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Hey everyone, Webb here – I’m thrilled to finally share some big changes coming to the game’s skills and economy systems. Our goal has always been to make skill progression feel natural, flexible, and accessible outside of dungeons. In short, I want you to be able to work on these skills whenever you want – whether you’ve just cleared a boss encounter or you’re wandering around the overworld.

To achieve this goal, we’ve created a clearer differentiation between the dungeon and overworld experiences.

• Overworld combat has been removed. Instead, these locations are dedicated to gathering and exploring. You’ll find nodes for mining and foraging, that don’t just provide resources but also help you level the respective skills.
• Resource nodes have been removed from combat rooms in dungeons. We want to ensure that players in dungeons can focus on the dungeon-specific gameplay. While we still plan on having specific rooms that allow for mining or other gathering while inside of a dungeon in the future, the combat rooms will be dedicated to defeating enemies and clearing the stage.

To further improve balancing for resource collection, we’ve also created a new system for Global Resource Management

This gives us the ability to control the flow of resources throughout the entire game, allowing us to control the total quantity, frequency, and distribution of all types of resources.

• Quantity: This system controls daily spawn rates for each resource, setting an upper cap on the total amount of any resource that can be farmed in a given day and controlling inflation
• Frequency: The rate at which resource nodes respawn is easily tunable from this system allowing for precise economic adjustments
• Distribution: The system automatically adjusts rates based on player demand, pushing players to new areas to keep things balanced and interesting. For instance, if one zone is getting farmed a ton, resources in that zone may drop off, while other areas perk up to even things out.

We’ve also added more depth to the resource nodes themselves by creating additional drop tables based on a variety of criteria such as the tool being used, your skill levels, your completed quests, and more. This rewards exploration of the world by increasing the types of resources you can obtain based on your progression.

From here, we can further develop the crafting systems that utilize gathered resources for another layer of progression. For example, we plan to add craftable items associated with reaching higher cooking and chemistry levels to stations in apartments to encourage the usage of apartments and these skills. This part of the roadmap also includes further refinements to the station experience, making them more intuitive and automated so you can focus more on playing the game. We’re kicking things off with mining, foraging, chemistry, and farming up to level 40. A rebalancing of progression for our remaining skills along with increased level caps are planned for the coming weeks.

In short, this is a big departure from the more “deterministic” drop rates you see in other games. Our new global approach lets us scale the economy up or down as needed. Early-game resources might spawn more frequently, while endgame or rarer resources can be tuned to appear less often or only in certain zones. If you’re alone in an area, that might mean you’ll have a higher chance to encounter a rare spawn – so it pays to explore.

We understand this is a significant change to the way you progress through the game, but from my point of view, it’s a much-needed leap for an RPG that’s all about discovery and adaptation. We can’t wait to hear your feedback on these new systems – especially as we keep iterating and adding more skills and content.

Thanks for sticking with us, and I hope you have a blast exploring all the new ways to level, gather, and craft. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for your thoughts and suggestions, so don’t hesitate to share. Let’s make this next phase of our game’s evolution a truly epic one – together.

Webb

Summary

• Most items requiring a specific skill level to craft/plant (e.g. seeds, potions) have had the minimum level requirement increased. In most cases, this has been balanced with one or more of the following additional changes
  • The blueprint recipe usage count has been increased or removed as a requirement
  • The skill experience per item crafted/planted has been increased
  • The station experience per item crafted has been increased
• Mining nodes now require both a minimum skill level and a relevant mining tool to harvest. Like before, higher tier mining tools will also allow you to mine lower tier nodes. Additionally, you can get bonus drops based on your mining level, with higher mining levels allowing you to obtain better drops.
• Foraging nodes now operate similarly to mining nodes, requiring a minimum skill level and a primary foraging tool to harvest. Unlike mining, foraging nodes contain multiple bonus drop tables. Getting items from these drop tables requires having both the relevant tool (e.g. a spile or spade) as well as a high enough skill level.
  • For example, some foraging nodes can drop seeds or chemistry materials. In addition to having the relevant secondary tool, acquiring the seed drops is contingent on a high enough farming level, and acquiring the chemistry materials is contingent on a high enough chemistry level.
• Some new items have been added for more relevant progression
  • Farming
    • Tea Seed (level 38)
    • Rice Seed (level 7)
  • Chemistry
    • Glory Stim (level 40)
    • Hyper-Concentration Stim (level 38)
    • Ironclad Stim (level 36)
    • Berserker Stim (level 34)

