down below would be fairly safe from raiders because the cliffs force the raiders to not haul the chests, and slow them down on escaping with loot. It's a neat idea, definitely not foolproof, and definitely not something you can construct yourself (cliffs can't be made by players). Defense is as always something that should take advantage of unique situations where possible. If you have such an option available to you, I think it adds a great extra layer of defense.
Last edited by MagicManICT on Mon Feb 18, 2013 5:00 pm, edited 15 times in total.
Reason: Updated wall and brazier information
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
User avatar
Sevenless
 
Posts: 1727
Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:57 am

A Tale of Three Fields: Fallow Play

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:39 pm

Seeing as Salem is a game that is entirely centric around the creation and consumption of food, it should come as no surprise to anyone that farming is seen as an important element of the game. As a hermit, what you can honestly do with farms without dedicating your entire gameplay to them is in some ways limited, but there are definitely benefits to be enjoyed all the same. The first section will discuss traditional agriculture, while a second section will discuss gardening. As always this is from memory, correct me if there are mistakes please and thanks.

Credit to Procne for fact checking :)

Things are changing. This guide is obsolete with regards to purity, read the dev statement linked below. I will be updating once purity mechanics are fully implemented and settle down.

Purity updates and farming



Farming

What you need to start out – Wood, the skill, humus, space for crops, seeds

First and foremost you’ll need fertilizer to get things rolling, specifically humus. Humus is produced by dumping compostable items into a compost bin. Generally this means anything organic, from raw meat to woodchips. When placing items in them, the number that pops up is the number of humus pieces the food piece was worth. Cooked food is always worth less than the raw ingredients. Woodchips are worth 0.5, seaweed 3.0, and raw meat 2.0 per cut.

Most people that I’ve ever talked to on the matter tend to hunt and use deer to fill the compost bins for larger farming operations in the early/mid stages of their development. Naturally living near a jorb stain (brown streak on the map, known as a game trail) is helpful for this aspect. Later on, in village farming operations, excess produce can be used to create humus and effectively render the farms a closed system.

When preparing your fields, make sure to have a compost bin up and running the day before. Humus is produced at a steady rate of ~ 1 piece per 2 hours spent composting. Each “unmaintained” field will require 5 pieces of humus to start and 50 seeds of cereal (or 50 cotton or 50 pumpkin or 15 cabbage if you’ve moved past the beginner stages). You will also want 5 blocks of wood for every field you wish to start planting on and naturally at least the agriculture skill. To plant cotton, cabbage or pumpkins additional skills will be required.

Colonial Tradesmanship + Self Defense > Settling > Agriculture

(this is from the wiki, I don’t remember Self Defense being a requirement but memory is nothing if fallible)

Once a field is planted, put 10 woodchips on it to push the upkeep all the way down to 50% and then let it grow. "Normal" fertilizing starts after this generation of crops because throwing any fertilizers on after 10 woodchips is essentially a waste of your time. Fields do not need to be on flat ground, and you can terraform underneath them after they've been planted without harm as of current.

Field Placement - Walled in and sets of 4

My personal preference is to make fields in multiples of 4. The reason being that this lines up perfectly with the amount of inventory space you have (24 with a backpack, you'll need every slot once you get tending fields going). This might not seem important, but when you’re applying hundreds of pieces of fertilizer it’s easier to not have to keep track of partially fertilized fields. For purity grinding purposes, I personally used sets of 8 fields per crop/purity type and had good results. Due to my preference of using 4 fertilizers per field, in retrospect 6 fields/set might have been more appropriate, but play around and figure out what you like.

On the note of fields and placement, you *must* wall in your fields if you’re going to have any more than say 4 as a starting hermit. Field griefing is a very popular way to hurt a player with relatively little effort required to do so.

When placing a field, the center will be based off the Northwest corner of the tile you click on. Refering to the minimap, I consider northwest to be the top left corner. It might seem simple but I've had surprisingly long arguments with people about the subject.


