Nightingale Community Portal
Cut-and-paste from https://gq-game-mods.blogspot.com/2024/09/nightingale-realms-rebuilt-initial-impressions.html
Tech tree unlocks were basically sold by merchants in various locations.
Player collects Essence and buys them from merchants.
The lowest-tier unlocks were gotten from basic Essence that could be collected by gathering virtually any material (even extremely common and plentiful ones like sticks and rocks) and Extracting Essence, destroying the item.
Tech tree unlocks are in a menu.
Player collects Essence and unlocks them from the menu.
At the beginning of the game, this requires Tier 1 Essence. This is primarily from:
Overland challenges (Bastilles), awarding around 25 T1 Essence on completion.
Defeating enemies.
Some overland challenges have literally endlessly respawning enemies as long as you do not destroy the respawn node. Each wave spawns a few enemies and the next wave does not spawn until you completely clear the current wave.
Crafting basic items using extremely common and plentiful materials like wood and stone. A stack of 20 Arrows made from 1 unit of Wood and 1 unit of Stone can Extract into 20 T1 Essence, which is almost as much as completing a challenge.
I expect that this might be patched out shortly, but at this time it's hard to say.
Both systems are virtually the same: You buy progress in the Tech Tree (which to me feels highly unsatisfying) and the way you can get currency to buy progress is so stupidly easy it feels like an exploit.
Drastically reduce or outright disallow Extraction for Essence.
Respawning enemies as an endless source of Essence is possibly allowable since there is considerable work/grind involved.
Even better, completely change how the Tech Tree is unlocked:
To learn how to make something, the player attempts to craft it. Each attempt might add 1%-30% progress toward learning how to craft the item, depending on it's complexity.
Certain items require an "Augmentation" furnishing to be near the Crafting Station in order to craft them. Without this Augmentation, it will not show in the list of items you can craft.
Several Augmentations provided the same benefit, making it a chore to sift through just what you needed.
A Crafting Station could only benefit from a limited number of Augmentations.
Additional bonuses to crafting can be activated at a Crafting Station if the correct Augmentation is nearby.
The only way to discover if an Augmentation provided a buff was to check the Crafting Station to see if a new buff showed up when the Augmentation was nearby.
Each Crafting Station can only have a limited number of active Augmentations, so you have to move things around so that the correct Augmentations are active.
This was highly unintuitive: Why can you simply not use a particular furnishing? Why should you have to move it around so that the ones you want to activate are closer to the Crafting Station?
It complicated decorating an Estate since the "wrong" Augmentation could be too close to the Crafting Station and turn off another Augmentation.
Augmentations are not required for an item to show up in the list of items you can craft at the Crafting Station.
Augmentations provide a buff for a Crafting Station. Different furnishings can provide the same buff. In the Tech Tree it tells you what buff is received by which Crafting Station.
Augmentations still need to be moved around because of the limits at each Crafting Station.
Previously there was apparently no limit to how many buffs a Crafting Station could benefit from, but now there is a limit.
This has the same problem of having to juggle Augmentation placement.
Slight reduction in complexity but overall, not enough of a benefit since the pain point of managing Furnishing placement is still there.
Completely remove the concept of Augmentation furnishings.
Allow the player to toggle which researched/unlocked Augmentation effect they want active at the time of crafting an item.
| Category Tags | Crafting, Tools/Gear |
| Mode | Both Online & Offline |
| Sentiment | Critical |
