Nightingale Realms Rebuilt - Initial impressions

Nightingale's 0.5 update "Realms Rebuilt" has a lot of promising story and cosmetic changes, as well as some mechanics and progression changes. This article will go look at the changes to unlocking the tech tree, as well as augmentations in crafting.

Tech Tree

Before Realms Rebuilt

• 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.
• In the Realms Rebuilt dev blog, this exploit was specifically called out and supposedly addressed: "We know what some of you are already thinking - time to put the Boomsickle to use and vacuum up a bunch of grass and sticks to harvest for Tier 1 Essence. Puck would approve of your cunning. Well, your lawnmowing days are over. Plant fibre, rocks, and sticks no longer extract into Essence."

Realms Rebuilt Update

• 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 13 T1 Essence on completion (at Difficulty 10, which is Normal difficulty for the starting Abeyance Realm).
• 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.
• Update 0.5.1. adjusted how much Essence you can Extract from Arrows but other easy-to-make items such as Simple Wood Axes (1 stone + 1 wood) can still be extracted for 10 T1 Essence, which is almost as much as the reward for clearing a Normal-Difficulty POI (which awards 13 T1 Essence).

Evaluation

• 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.

Recommendation

• Drastically reduce or outright disallow Extraction for Essence.
• Change the Repair mechanic.
• Since buildings can be repaired by simply whacking them with a Hammer, let gear be repaired by simply standing still out of combat or interacting with a Crafting Station. If the player stands still more for than a few seconds, they automatically start to repair their gear and durability of gear slowly increases.
• This would also mean no in-combat repair.
• Possibly allow enchanted gear to not degrade at all.
• Limit Essence to crafting magical items.
• Instead of Extracting unwanted gear into Essence, some alternatives include:
• Deconstruct to recover components/materials (especially legendary materials) and thereby retrofit their gear instead of fully replacing it. Since deconstructing furnishings gives 100% materials back, deconstructing gear/equipment can do the same.
• A new Aid NPC POI type can be used to consume obsolete materials. In this type of POI, the NPC asks for a mix of crafted items, without specifying Tier or materials used to construct them. For example, an NPC might ask for a bunch of hinges and shafts.
• Recycle refined materials into base materials. For example metal plate could be recycled back into 1-2 units of ore. Need to be careful here that recycling won't create more material than is required to create the item to be recycled.
• Change the Tech Tree to be unlocked by trial-and-error crafting instead of buying unlocks.
• To learn how to make something, the player attempts to craft or build it, increasing progress toward learning it by a random percentage range.
• More advanced items can have a slower learning rate, resulting in more attempts required (and more materials consumed in the attempts).
• Learning magic can be potentially very costly in Essence as it is consumed in each attempt. This further encourages players to do more POIs.
• Limit Essence sources to:
• Clearing POIs.
• Possibly small amounts from defeating Bound enemies.
• Change Challenges to give something other than Essence.
• A tiny permanent buff could be granted according to the type of Challenge succeeded.
• If Challenges only gave Essence, there is no point doing harder Challenges since you can just farm Essence.
• Re-envision Bastille POIs:
• They can potentially be Essence caches or traps for Wisps to capture their Essence.
• The basic mechanisms are to avoid the cache from being released by nosy wildlife instead of intelligent humans as these structures were built long before humans were anticipated to roam the Realms.

Crafting and Augmentations

Before Realms Rebuilt

• 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.

Realms Rebuilt Update

• 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.
• You cannot simply move an Augmentation close to the Crafting Station. The Crafting Station must frequently be picked up and put down again for it to detect which Augmentations are closest to it. Otherwise it typically retains the links to whichever Augmentations were registered and still in range.
• Higher-tier Augmentations can take up augmentation buff slots but do not stack with the lower-tier versions.

Evaluation

• Slight reduction in complexity but overall, not enough of a benefit since the pain point of managing Furnishing placement is still there.

Recommendation

• 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.
• It is generally not necessary to limit the number of Augmentation buffs because the buffs generally affect completely different types of crafted items (e.g., ranged weapons versus melee tools).