Fertilizers – Get S/C Bonus, Use 3 fertilizers then a woodchip per field if you have 4+ fields

There’s often been big discussion surrounding the core use of fertilizers in the farming world. You can get really big numbers off a single field, but due to diminishing return those big numbers are really inefficient when you take player effort into account. If you’re anything other than a hermit with little to no walled space to live in, using mass fertilizers is less efficient.

The other option is to boost up your Stocks and Cultivar level for the free per plant bonus of plenty, and to use few (but strongest power) fertilizers. My personal rule of thumb, after the initial plant, is to use 3 fertilizers for effect, and have the 4th fertilizer be a wood chip to keep the upkeep perfectly maintained at 50%. Low upkeep = less humus and seeds needed per replant on a field.

The stocks and cultivar bonus is a random + in plenty between 0 and your S/C level. Do note, the random function attached to this doesn’t seem terribly forgiving. The average bonus you get from your skill seems to be roughly 1/3 your S/C level in plenty per field. There is no hard data on that, that’s just a guess I got off planting my 100 fields for 2 months. But at 100 S/C, that means roughly every 3-4 fields you plant you’re getting a free field worth of produce.

*Note* Fertilizers used after the initial plant originally influenced seed purity. This naturally mucked up how farming was being done, but this effect seems to have since been removed according to the erstwhile farmer Staxjax.


Which Purity? - Mercury (This has been changed to reflect new humour values of foods)

As a hermit, it’s probably best to aim for a single purity, and make fields in sets of 4 for yourself to keep the work manageable. 12 fields should be doable for a single hermit if you leave out cotton and corn. Honestly? After having tried to raise all the purities myself with some help, even for a small-mid sized village I’d still argue it’s better to just raise one purity for simplicity’s sake. Larger villages interested in min-maxing (being absolutely perfect in a video game) will want to get different purities to optimize the various foods.

The good mercury foods:

Pumpkin Pie: 17.5 phlegm, 18yb.

Add a side phlegm food like wild salad or walk on the wildside and you have a very powerful phlegm food here.

Mushroom Pie: 17.5 blood and 17.5yb

Excellent food for both blood or yb. Purity mushrooms can be grown via potting sugar caps in high purity humus (don't bother until you have at least 30% or higher purity crops to dump into humus bins. The effect before that stage just isn't really worthwhile).

Cabbage cakes: 15bb

Definitely weaker than other types, but BB is notoriously easy to level and they consume very quickly. More than enough for mid level town stat grinding for certain. The point of this is simplicity and maximizing output for effort input, not perfection.

Raising purity - Choose the seeds with higher alchemical value that you want. Ignore multiplier and % purity.

How do you get purity you might ask? Simply selecting the highest alchemical purity (the value given for the element, not the purity multiplier or %) seeds of the type you want and replanting those. Never mix seeds together until you have to as it lowers the purity. Speed and plenty are the two important attributes for maxing purity. Coal or turkey droppings are suggested, as well as keeping perfect upkeep and getting the most S/C you can. When only using 3 per field, making coal to maintain fields isn't overly odious, and turkey droppings are a natural biproduct if you keep them for meat anyway. Do be aware that unevenly fertilizing for speed will muck up harvest times and you effectively progress at the speed of the least sped up field you have.


Influence and tiers - Read it all if you want pretty clothes, otherwise plant cotton to get influence for green cabbage (cabbage crumbs)

Influence is effectively a “field quality”. It is completely seperate from purity and is used to produce different "types" of product. Colewort for example can be used as "Cabbage Leaf" in any of the recipes, but in order to make the cabbage crumbs recipe you'll need the tiered up version of cabbage "green cabbage". Each crop has a no tier version (colewort as mentioned for cabbage), two mid tier versions (green and white cabbage), and a top tier version (red cabbage). In the case of cotton, this is essential for getting access to higher types of clothing. For pumpkins some of the highest tier products are also inspirationals. For cabbage/cereals it unlocks access to new recipes, some of which are very powerful. But back to how influence actually works:

