Darkfall: Day Five
Hot on the heels of David X. Messer's account of Day Four comes Day Five. And this time I'm publishing it the day I get it.
Planning on doing things in an MMO is a bit like taking a bath in treacle. On the one hand you're there to get clean, but on the other hand, mmmmmmm treacle...
The plan for the evening was simple. Investigate crafting. There was one minor problem with this, and that was that I didn't know what the mining nodes looked like in Darkfall. Sure, the stone mining nodes are everywhere, you just walk up to pretty much any rock and there you go. The problem with mining stone to level mining skill, as I noticed, is that you end up with a bag full of stone. The problem with this is that Darkfall features encumbrance, so not only did I have a bag full of stone but moving anywhere with it was painfully slow.
So anyway. Off I went into the unexplored regions of the map to find a mining node that might have iron ore. It didn't take me long to find one, they're small flat stones that kinda shine in a kind of metallic way. It's hard to describe but it's one of those things that when you see it you know you've found what you want. I estimated I could mine about 22 iron ore before I ran out of stamina. Should be plenty right? Off I went back to the nearest town (which I think was Shaol but more on that in a moment) to purchase the armoursmithing skill and to make some armour. The first step was to smelt the iron ore into bars. Pretty standard. Except in Darkfall when you fail to make a iron ingot, you lose the materials used. This seems pretty major on the surface but it's just a case of skilling up your smelting skills to the point where you're failing less.
Things changed to a rather large degree when the Clan channel piped up. Apparently the Clan headquarters has a mine where I could gather in relative safety and possibly knock this mining thing on the head pretty quickly. This is where my problems started and my evening would disappear.
The Dark Elf starting area is south central, at the bottom of the map in the middle. More or less on the coast. Where was the Clan HQ? That's right, in the North West most corner on what looked like a snow covered island. I'd been meaning to explore a bit more of the rest of the map and this seemed like an excellent idea, at the time. An hour later and I was still only a quarter of the way there after encountering some difficult terrain that I needed to back track over. And that's effectively where my evening of best laid plans ended. For the night. Hopefully tomorrow evening I'll be able to get to the Clan HQ and report on that side of things.
Posted by Drew Shiel at November 13, 2009 3:33 PM
