Galactic Diary

I made some leaps forward for several characters this week.

Tailor

I had her make one of every single thing she could make to work towards Novice Tailor. Everything in Black, that dreaded favorite of players and bane of the color mad Tailor.  I put everything on the Bazaar that I could at one time (I forgot you can only list 25 items at once on the Bazaar) for a cheesy 150 credits each.

 

Sales!  I love the fact that I can make these crummy things with no color and sell them, because Tailors who have risen in the profession are selling their items from home vendors, and they aren’t a competitor at the Bazaar.  New people want to get out of their newbie clothes as soon as possible, so it’s nice for them to find affordable and varied clothing, including some things just for Ithorians and Wookiees.

Architect

I made Novice Architect late last night.  I had to do some background work to get the materials I needed to grind Wind Harvesters to Novice level. 

I purchased a Heavy Mineral Extractor for 30k, and 10k worth of Fusion to power it. (lots of delivery missions there).  Even grinding the Artisan levels of Architect, Low Grade Ore has been a real problem.  I found a crummy Aggro-infested (NPCs who will come over and crush you as soon as you’re in their range) area in some trees at 66%, which is not a good percent spot but I had spent an hour surveying for 4 different kinds of ore and this was the first semi-decent spot I found.

With this, and what I had already mined with my homemade Better Than Your Knee personal harvesters, I ground to Novice Architect!  Yay!  Immediately I made my Medic a Small Tatooine House (see her adventures below) and the few pieces of furniture I could put my hands on.  I need wood for plants 🙂

My husband mentioned he can now take on Valerians and I was pleased to see he looted two very familiar paintings from them.   The Valley View Painting and the Party Poster shown here are such common drops, but I hadn’t seen had them or been able to have them on my virtual walls for such a long time, it warmed my heart to see them. I put them up immediately, placed my modest furniture, and ah, my house finally looks like a home. I have a place to sit!

The road from Novice to Master Architect is going to rely on my continuing to get materials in large quantities.  There are only a few things Architects make that need good items stats, but buildings and harvesters take HUGE amounts of resources.  I was down to my last bit of Steel grinding last night and just barely made it with like 50 units left to my name.

Medic

My live Medic really scraped to get xp until she entered a guild maybe 6 months into playing the game?  My new Medic is doing so much better anytime my spouse and I can play at the same time.  The guy is a Gold Mine of medical and Entertainer Healing xp.

I talked with Mobyus of the SWG-U guild and my Medic now has a guild, where I hope she can be helpful.  People seem really really nice.

A tip from Mr. Big that there was nice water on Talus had me send my Architect over to place three small harvesters on some of the water.  I have never seen anything like the field of harvesters placed on this stuff. Even more amazing, and just eye popping, there was an entire hill filled with people hand sampling!  JSM….My Medic was able to fill a box of XP healing some of these people.

This event, and my need to survey more area at once, led me to finally put in a macro for Surveying, from my ever handy notebooks.  It worked like a charm, and is available to all of my characters, something I didn’t recall.  That will be sooo handy once I write in the Crafting Macro which is a page long in my notebook…zzzzzz……

A Note for my Ithorian Spouse who is starting his Resource Business:  

These Resources will always sell.

Hide, particularly Wooly. Don’t worry about the stats at this time.

Radioactive Energy

Steel (any variety, any stats)

Low Grade Ore (any variety, any stats)

A Week in the Galaxy

I’ve had a week in my old favorite game playing combat and non-combat characters.  I spent many an hour arguing on forums in the past after the NGE saying that the original game was superior, and the counter argument by many was “You’re dreaming, it was awful, it was broken, you just don’t remember it correctly, blah blah.”

Dear Doubters, you were wrong.  You were always wrong.  After playing and beta testing many games in the intervening years, a single day back in the Galaxy, even, told me what I knew to be true.  This is the best game ever created.

It is a living, dangerous world.  Everything matters.  You can be anything, do anything.