Each crop uses up 3 of the bars and gives to 1 of them. Even though it uses 3 bars (this may be a bug, but loftar doesn’t seem to have changed it despite it being reported) each crop determines its tier from two of the bars. To quote the agricultural wiki page:

(Red) Cabbage: 3,4 -> 1
(Green) Ear of Cereals: 4,1 -> 2
(Blue) Cotton: 1,2 -> 3
(Dark Red) Pumpkin: 2,3 -> 4

So cabbage takes from bars 3 and 4 (cotton/pumpkin outputs) and gives to bar 1. If both those bars are empty, cabbage simply gives to bar one but suffers no bad consequences. To get a better type of cabbage (say green cabbage to make cabbage crumbs), the 3 and 4 bars must equal 50 or more combined. However, there are two mid tier outputs for each crop, and which bar you have filled more determines what type of outputs you get.

Loftar wrote:Currently, each cycle depletes 5% (unmodified) of the elements that the crop consumes, and fills 5% (modified by the influence boost) of the meter that the crop adds to. The harvest yields tier 1 output when the sum of the two meters it consumes is 0%-50% (of one meter), a mix of tier 1 and one of the 2nd tiers when the sum is 50%-100%, a mix of the 2nd tiers when the sum is 100%-150% and a mix of one of the 2nd tiers and tier 3 when the sum is 150%-200%. I'm open to changes on that, though.


Thanks to Jalpha for taking some time and making an infographic that sums this up a little more easily.

Image

To expand this a little, here are the mathy numbers behind getting which crop at which influence levels from LeftyRighty's wiki page:

LeftyRighty wrote:
((bar 0 + bar 3) < 50) oatmeal

(bar 0 > bar 3) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) > 50) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) < 100) barley / oatmeal
(bar 0 < bar 3) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) > 50) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) < 100) rye / oatmeal

((bar 0 + bar 3) > 100) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) < 150) barley / rye

(bar 0 > bar 3) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) > 150) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) < 200) barley / wheat
(bar 0 < bar 3) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) > 150) && ((bar 0 + bar 3) < 200) rye / wheat



The only way to get access to better quality clothes requires raising cotton tiers, but otherwise you can almost completely ignore them if you so choose. Simply maxing the cotton output bar and then dropping cabbage on those fields is all that's required to get green cabbage for cabbage crumbs. The only real option for influence fertilizers is hay, but turkey droppings influence it very minorly.

If you EVER want to use influence fertilizers, the skill "three fields system" is absolutely required.


I've been farming for 2 weeks and my seeds are purity multiplier 1.15? Why am I bothering? - It gets better later

Due to the way purity multipliers are calculated right now, purity starts off really slow and starts to accelerate as time progresses. Your first couple weeks of farming will get essentially no change in purity modifier (1.00->1.15 is average I'd say). However, you will start seeing much bigger leaps at the 1 month point, and things start becoming very satisfying after 2 months of work. This is of course if you start from scratch. Higher purity seeds should be fairly easy to acquire from more established players to jump you past this zone. Take a look at this graph of purity multiplier vs alchemical purity to see what I mean:

Image


Gardening - Coming Eventually
Last edited by Sevenless on Wed Apr 10, 2013 5:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
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Mines and Metals

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:39 pm

Purity Grinding Metal - Possible since well before anyone except Staxjax thought it was

Image

So, this should probably come as a shock to most players when I first write this, but it turns out purity grinding for metal has been in the game the ENTIRE beta. My little Dowsing Rods there prove it because I've never heard of a base level mine being 1.17 purity. Highest ever found that's been reported is 1.12, to me personally anyway.

Turns out, and I have to give entire credit to Staxjax for this discovery, the metal purity in Salem is not based on Anvils and Smelters as one would expect coming from haven. The entirety of metal purity comes from the ore in the mines of current. But wait, didn't we want to move away from a node system? How does this make any sense?

