The new design looks very silly and doesn’t match with the theme of the game. There are numbers everywhere it’s like I’m in an Excel Spreadsheet, not crafting in a mediaval-ish game. And it gets even worse when you add fuel and the seconds rapidly decrement to match the multiplier.
Now here is the suggestion. In the Together update you removed the city projects timers but doubled the grind, therefore nothing changed, it’s still the same time gate, even worse I might say, you just moved it from the City Projects to the Refinement stations.
I would remake the refinement crafting exactly like cooking is implemented. If you want to slow progression just increase the grind again. This idle refinement feels really bad in my opinion. I would prefer to stay at the crafting table for 10-20 seconds to craft how many refined materials I need instead. The new added fuel can be used as requirement to refine in the proposed system with the note that there should be enough fuel on the map to allow it.
Finley vendor also has to change, either put him to appear on the in-game time at night if you really like the idea, but I would keep him there permanently and reset the stash daily for rare loot, and weekly for extra rare loot.
So you’re in the know, Finley only appears above the house with the red door (the one you get your illumination rune from in early game) on Saturdays every day between 8pm and 12am. EDIT: Thanks clever, corrected.
If you can’t play in that time window, the merchant is completely useless to you, not that I’ve seen him with anything worth owning other than gems.
I agree with this point. I’m not against the timers on the materials, perhaps the solution is to just remove the time. It isn’t really serving any purpose anyways. But the building needs to be worked on IMO. Perhaps only one build can be constructing at a time, and depending on it’s tier and size, that depicts how long it is building.
I’m guilty of bringing materials I farmed from my realm into a friends realm, and we maxed out his city before he could even get to the higher tier mats. There really isn’t a reason to pick one building over the any of the others to build first, when you can just instabuild them all.
I think that was changed, it’s now daily between that time window and on Saturdays he appears in a larger time window. But I only read about it, I didn’t actually see it happen.
I posted this after I made a new character and realm with the purpose to feel a new player experience with the together update. I didn’t bring materials from my other realms and my conclusion was that even though they removed the time gate from the city projects they added more time gate to the refineries.
I checked him once, didn’t buy anything. Its a random pool of loot. It didn’t even have embers I think. Making the vendor shop item pool more random was a mistake, there should be a deterministic pool of items that are useful to the player that reset in a time window. For example, it is very hard now to buy a chest from the wood vendor, its fully RNG now. You have to rely on the RNG research gamble now. But this is another discussion.