Although there is much to like in the other games I play, not a single one of them is a living world where you have an alternate life.  You can have adventures in other games, but you’re just another pixel in the pot.

Anywho.

Scout/Ranger Wannabe

I have a Scout who is working oh so slowly it seems towards Master Ranger.  This character is the key for real success for the other characters because she will be able to go to any planet in the system and hunt the very best Creature Resources.  My Doctor wannabe and Chef wannabe really want to see her succeed.

Coronet is my favorite place, but everything in a ring around the city is hunted by others.  I had the idea to go to Tyrena, another starter city (when you create a character you can choose the planet and city they begin their adventures) to see if there were lower level creatures I could hunt. Yes, this is a good spot.  I also recalled Korvella being decent for beginner creatures and went there, but the area was pretty barren of spawns. 

Note this Corellian butterfly “cons” yellow to me, so I’m making progress.  For the longest while everything was red as in “Red You’re Dead”.  I have to admit there is something hinky about combat.  In some cases, I’m one-shotting (sp?) these.  In other cases, I do zero damage and have to run for it.  I don’t know if it is lag or what, but yow.

Medic

I wasn’t going to make a Medic at all because Healers in games have a weird existence, more so here than anywhere.

I cracked and made a nice Wookiee (who by chance looks exactly like my former Architect, so feels….).

The Coronet Med Center always seems to be full of Master and Novice Doctors, so a Wookiee Medic has little chance of getting someone to heal with their power ability as a noob to heal 22 damage.  Stand back!

I was on a different server than my Trandoshan spouse (this is how I know about those Scaly Secrets), and I used to look at his blackened HAM bars in wonder and wish he was on my server with all those delicious wounds.  He is MINE now, with his wild combat ways and darkened HAM bars.

We tried two lairs last night.  The first was a Gurrcat lair, which resulted in him dying and both of us being incapped numerous times.  Pack animals pack and attack in groups…No more dogs or cats…

                                         We ponder our constant death and incapacitations.

I had taken a Krahbu lair so we tried that with much better success.  We need to work on the technique of the Ranged person pulling the creatures over and the Brawler/Melee person then stepping in.

My toolbars, agh I really had them set up badly.  All my combat on one bar and heals on another. Bah I had to switch between mouselook and mouse mode to use them and death and incaps were a result (plus I can’t heal yet worth beans).

My spouse’s X31 vehicle blew up so we had to call it quits since there were HAM problems, cloning problems…

Back at the Coronet Med Center I kept trying to heal him as quickly as my Mind would hold out.  I felt like a dog with a bone, let’s be honest. I didn’t want anyone else to get that juicy xp.

I filled most of the three bottom boxes of Med Experience just in an hour or so working with my Ithorian mate.  Too good.

Architect

My crafting characters have spent the week doing Artisan missions between Coronet, Doaba Guerfel and Vreni Island for money.  This allowed me to buy a small home, backpacks for sorting resources and loot and two personal chemical harvesters and two wind harvesters.

Last night my Architect wannabe (3 boxes away) finally stood in front the public crafting station in Coronet and made pretty much everything she could make from the Artisan Engineering tree to advance her craft.

I had to purchase metal and fiberplast so I could make what I needed.  Luckily I found some for 1K for 1000 units of resource, which I could afford.

Extra crafting tools are always useful, and I have five characters who can use all of this stuff.  The survey devices are also so useful. 

I got two boxes last night, so I’m moving along. I was proud to train someone at the Starport this morning in Engineering 1.

Tailor/Maybe Chef

I was going to make this character Tailor Image Designer which is a fun combination.  Once I started thinking about how my characters could really use some foods, I think I will go Tailor Chef.  (I found zero Veghash for instance, anywhere in the galaxy. Rats.)

She has sort of been the “lead crafter”.  She bought the house, bought and placed those chem harvesters, tipped my spouse money for a new bike…She’s cool. 

I can’t tell you how pleasing it was for me to place and get running my first harvester since 2011.  Ah, nothing like it.  I got an 81% spot near our house!  Dept. of doh, I forgot to get power for the harvester so when I went to turn it on, nada.  My Architect purchased two Wind Power generators so this won’t happen again.

