I finally got to log into Fallen Earth tonight, only to found South Berg was more or less deserted. I guess the hardcore gamers have all moved on to more challenging areas, and we casuals just don’t all log in on a weeknight.

I loved it. I’m not being as anti-social as that sounds, really. After all this *is* a post-apocalyptic world and (it seems to me) population should feel a bit sparse. Plus stocking up on harvesting materials was so much easier than it was when the place was crawling with players. For example, there’s a quest to mine scrap copper from a quarry in South Burg. If memory serves, I needed 10 bits of scrap copper for that quest and I think it took me about 30 minutes to do on the weekend. There was *so* much competition for the limited nodes that as soon as one popped, 3 or 4 players would jump on it. Tonight in about 15 minutes I harvested ~40 bits of scrap copper and could have done more if my pack hadn’t grown too heavy.

Then I set up a ton of crafting jobs. 10 batches of zip gun ammo, a bunch of “fried chicken” (really fried crawler meat, but it tastes just like irradiated chicken! Which is not to be confused with Prairie Chicken, a specimen of which is shown below), a fingerless glove for myself (I’d made one before, not realizing “fingerless glove” was literally 1 glove, so my poor dude is running around with 1 fingerless glove and 1 hand wrap) and 3 pairs of moccasins (to skill up armor-making — if anyone needs a pair let me know). I’m going to estimate that’s about 3 hours of crafting time.

With that done, I decided to jog over to Mumford, another starter town. See, as you gain experience you get APs (I forget what that stands for… Achievement Points maybe? Attribute Points?). You spend these to bump up your stats and skills. But some quests give you bonus AP, and every starter town has different quests that give these bonus AP. So min/max characters are going to do each of the 9 starter towns to wring out every bit of bonus AP they can. I don’t know as I’ll go that far but I’m still working my tradeskills and am happy noodling around in ‘easy mode’ so I’ll at least do Mumford and maybe North Burg.

On the way there I found a nice patch of Woolly Cactus (Cactus is a miracle plant in Fallen Earth. There’s burning cactus that gives acid, water cactus that gives tainted water, cactus cactus that gives cactus and the woolly cactus that gives wool.) and Cotton Plants, so I harvested those and marked the spot on my map for later. Then a decent patch of copper and finally a crashed plane with lots of salvage opportunities, once I took care of the Blade Dancers loitering about. Hey by then I had a few batches of zip gun ammo and that stuff gets heavy. May as well indulge in a bit of target practice and cut down the riff-raff in the area! By that time my pack was full again so I trudged into town. LOTS of work to be done there, but after dumping some extra ore and other heavy items in the bank, I logged for the night.

To a lot of people, this is going to sound like a really dull night of gaming, but to me it was really enjoyable. I love scraping together the odds and ends I need to craft something, and of course I love exploring and finding things.

Crafting in Fallen Earth happens in real time. When you set up your crafting UI to make something, you get a display of how long it’ll take to make. Stuff I’m making now (crossbows, zip guns, clothing) generally takes 8-10 minutes to make. Once you start the process, you can go do whatever you want. Hunt Bladedancers, scavenge for materials, or even log off.

I’m surprised at how much impact this system has on me.

Now this is all going to be old hat for EVE players, I know, since EVE characters study skills in a similar way.

I just laugh at myself when Angela lets me know dinner is ready and I say “Just a sec…have to start building a new crossbow!” because I don’t want that down time wasted. 🙂 I’m sure this urge to log in constantly and set up crafting queues will ease with time, but for now it’s making me feel ‘connected’ to the game in a way that most MMOs don’t.

I didn’t get much chance to play last night, since I was watching Monday Night Football, but I did log in to start making a medium level zip gun for myself.

One important tip I’ve learned too late. [Just to be clear, I read this on the forums late last night and haven’t personally tested it yet, but the knowledge seemed accepted by the community so I assume its true.] If the difficulty of an item is no more than 30 less than your skill level, you’ll earn skill points making it. I, based on years of MMO crafting, figured I needed to make “white” items (items with a difficulty level similar to my skill level) in order to maximize progress, leaving the “green” stuff behind. This got expensive because all the ‘white’ stuff was pretty complex and required lots of mats, some of which I need to buy from an NPC vendor.

I more or less went broke doing this, when I could’ve been skilling up making (“green”) crossbow bolts or zip-gun ammo, both of which require very few mats, and mats that are cheap to buy and easy to harvest. I think zip-gun ammo requires 2 bits of scrap copper — even if you have to buy it, NPC’s sell scrap copper for 7 chips (at least, that’s the cost in South Burg). Really common vendor trash loot from mobs (teeth, feathers and junk) sell for 2 chips each, so it just takes a couple kills to get enough chips to buy mats for a batch of zip-gun ammo (and if you’re harvesting you can sell tainted meat and random bio chemicals you get off your kills for even more).

🙂 I think Fallen Earth is under my skin. I can’t wait to put more time into it.

That’s a nice feeling to have, given that it was more or less a spur-of-the-moment purchase for me.