Details

While this update plans skill progression through level 40, we plan to increase the level cap in the coming weeks. This required an end-to-end investigation into the current skill systems, resulting in a rework of almost all areas of skilling to provide players with a more coherent experience.

We’re also preparing an improved skills interface to help you plan out your progression journey without the need for external tools. We hope that this will provide players with the necessary information about levelling their skills so that players are not overwhelmed trying to figure out how to level themselves up. This update is also planned to go live in the next few weeks.

Additionally, we plan to update Fishing, Cooking, and Hacking very shortly after this update and these skills will be receiving a similar update to the changes made to the Farming, Foraging, Chemistry, and Mining skills.

After Fishing, Cooking, and Hacking, we plan to focus on updating Gearforging, Crafting, and stations. This update will include some new station types to provide land with layers of gameplay integration in transportation, banking, energy regeneration, and combat buffs. This will also come with a more streamlined and coherent blueprint framework, and an increased station level cap.

We’re hoping to roll out these changes as swiftly as possible and to avoid any potential market stipulation on any particular items, we’ll be releasing the patch notes as usual on Thursdays.

Below you’ll find some more detail on the specific changes.

Farming Changes

The progression for farming was previously not very rewarding when levelling up, so we’ve gone ahead and smoothed out the curve for seed progression. Furthermore, seed configuration has changed significantly. Generally, experience rates have been increased and growth times are more appropriately aligned to level requirements. We’re hoping that this makes farming feel more rewarding and less of a chore – whilst still retaining the prestige of reaching higher levels. We’ve also taken this opportunity to introduce some new seeds in preparation for the changes to cooking and food which will be coming in the very near future.

Name	Old Level Requirement	New Level Requirement	Produce Sell Value Per Unit	Average Grow Time (hrs)	Expected Yield	Experience Per Seed
Tea Seed (new!)	N/A	38	10	16	6	3500
Coffee Seed	5	34	10	12	16	1265
Watermelon Seed	10	31	8	10	4	2160
Strawberry Seed	10	28	8	2	10	436
Soybean Seed	5	25	8	14	18	2515
Raspberry Seed	5	22	7	1	8	196
Chili Seed	5	19	7	6	9	910
Aubergine Seed	1	18	7	8	4	625
Zucchini Seed	1	16	7	4	4	325
Cucumber Seed	1	14	7	2	3	215
Oats Seed	1	12	6	5	8	285
Carrot Seed	1	11	6	2	4	95
Sugar Cane Seed	5	9	6	4	12	165
Rice Seed (new!)	N/A	7	5	4	12	155
Cabbage Seed	1	5	5	1.5	4	45
Wheat Seed	1	5	4	1	8	22
Lettuce Seed	1	3	4	1	9	12
Potato Seed	1	1	2	0.5	3	10
Pepper Seed	1	1	2	0.5	6	9
Tomato Seed	1	1	4	0.5	6	8

Chemistry Changes

As we gear up for more difficult combat challenges, we’ll need to supplement that with finely tuned consumables that are both useful and realistic to acquire. Previously, consumables were somewhat over-tuned at the lower levels – making many of the higher level stimulants redundant in all phases of the game.

We’ve tried to rebalance the scales to ensure that all consumables have relevance at various points throughout the player progression. We also observed that many players were ignoring chemistry entirely due to the logistical difficulties faced when training it. We’ve amended the experience per hour rates and adjusted player chemistry requirements to provide a more straightforward progression path.