                                                   Selfie with beloved harvesters!

Start me up!

 

 

 

 

Smuggler

 

 

I never mastered Smuggler, but had a lot of fun slicing weapons for people and opening crates and creating spices during the short Combat Upgrade period.

 

She has my old smuggler’s name but I made her a Bothan this time which seems better suited to the character.

 

I placed her in Theed rather than Coronet because she’s all sneaky and what better hive of Imp activity than Theed?

 

After our experiences with lairs last night, I was going to be sure to Clone her, because she’s going to die, die die.  Yikes, 1000 credits to clone and that is what a new character has so…make some credits first then secure the clone.

 

 



 

Galaxies Tuesday: My Architect

Speaking of making homes and furnishings, I loved my Architect and her business.  I loved decorating each style of home available to players, and making and selling furniture. 

I remember well how thrilling it was when they made it possible for you to craft dressers and chests that could be decorative and useful for storage of items.  This wasn’t available right away, furniture was just decorative.

The next step was the ability to color your furniture.  Downright scintillating to the Architect about town.   I came across a discussion of how that colorization would never be possible and why  (note, I don’t edit any of these things, it is all as it appeared on the forums…this I remember starter, that isn’t me, it is the original poster.):

I remember reading the post Pawlin is referring to but after several searches I still cannot find it. Sometime approximately between May 2005 and May 2006, we got a definite “NO on the color options for furniture” explanation. Based on Pawlin’s changed responses of “We wish to have color…” to “We have been told no on color…”

A Dev explained why making furniture with color options (like clothes) is “not impossible” but would be very time consuming and difficult to make new art in every color for every furniture item in the game. Clothing was intended to have color options during crafting and was coded that way and art done for it since the beginning. Furniture et al was never intended to have color options so the art and coding was never done. It would take a LOT of work to do it now. And they feel the game has many other higher priorities than making a chair have more color options.

Here’s SWG-Goliath explaining sort of why it can be done but won’t be done: CLICKY #1

 

Mirkwoods wrote:

 

SWG-Goliath wrote:

Modular housing sounds cool at first glance, but the real problem is how we set up houses and other interiors in the game. In order to seperate the house from the rest of the world and thereby making the game more effectaint we use a portal system. when you step from the world into the house, you walk thru a portal. Each portalted room is called a cell. The cells have to line up perfectly, and the custom lighting i do has to match from room to room, or there is a huge and ugly pop when you step between them. In addition there is flooring issues as each cell has its own floor. those floors have to also match exactly or you cant cross thier bounderies.

cell

|_ mesh

|_ floor

|_ portals

|_ Lights

Bottom line is that from an art perspective player created modular housing would be extremely buggy and unpredicable assuming it even worked at all. Our game in its current state isnt set up for this level of customisation in housing.

Message Edited by SWG-Goliath on 10-03-200510:48 PM

 

This makes sense, but what I was talking about, if you are responding to me specifically, is making a decorated room an item.

Not the room itself, but perhaps an item with certain dimensions that will fit into many of the rooms. This item consists of something called say, “Bedroom suite.”

The bedroom suite consists of say, a large bed, a large area rug underneath and some chairs and other bedroom looking objects that are actually just one object.

We’ve all seen that there can be huge objects that are just one item; Example = Asteroid Chunk.

This way, when you put down say the “Bedroom suite”, or a “Small kitchen”, you are putting down only one object, and having most of a bedroom, or a kitchen already done, then you can use the smaller items to decorate and customize the “rooms.”

I’m not sure how something like this could even mess up the lighting.

I’d love to hear why this wouldn’t work… but I’d prefer to hear how it could be made to.

 

SWG-Goliath wrote: Its not impossible but you wouldn’t be able to sit on or use any of the items that are part of this suite. Each item has specific functions. For example a dresser holds items, a bed or chair can be sat upon, a lamp emits light. If we combined all the models into a single item, the funtionality would be lost since that function is applied per item. I hope that makes sense.

