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Fallen Earth devs explain how schedules are made
As January is fairly quiet for the devs working on Fallen Earth, they've used the monthly state of the game post to share a behind-the-scenes look into the production process. The team begins by making a list of all of the ideas it wants for the game, and then reviews this list quarterly. Out of the list comes the schedule to bring these ideas to reality. Schedules are almost impossible to stick to 100%, however. Issues and limitations pop up, requiring the team to be flexible. "This is actually where the strength of the team comes into play," Napalm posted. "They're very adaptable and adept at changing direction or coming up with 11th hour solutions. And despite the best laid designs there are ALWAYS 11th hour solutions." The state of the game does mention that the team is cleaning up some bugs relating to farming and has hopes that the new system will be more integrated in the future. There's also a sneak-peek at the sector 3 coresuit, which is currently being modeled.
Big changes coming to Sunsong Ranch in 5.2
There's been plenty of talk over the last couple of months about Sunsong Ranch, the farm that players can adopt and use to grow various crops of their own. A lot of that talk revolved around whether or not Sunsong Ranch was the first step towards player housing, a feature that a lot of players have been wistfully wishing for since the days of vanilla. Earlier this month, we asked Cory Stockton and Dave Kosak if this was indeed the case, and the response was that while the ranch could be interpreted that way, player housing wasn't something intended for the future. However, both Stockton and Kosak were excited with how well the farming feature had been received, and with how well it integrated with other features in the game. As a new feature, the farm works seamlessly with other professions in the game. Being able to grow your own resources has been a tremendous boon for players, but the question still remained -- how could the farming feature be improved even further? Well ... how about as an additional means to gather reputation?
Fallen Earth farming to go live tomorrow
Tomorrow's update 2.6 for Fallen Earth will bring the long-awaited farming feature to the post-apocalyptic MMO after enjoying a few weeks on the game's public test server. As stated in a previous exclusive on Massively, these farms will allow players to create 3-, 6-, and 9-plot farms with crops you can grow, livestock you can raise, and western-themed gear you can wear. Rare and valuable materials can be harvested from these farms and the higher-end farm houses even have space for indoor seating, vaults, and more. If you'd like to see these farms in action, be sure to watch my livestream this Thursday at 8:00 p.m. EST where I'll show off the farm buildings and give my impressions on how it all works. [Source: GamersFirst press release]%Gallery-48606%
Fallen Earth readies the land for farms
Fallen Earth's latest state of the game is as country as one can get. The title is currently testing out farms, which should go live in the game sometime in December. Farms are a branch of the construction crafting set, which can grow plants and animals. That's right: Through the magic of cloning, livestock can be cloned right there on the farm. Players can build one of these farms anywhere with enough space and no landscape conflicts. They come with a farmhouse and several amenities and last for four hours before disappearing. Of course, don't take the state of the game for it; read our in-depth interview of the new farming system from last month! The state of the game also said that the next stage of the Coresuit will be coming in the new year, player housing is still being investigated on the technical front, and a certain mount will be getting an update this holiday season.
Fallen Earth to introduce farming
Fallen Earth's upcoming content includes new stage 3 coresuits, skill and mutation adjustments, and farming. Yes, farming is coming to Fallen Earth! According to the most recent dev blog, post-apocalyptic farming will be a crafting skill that will allow a player to build a three-, six-, or nine-plot farm where organic resources can be grown through seed planting, and animals can be raised. Additionally, harvesting will give a player the chance to get a common, uncommon, or rare component. Farming in PvP zones will increase the resource yield. Be sure to read the entire dev blog for more information on what's coming to the PTS with the next content patch.
Reputation in review: The Tillers
I may have taken leave of my sanity. I'm currently in the midst of a massive reputation grind in an effort to get everything to exalted. Part of this is because I like seeing green bars fill up on my screen, but part of it was intense curiosity towards the new daily system. Despite a somewhat compelling story, the daily quests in the Firelands just didn't quite work for me. Partially because the story just didn't seem all that compelling, but mostly due to the fact that the majority of the quests took place in a zone that was red on red. I hate red zones. Regardless, as a result of the experience I've seen what these rep grinds look like, and surprisingly, they're all different. You're not going to get the same experience doing each, and the quests aren't really very similar between each, either. Some of the reputation grinds are fantastic, and some ... well let's just say they could use some work. But let's take a look at what was hands-down my favorite rep grind and exactly what made it so fantastic to grind out.
Breakfast Topic: What do you like about farming?