Apparently, mines are very very common. In the world, I'd say you might see a mine one every 100 tiles. But when you go out prospecting you only see them once every 10 minutes or so. That's because when you're prospecting, you can only find mines within a certain purity range of the purity of your searching tool. Obviously we all started off with woo-woo wands or 1.00p dowsing rods, meaning the best we could find was within a small range of 1.00p. It seems to be that you can find mines within a range of +/- 10 elemental concentration of your current tool. With 1.00p, that means you can get as high as 30 or so of one element. Once you get your mine, smelt the ore WITHOUT lime. Lime is foraged or quarried, but it is always 1.00p. When smelting, the lime mixes into the ore to create the final bar purity. Since that's lower than whatever ore you find, you'll want to do it the harder way. All you need is 2 bars this way.

From there, forge a pair of dowsing rods (anvil P doesn't influence this). With these new rods, begin your quest for a new mine and repeat the entire process. Do remember, the rods see a range, but as far as I can tell there's no guarantee each mine found will be higher in P. You will find mines that are lower and have to go back to searching yet again. The mines themselves are common enough that luck doesn't terribly limit the process, and as such it isn't like the old node system at all.

Is this system going to be kept? I'm not sure. I've never heard Jorbtar even mention it existed, so I'm assuming it's been hiding and they were just waiting for the discovery to go public (fitting for the trolls they are). Furthermore this system isn't without its flaws. Mines are the purity fountain, but since you build so many it's actually somewhat difficult to defend them. Now this wouldn't be true if mines were destroyable, but of current they cannot be harmed it seems. Either way though, it does force villages to defend their high purity mine(s) as well as their town. The one benefit is that it doesn't require mass duplication of smelters and anvils if a town ever wanted to have two types of purity. And finally, what can you do with the metal? Well of current the answer is "not much". Lover's locket and the hunting trophy are the only two things that are influenced by metal purity that I can think of.

Either way, the knowledge is up to you to play with. Happy prospecting everyone :)

Ornery wrote:It will find mines, Dyne. The nodes it detects are just rarer, so you'll probably have to travel a good distance before you find one. They can be kinda easy to miss, but adding

Code: Select all
 <marker match="gfx/terobjs/minepoint" tooltip="true" text="Paydirt" color="#000000" />


to your radar will have the nodes appear on it as a black dot while prospecting, if it's within render distance.


Something useful Ornery mentioned.

How Smelters Work (as of Sep 14/2012)

Currently there is no random function involved in smelting. Each % "chance" you get is actually more like a % of an earned bar. When the smelter has accumulated 100% of a bar, that load will generate a bar of metal.

One thing veteran smelters might have noticed is that you get a bar every 2 smelts when not using any lime. I'm not sure how/why this happened, but the formula for smelting originally given was either wrong or has since been ninja updated. The current formula for the amount of bars "earned" by a smelter is as follows:

2% + 1%/lime per piece of ore in the smelter. 25 pieces of ore therefor generate 50% of a bar. 24 ore and 1 lime however generate 72% of a bar.

The ideal amount of lime to have in the smelter matters a lot on how much lime, charcoal and ore cost you. Not necessarily silver, but the effort required to get them. Anywhere between 6-10 lime is a good ratio to have. Lower amounts of lime are more "cost" effective (assuming you were buying lime/charcoal), but are less equipment effecient in that you need to burn more smelter loads to get your product.

For low amounts of smelters, 10 lime per load is probably the best. If you're in the business of buying your inputs and selling the metal, lower amounts of lime would be better if you can make enough smelters.
Last edited by Sevenless on Thu Aug 16, 2012 1:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
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Re: Sevenless' Guide to the New World ~Work in Progress~

Postby Sevenless » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:39 pm

Running a Settlement reserve
It's been neat to see the evolution of a game. Salem has come so far, and still has far to go. Although frustrating, I think it's been an experience worth the effort.
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Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2012 1:57 am

Re: Sevenless' Guide to the New World ~Work in Progress~

Postby sabinati » Tue Aug 07, 2012 11:15 pm

sticky
Admin for Salem Wiki • Make suggestions or complaints in the Wiki Suggestion thread
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