Another artisan subject which should not be missed out is FARMING. What is farming, generally, in MMOs? The most common understanding we have on farming is that it is used to grow crops and manage livestock. There’s quite a few fair interesting takes on farming across all the MMOs.
Guild Wars 2 probably has the most basic one as it just ends up being a daily gathering hub so there’s not much to go over. Their crafting systems however are top tier. World of Warcraft has two major forms of farming. One of which is an interesting farmville-esque daily hub which many may have enjoyed in Mists of Pandaria as it has some really interesting progression to it. Black Desert Online pulls ahead as the closest version that we are going to see in Ashes of Creation. Their system is going to be similar to what we’ll get in Ashes of Creation.
FARM PLOTS
Ashes of Creation farming is going to be centralized mainly around your freehold thus this feature is kind of a pseudo freehold and a little teaser on things to come on the next feature. A freehold has a number of plots available for you to place a many number of artisan related structures and services. One of these blueprint categories is going to be for farming. Meaning probably all the plots available to be are going to be bought from a blueprint vendor. Restrictions to purchase the top tier blueprints- blueprints are put into tiers and higher tier blueprints are only purchasable from higher level scientific nodes. People will not be able to buy some of the really high tier ones until much later down the line as the nodes progress. Intrepid stated multiple times that blueprints are not consumed when placed. Meaning all blueprints are going to cost some materials based on what tier that it is. These blueprints are an investment on your account so they are probably going to be very expensive to buy especially the higher tier ones which will likely give you access to the most powerful crops and herbs. In Black Desert Online, these farming plots are placed into the world after being purchased with what are essentially “account points” called contributions. Owning these farming plots is a significant investment as you can own 10 of them and the highest tier ones cost 10 contribution points. As you start off farming, you can only purchase the low tier ones however when you reach certain farming thresholds, you get to purchase better ones which hold more seeds.
NEED MORE SEEDS
We begin sowing these crops with seeds. Back in Mists of Pandaria, they introduced a farmville type daily hub called The Tillers. This was basically your go-to place to prep various materials needed for your raid food buffs. Some may have enjoyed this addition as it had a really nice progression curve to it. The way it worked was, you had to till the ground, plant the seeds, water them and perform various daily quests to increase your reputation with these tillers. Which in turn allowed you to purchase better ways to farm and better seeds. On top of that, it was complemented with a unique cooking grind. Seeds are purchasable in Black Desert Online through vendors but only the lowest tier ones. To tear the seeds you must grow the crops fully then choose to breed them instead of harvesting the crops. This gives you back a number of seeds but more importantly it gives you a low chance to get a seed at a higher tier. Which means eventually your whole farming plot worth of tier 1 seeds can gradually be converted into tier 2 seeds and then eventually to tier 3 seeds. The whole thing gives it a sense of choice whether you want to give more crops right now or take a hit early on and obtain more higher tier crops later down the line.
MAINTENANCE
The farmville game in Mists of Pandaria and the herb garden in WOD was just a daily thing. You just did your chores once a day and then you get full efficiency from it. However in Black Desert Online, you manage your crops by keeping them clipped, removing bugs and curing any disease. This is very high maintenance, so wash out grinding it only takes like 20 minutes for your crops to go red needing more maintenance. There are various ways of getting around this, one of which is a feature we will be seeing in Ashes of Creation. The first way is to have an alt specifically for farming. Every hour or so the crops must be attended to. However there is another way to do it, by hiring farm hands to do all this stuff for you which increases your growth time by up to 50% as they tend your crops nearly instantly all day long. Hiring farm hands is going to be a thing in Ashes of Creation as it stated they can do things such as crop management, planting seeds and selling your crops.
LIVESTOCK
Ashes of Creation has quite an expansive cooking system which means there’s a couple of materials which will likely be highly sought after- milk and eggs. These materials are just purchased from vendors in World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 which is kind of lame. However Black Desert Online has by far the most extensive cooking and their cooking is gated mainly by milk. The only way to obtain milk in video outside of purchasing it from other players, is to harvest it from cow farms out in the world. To harvest about 40 to 50 milk, you need to spend 10 energy. Milk is a very hard gate if you want to go hard into cooking. Let’s hope this kind of gate is something we’ll see in Ashes of Creation as the demand for something vastly outweighing the supply encourages the people to get around it in creative ways. Milking the cows has a cool little game. Let’s hope that all the more inclusive gathering professions will have unique mini games like taming, farming, fishing.
ENVIRONMENT EFFECTS
The final part is to understand the effect the environment has on your freehold farm plots. If you situate your freehold near a lake or river, your crops have access to fresh water, likely reducing the amount of maintenance you’ll need to do throughout their growth. This is also a feature that exists in Black Desert Online as they have a world moisture overlay and a temperature overlay to help you decide where you want to place your crop to grow special types of herbs and plants which need these different climates to survive. Many other environmental effects could affect different types of crops namely the underground which is the only place you can plant and grow certain types of mushrooms meaning you’ll need to place your freehold down there if you want to invest in those types of crops.
00:00 Intro
00:25 What is Farming?
01:51 Farm Plots
03:34 Need moar Seed
05:11 Maintenance
06:34 Livestock
07:58 Environment Effects
08:54 Subscribe for a New Video Every 2 or 3 Days!
09:06 The Jebaitening