Farming was literally the farthest thing from my mind when I wondered in a recent Breakfast Topic where you've been choosing to set your hearthstone, but boy did all the replies of "Halfhill! Halfhill!" set me straight. My daughter, a confirmed Glitch-aholic, hasn't been active in World of Warcraft for quite some time -- even playing a panda can't tear her away from milking butterflies -- but I know that one glimpse at the temptations of the Tillers, and we'll be renegotiating the list of games she has time to play. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree; I'm a fan of farming, too. What I find so striking, though, is the number of WoW players who are discovering the attractions of this sort of gameplay for the first time via the Tillers. I suppose it's still early enough that many players are simply grinding through the content to grow veggies for cooking or harvest other materials for your professions. And obviously, the minipet and mount fanatics among us are all slaving away for a Terrible Turnip or a Riding Goat. But I suspect there are plenty of players out there like me who are tickled by the whole farming concept. We're one step closer to having our own little WoW homesteads! Is there something you especially enjoy about farming? Or are you only buckling down in order to grab certain rewards?
Ask Massively: Forums, edit buttons, and staff change-ups
Last week, we announced that we are closing down Massively's forums. What forums, you ask? Yeah, unfortunately, that was exactly the point. The forums were always a bit too adjacent to the site, and in the wake of the success of our newfangled comment system, we'd prefer to focus on publishing articles and engaging readers right here in the comments on the site, rather than on a neglected off-site portal. I'm genuinely sorry, but I hope the few remaining, stalwart forumgoers will migrate over and help make our comments an even more interesting place to be. In return, we'll try to crack down harder on the comment trolls who are hell-bent on killing the buzz. Believe me, they annoy us as much as they annoy you, especially when we're babysitting them on a Friday night. But this is Ask Massively, the meta column where you ask us weird questions and we give you weird answers. So what else did you wonder about this week?
Lost and lonely dog seeks warm and loving home (on your farm)
Some may call my desire to reach exalted with the Tillers nonsensical, but I would happily argue that the goat mounts are more than worth it. Regardless, I've been happily tilling away on my farm and doing dailies for Halfhill's assorted residents. There's a pretty cool cycle with the Tiller dailies, a storyline that plays out as you continue helping out poor hapless Yoon. He's trying to become a member of the Tillers, but he'll need five votes to get in. Somewhere in the middle of revered, I got vote number four -- and I resigned myself to nothing particularly interesting until I hit exalted. But imagine my surprise flying over Halfhill when I stumbled across the little guy pictured above. The poor thing was stranded and alone in the midst of all the verdant fields, hungry and scared. Obviously dogs don't care for vegetables, even if they are monstrously huge. So I took the quest he offered, Lost and Lonely, and fetched some steak for the starving pup. Once fed, he hightailed it for my farm, and now lives there quite happily. He even responds to emotes!
Blend in with the Tillers with your own farmer outfit
For as long as I've played World of Warcraft, players have been making farmer outfits. Who knows why? Maybe it's because Blizzard made it so easy, or maybe it's because every gamer subconsciously yearns to live an agrarian lifestyle -- Eh, on second thought, I'm going to go with it's because Blizzard made it so easy. I mean, look at the types of items we can get. There are overalls, a pitchfork, and lets not forget all those ugly brimmed hats. Wrath of the Lich King even gave us the chance to wear plaid flannel shirts. Flannel shirts! What fantasy world application truly requires the abomination that is flannel!? Well, whatever it is, Mists of Pandaria has finally given us a place to live out our agrarian dreams, and thus a good reason to make a farmer outfit.
Making best friends with the Tillers
The Tillers are one of several new factions in Pandaria, but they come with a couple of unique twists. First, you get to have your own farm for growing cooking ingredients through some unique phasing and a quest chain with a pandaren who is new to farming. In order to upgrade your farm and get more plots for planting, you have to get the approval of the other farmers around the area, which you can complete by increasing your reputation with the Tillers and completing a series of dailies. Second, you can improve your farm itself, through befriending the various people you'll meet around the area. You'll start out as strangers to these characters, but over time you can earn reputation and make friends. Once you've reached best friend status, each character will mail you some items, and send an improvement or two for your farm. So what's the best way to a Tillers' heart? Some would say through the stomach, but I'd have to say through the judicious use of gifts. And those gifts are surprisingly easy to find ... if you know where to look.
The Daily Grind: Is farming ruined forever?
