Wish you were here

[JeffGV]

But at the same time they also boosted foods that use pre-purity nerf high purity flours (and other ingredients) that are still stored here and there. Heh, even i had (have) quite some good flour stored.
Even if the system is changed, we still have the old, overpowered items ingame (heh, try getting a 90% purity earthworm python now...). And devs can't balance according to those ones (or to the titans, either).

[Darwoth]

a handful of people having a few barrels of old flour and some worms does not imbalance make (the worms dont even really matter much currently, it is overwhelmingly based off of wood purity and i have seen virtually no difference between a bin filled with 80% worms and one with 30% worms) the stuff will be consumed and a few people will have an easier time pushing for an extra 100 stats, is not the end of the world and i am amazed that the majority of the playerbase still knows so little about the game that they dont understand how the scales were tipped in their favor with their tiered food patch .

[colesie]

At this point I'd like to ask players who have had more experience in HnH than I a question.

How does the grind in Salem compare to the grind in HnH? What makes Salem less accessable to casual and semi casual players than HnH?

Farming in haven is skill-based.
When you harvest a field you'll get 3 seeds (providing your character is full nature on their sliders) they will be randomized with +/- 5 points iirc on their quality from the quality you originally planted. This is assuming your farming level is higher than the crop itself. As your farmer increases, so does your crop quality. As crop quality increases so does the quality of the foods that you are eating. It's a continuous and straight grind. Quality can be raised very casually as you don't need to do things like fill humus bins, check purity, compare all kinds of numbers and match up colours etc. You plow the field, and you plant your seeds. If you log on once a day you'll be able to be a successful farmer. Log on, harvest, put the junk quality seeds into your chicken coops/food troughs to feed your cows and you'll also be increasing the quality of your livestock. Again, kill off the ***** quality as higher quality ones are born.

"Gluttony" in haven is about as casual as it gets. You eat food as your hunger bar gets low from stamina loss / regeneration from doing usual things like farming, foraging, etc and it will add the stat gains to your FEP bar. The meter does not go down, it only goes up as you eat and the meter needs more to complete based on your highest stat level.

Say that you have 100 strength. You will need over 100 FEP points from eating food in order for you to get 101 strength. This system encourages you to balance your stats because if your other skills are far below 100, you'll still need to eat 100 points worth in order to level it up. This also lets you increase your stats while on the go without needing to fill your humours and stock up on food beforehand.

As Potjeh said, movement combat is the great equalizer in haven. Providing you have the strength and sword quality that will allow you to pierce armor, you can take on people 10x's your skill level. When you are hit moving, the hit will go through your defense completely. This allows for anyone to be a potential threat if they know what they are doing.

[Lusewing]

I concur with what Colesie said. I was a farmer (and a pretty good one I must admit) in H&H for a long time, both as a hermit, as a sole farmer of a small town and a joint farmer for a larger town during my play lifetime. The Farming in H&H has much more gratifying feel to it, you can see its increase with each harvest, though it is normally only by about 1/2 points with a large enough field, it is still a visible increase. Farming however is still very laborious with each tilled 'field' being only a tile in size (and each needing to be tilled, planted and harvested independently) and having no way to increase it's yield other then making sure your slider (you can either chose to be more mining/industrious based or nature/farming based), even then you gain a small amount per field, at least in comparison to Salem fields.



This is the size of a normal field in H&H, at least for raising by about 1 point each harvest. Every so often a tilled tile will turn to grass and will have to be tilled again using a plow (or by hand) but other then that there is not really any real maintenance that needs to be done past the expected plant > wait > harvest > sort seeds > plant highest > repeat

The problem I see with Salem's current system is the amount of effort that has to be put in before ANY increase to purity is seen.

I am not saying it should be easier to raise purity, far from it, but I do feel that getting to 5% purity should be simpler just to help encourage would be farmers to look into more ways to keep increasing their crops after the initial few % gains become less and less. Let them experience the joys of improving their crops, and thus the benefits it provides, to catch their interest. Only then can you really add the more complicated measures needed, such as purity wood and worms, without scaring them away and making them think that trying to reach any sort of purity is out of their grasp.

[martinuzz]

Maybe start by making all forageables (mushrooms, herbs, but also water, granite and lime) have a minimum of 10% pure, and range from 10%-20%, instead of 0%-10%.
I think that would already make a pretty big difference.

[colesie]

Got that pic got me all nostalgic lol
Think I should start up my farms again

[Lusewing]

Got that pic got me all nostalgic lol
Think I should start up my farms again

Hehe I originally took the picture to tell some one off for harvesting far too many help buds and setting the crop purity back by about two harvests, I never did (and still don't) like people messing about with my farms, whether they know what they are doing or not.

I think simply giving the crops a larger chance to shift in one purity direction or another would do the trick. With four different purity's it is highly unlikely you could get very far by only relying on blind luck, thus I think the shifts could encourage players to seek out how to stabalise their crops and get them growing in the right direction.

[Jalpha]

Okay, I agree that farming in Salem is a lot less labour intensive, all that unnecessary clicking in HnH drove me insane.

So could it be that the grind feels like hitting a brick wall now? Bear with me please, and don't stop reading after the next sentence...

When I did some beta testing for WoW the XP gain was constantly readjusted to ensure players gained a sense of achievement but weren't put off by how difficult and time consuming it was to gain levels. There were a lot of players, at least in vanilla, who hung around at levels like the 30 mark, and moreso 50. I think the game was better then, before my endgame instances got filled with total noobs with poor attitude. But I digress.

You could draw a connection between the leveling curve in games like WoW using XP, and Humour gain in Salem which requires farmed produce. Surely though the way things now work, where you can tier fields to get a substantial increase in your foods effectiveness, and then needing to progress on to the purity system to advance, is enough to give players a sense of achievement, and a point at which they can choose to sit happily, or push through.

If the above statement doesn't ring true with so many people then why? I understand that most testers here have seen how simple the old system was, so approaching the game from a new players perspective like this is difficult. I also understand that a lot of people got caught halfway through the old grind when the rules of the game got changed on them. Are there any reasons that aren't primarily influenced by how the old system used to function though?

[Potjeh]

before the purity nerf people that sunk enough time into the game could achieve high stat characters.

after the purity nerf people that sunk enough time into the game can still achieve high stat characters.

That's the crux of the issue. The required time investment is simply too high for casual players, especially since it has to be done pretty fast to come ahead of all the raiding setbacks they get. And if building a combat character didn't take such an inordinate amount of time, we might see more actual combat rather than summoning.

[rustles]

a handful of people having a few barrels of old flour and some worms does not imbalance make (the worms dont even really matter much currently, it is overwhelmingly based off of wood purity and i have seen virtually no difference between a bin filled with 80% worms and one with 30% worms) the stuff will be consumed and a few people will have an easier time pushing for an extra 100 stats, is not the end of the world and i am amazed that the majority of the playerbase still knows so little about the game that they dont understand how the scales were tipped in their favor with their tiered food patch .

You realize people planted 100% pure trees before the update, right? According to the wiki, the amount of charcoal per coal stack was based on wood purity, so it would be no surprise to me if people planted them. Back then tree purity relied entirely on humus purity.

It wouldn't be all that unlikely that people happened to have 100% pure earthworms and 100% pure trees before the update, and are now producing 100% pure humus because of that.

I wouldn't be surprised if you were producing 90-100% pure humus right now.