Lastly, there are also four new combat stimulants, which are only available at the higher chemistry levels and with a level two chemistry lab. You’ll be able to find the recipes in the Tier 3 dungeon reward chests during this update, and in the future you’ll be able to craft them when the applicable complementary furniture is attached to the chemistry lab..

Display name	Old Player Chemistry Level Requirement	New Player Chemistry Level Requirement	Chemistry Table Level Requirement	New Crafting time (s)	New Recipe Usage Count	New Player Experience Per Craft	New Station Experience Per Craft	Sell Price
Glory Stim (new!)	N/A	40	2	750	15	800	120	800
Hyper-Concentration Stim (new!)	N/A	38	2	750	15	800	120	800
Ironclad Stim (new!)	N/A	36	2	750	15	800	120	800
Berserker Stim (new!)	N/A	34	2	750	15	800	120	800
Speed Stim	1	32	2	600	25	550	85	450
Cooldown Stim	0	30	2	600	25	550	85	450
Critical Strike Stim	0	28	2	600	25	550	85	450
Dodge Stim	1	26	2	600	25	550	85	450
Damage Stim	1	24	2	600	25	550	85	450
Health Stim	1	22	2	600	N/A	550	40	450
Speed Flask	7	20	2	360	N/A	125	30	120
Cooldown Flask	10	18	2	360	75	125	75	120
Critical Strike Stim	10	16	2	360	N/A	125	30	120
Dodge Flask	7	14	2	360	N/A	125	30	120
Damage Flask	7	12	2	360	N/A	125	30	120
Health Flask	3	10	1	360	100	125	75	120
Speed Vial	1	8	1	180	N/A	35	20	50
Cooldown Vial	3	6	1	180	N/A	35	20	50
Critical Strike Stim	3	4	1	180	N/A	35	20	50
Damage Vial	3	2	1	180	N/A	35	20	50
Dodge Vial	1	2	1	180	N/A	35	20	50
Health Vial	1	1	1	180	N/A	35	20	50

Foraging Rework

In general, we’ve tried not to rock the boat too much with foraging changes. These changes emphasize smoothing out the progression curve and adjusting the acquisition of foraging materials to more accurately match the chemistry progression. As mentioned in the summary, this also includes receiving bonus items based on the tool equipped and your foraging skill level. The new foraging nodes also bring the full might of the global resource system with them, so we’ll be monitoring the acquisition rates of all of these materials carefully.

Node	Gloves Requirement	Foraging Level Requirement
Sunbloom	Old Gloves	1
Hemlock	Old Gloves	4
Witherleaf	Old Gloves	7
Scorchroot	Old Gloves	9
Shimo Berry	Coppercore Gloves	12
Ginseng	Coppercore Gloves	16
White Lily	Coppercore Gloves	20
Ironclad Berry	Coppercore Gloves	22
Spikeward	Coppercore Gloves	24
Jade Fern	Coppercore Gloves	25
Pink Bloom	Coppercore Gloves	27

Mining Rework

We’ve done some reconfiguring of mining nodes to make more sense from a progression and a thematic perspective. Experience rates for mining have also been generally increased to provide players with a more natural progression through the mining ranks. As with Foraging, these reworked mining nodes will be fully governed by the global resource system, which we’ll be monitoring carefully.

Name	Mining Level Requirement	Equipment Requirement	Node Contains	Bonus Table Mining Level Requirement	Possible Bonuses
Iron Node	1	Iron Pickaxe	Iron Ore	5	Coal
Copper Node	1	Iron Pickaxe	Copper Ore	5	Coal
Sandstone Node	10	Steel Pickaxe	Desert Crystal, Amber	12	Coal
Chronoterra Node	15	Steel Pickaxe	Geoterra Crystal, Chonocrystal	18	Coal
Tritium Node	20	Nebulite Pickaxe	Tritium Ore	22	Coal