One of my favorite things to do in games is farm. No, not the kind of farming that involves killing zillions of mobs for mats and money -- real (virtual) farming. Like when you buy seeds and plant them in the ground and wait for them to grow and then collect the literal fruits of your labor. Think I'm talking about FarmVille? Nope. Lord of the Rings Online, actually. And Ultima Online and Glitch and hopefully, someday, ArcheAge. MMOs actually implement farming so much better than the social game that seems to have redefined it. In UO, I can grow decorative plants and buff petals; in LotRO, I can mass-produce crops that are used by cooks to make food; and in Glitch, I grow flowers and herbs used by tincturers. I suppose even in Star Wars Galaxies, I was farming up corn and tubers in my oversized industrial extractors. But I have to wonder whether the FarmVille-induced stigma attached to farming as a gameplay concept has ruined it for MMO fans forever. Even when we discuss ArcheAge's amazing farming system, we can't help but crack jokes about tractors, jokes we wouldn't make about big, burly, angry Orcs practicing their fine tailoring skills in World of Warcraft. What do you think -- is farming in MMOs ruined forever? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Visualized: World's largest QR code is a Canadian maize maze
And why wouldn't it be? That's how the Kraay family of Lacombe, Alberta, Canada gets down, as evidenced by the family's past 13 years of elaborate corn maze designs -- from a logo of the Edmonton Oilers to a 25th anniversary commemoration of Rick Hansen's "Man in Motion" tour. Said QR code sends adventurous scanners to a website for the Kraay's family farm website. The code also got the Kraays into the Guinness Book of World Records for "World's Largest QR Code," which was really what drove this whole project. At approximately 29,000 meters (1.1 square miles), that's quite a bit of carefully crafted corn designing. It's certainly more elaborate than the previously claimed record holder, and a lot more official. "It was something that we didn't think would happen. There were a lot of little things we had to do and Guinness is pretty picky with how you collect your evidence. We were a little bit on edge on whether it would come through so we were very relieved and very excited," Rachel Kraay told CTV News about the project. To verify that the code works, the Kraays had to commission a helicopter to fly them over their own farm, allowing them to scan it while hovering hundreds of feet above. And then, at the end of last week, the Guinness folks sent over a package certifying the bizarre world record. "They didn't even call. I just went to the door and there was a large package and inside was the certificate and a letter. I guess that's how they do it." [Image credit: Facebook]
Chasing chickens for the Tillers
I'm a solitary person outside of raid nights, so I do end up loving all the archaeology, fishing, and cooking. I like providing feast materials for my guild, and I wrote a blog post before I joined WoW Insider about the pools one could fish for the guild achievement while still being buff-food productive. So it's no wonder I'm really psyched about farming. My own personal farm, where no one can reap from the same planting as I can? Yes, please! The farming faction is the Tillers, who are based at both Halfhill Market and the Heartland in Valley of the Four Winds. But farming isn't all they do. The Tillers are involved in the expanded cooking, and they offer dailies that reward valor points as well as the Pandaria-based cooking tokens. One of the many NPCs you can gain personal reputation with, Old Hillpaw, has a chicken farm. So naturally, one of the dailies he offers is Chasing the Chicken. This isn't your ordinary daily of kill X hozen and steal back Y vegetables. Old Hillpaw has tasked you with finding his prize chicken.
FarmVille in World of Warcraft? WoW Insider's first look at The Tillers
When Mists of Pandaria was first announced at BlizzCon 2011, the developers stated that players would be able to grow cooking mats and herbs on their very own farm in the next expansion. Immediately, players began to speculate on what exactly the words "your own farm" meant in World of Warcraft. Would we be getting our own version of FarmVille in WoW? Or maybe something more like Harvest Moon? Could this mean player housing? No one knew, and the general shortage of information over the months led some of us to wonder whether we'd be seeing the new feature at launch or have to wait for it in a future patch. Now, almost a year after the original announcement for Mists of Pandaria, we can finally put a lot of our questions to rest. Over the weekend, Blizzard implemented The Tillers quests on beta servers, and with them, the new farm feature. So is it FarmVille? Let's take a look. Your adventure in farming begins in Valley of the Four Winds, where you'll be able to start a line of daily quests to gain reputation with a pandaren faction known as The Tillers. Quests revolve around an NPC named Farmer Yoon, a young pandaren who recently traveled to the valley to inherit his late grandfather's farm, Sunsong Ranch. As it turns out, though, Yoon isn't cut out for all the hard work a farm requires, so he enlists you to help him run the farm and win favor with the valley's farming guild, The Tillers.
Breakfast Topic: What's the most difficult thing in the game to farm?
My warrior recently found herself farming a lot of Khorium in order to build her Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and while flying a seemingly endless number of circuits in Nagrand in order to get the metal (which is a rare spawn on other Outland ore nodes), I started to wonder where this farm fell in relation to other grinds. Khorium sometimes cooperates by spawning regularly, but this time, it was its usual, awful self. I'm sure the Burning Crusade-era players can relate. And yet, somehow I still don't think that khorium is the worst thing in the game to farm. Off the top of my head, I can think of others that are or have been equally bad or worse: Non-combat pets A lot of farmable non-combat pets (e.g., the dragon whelps, the firefly, the Fox Kit) have a 1-in-1,000 drop rate and a limited number of mobs up at a given time. Combat pets Waiting for a particular pet to spawn somewhere and then finding and taming it before someone else does can be maddening if you're consistently unlucky. Fishing Accomplished Angler is justifiably famous for being stuffed with requirements full of RNG. Let's talk about the year it took me to get Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box! On second thought, let's not. The Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest This disappeared in Cataclysm, and with it went all the work that went into farming up bug parts and Elementium Ingots, which is where I got stuck in the chain. (So close, and yet so far.) The Insane This almost goes without saying, although it's easier these days than it used to be. Your thoughts, readers? What's the toughest thing in the game to farm?
Expanding Endgame Choices: How Mists of Pandaria changes everything
In the past year, even before Mists of Pandaria went into beta, we've been seeing an expansion of options for players in World of Warcraft that have broadened our idea of endgame content. Endgame content can be described at its most basic as stuff we do when we're at max level, and patch 4.3 added not only the Raid Finder (which is absolutely endgame content) but also transmogrification (which is content for everyone). It revitalizes older content that was once endgame; it gives players from the level 17 twink to the 70 running BC raids to the new level 85 something to do that in no way actually amplifies a character's power in any way. It breaks with the mold of what we think endgame content is supposed to do. Mists is bringing more of this. From the Pet Battle system, to a mass of hundreds of new daily quests and a removal of the limit on daily quests, to specifics such as being able to level up your own farm and improved Raid Finder support for each new tier of raiding, what we're seeing is an emphasis on broad content -- things people who play for six to 10 hours a day can do but which are also accessible in smaller bites for people with far more limited play time. You can hit up the buffet, do some Pet Battles, run some dungeons, or work on a reputation, or you can pick one aspect of the game and work on it. Do you really want to develop your fishing? Are you completely disinterested in anything but PvP? You can go as deep or as wide as you wish. As someone who has no interest in Pet Battles, fishing, or having my own farm, I think this is fantastic.
Japanese 'Dream Project' looking to kill bugs with LEDs, harvest crops with robots
No, they aren't harvesting us just yet, but Japan is putting in place a plan that could see automated farms that feature robotic tractors for tilling earth and collecting crops while LEDs keep unwanted pests at bay. It's part of something called the "Dream Project," a four billion yen ($52 million) effort to reclaim some of the farmland that was affected by the March tsunami. An area in Miyagi prefecture, 200 miles north of Tokyo, has been identified and, if all goes according to plan, these machines could start roving in as little as six years. Harvesting tiberium could take a little longer.
SUFFER '11 farming robot plays a multitude of roles, takes commands via Wiimote (video)
So much for stereotypes, eh? The future of farming is being painted in a far different light here at NEXT Aarhus, where a team from the University of Southern Denmark brought in the largest Wiimote-controlled robot that we've ever seen. The heretofore unnamed beast (going by SUFFER '11 for the time being) is a farming-centric machine that's designed to take the load off of the landowners (while providing a bit of enjoyment all the while). Put simply, this modular bot can have various apparatuses swapped into its midsection -- one pop-in attachment could pick potatoes, while another could disperse pesticide, for example. There's even a module that'll enable it to detect rows and plow down the obvious routes, making it that much easier for farmers of the next millennium to take time off. Of course, the standout feature from our perspective was the inbuilt Bluetooth and WiFi, which allowed the demonstrator to operate the 'bot with a standard Wii remote. Per usual, the vid's after the break. %Gallery-131985%
Massively Exclusive: Free Realms' Referee Ruby goes farming
"This is my farm. It's not so great yet," Referee Ruby says wistfully. "Someday..." In the first of this exclusive video series, Free Realms' infamous in-game support character comes alive to show us the joys of the farming system. If you've ever liked FarmVille -- or even hoped there would be a better version of it out there -- then you're going to love working the soil here to bear the fruits of your efforts. And zucchinis. And eggplants. As in real life, Free Realms' farming takes an attentive hand and some hard work. Weeds must be pulled and boulders blown up to make room for tilling, and plants have to be watched so that you can harvest them when the time is ripe. The payoff is worth it, however; crops can be sold to the market for a fair bit of cash. Farms can be leveled up over time, opening access to more plants and tools so that you can shape the land to your whims. One of the best ways to do this is to talk to Farmer Chug, who has a few quests to speed you on your way. Bask in the full glory of Referee Ruby as she goes Green Acres on us in the video after the jump, and make sure to check out the new farming for yourself as the game is back up and running!