SWG-Goliath: Master Artist

 

Pawlin wrote:

Yeah you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard for their art dept. to put out a few new skins for new house styles.

ONe thing we’d like is furniture color customization. We were told over a year ago that the “ball is rolling” on that… I figure Sisyphus is still workin on it.

 

CLICKY #3

 

Pawlin wrote:

 

Edzew wrote: …also they can change the color on furniture as well yet they say its imposible kuz it would take to mutch code or sum crap like that …

 

They did not say it was impossible.

They have said that its a lot more work than people think cause the furniture items as made are not setup to handle multiple color options. So they’d have to both do new art for all the new colors and rewrite the software code for all the furniture.

I certainly hop we’ll net some new content like this eventually but I don’t expect it anytime soon. We’ve been asking for this for over 2 years so don’t hold your breath.

Pawlin wrote:

 

Wirlies_Birds_Inc wrote:

Pawlin said:

Color pallets for furniture might be off the table. SOE has said before that would be a ton of work so I don’t know if they’d be able to swing it.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

(Sorry, I don’t know how to do the neat little quoting previous post trick so many of you can do)

I don’t buy this for one second. You mean to tell methat will all the features in this and any other game, and with the fact that there are color palletts for clothing, for skin, for speeders and for ships, adding one for furniture is not techinically possible? Sounds to me like when you tell you kid to do thier reply is “but dad its soo hard”.

Sounds to me like they just don’t want to add a color pallet to furniture.

 

NO. I am not telling you it is “not technically possible”. I never said anything of the sort. I said that SOE said it “would be a ton of work”. If something is a lot of work, that is not the same as impossible.

Yes when it comes down to it some things they have to say ‘no’ to because its simply too much work. We have to be realistic. They have a limited amount of people and time. We want to get the most bang for the buck in the things they do for Trader.

I’d certainly like furniture pallette. I’ve personally asked for it a million **edit**ing times. But when they tell you outright that something isn’t going to happen then its time to move on and ask for other stuff.

Oh please, I can’t just tell my boss to **edit** off cause something is too hard and use that to get out of anything.

That is not what we’re talking about.

I’m talking about a business telling their customers “sorry thats to much work for us to be able to do”. I work directly with customers myself and do at times I tell them ‘no sorry’ when they ask for things we can’t realisticially do. Its based on cost and return and amount of work.

Seriously are you accusomted to businesses telling you “yes” for whatever you ask as a customer??

This is not the marines. You and I are not SOE’s commanding officer. So we can’t just order them to “make it happen”. The “customer is always right” philosphy is nice but only works so far when you’re looking at the various wants and needs of 10’s of thousands of individual customers and 9 distinct professions with various play styles. They have limited resources and have to spread them around the best way they can to get the most bang for the buck. We’ve only got a limited time they’re going to spend on our revamp and we need to make sure we get the most out of it.

I’ve been very clear that this is a case of SOE telling us its too much work. Thats a very straight forward no answer based on them not wanting to put that much effort into something. SO I’m dropping it in favor of the many other things we’d like done that they havne’t said no to. We won’t drop it entirely but since they’ve said no once why keep beating a dead horse??? I’m NOT going to make baselless accusations about teh validity of the amount of work they say it would take, tahts virtually calling them liars which gets nobody anywhere.

150)?150:this.scrollHeight)”Pawlin Construction of Kettemoor.
Harvesters and Crafting stations – Triad Coronet Mall just outside Coronet (-177, -5490)
Architect, House, Furniture, Harvester FAQ
Oprolan the Wookiee of Sunrunner. Cheap resources at Talus (-639, -3058), West of Daeric.
“Worst FF ever *thumbsdown*” — Pawlin fan club
“I am not going to win Miss Congeniality again this year in the Senate.” — John McCain

 

My girl actually met the great Pawlin once!  Too exciting. She asked about harvesters, I think.   He was a very low key person, and very nice.  I don’t think he could tell she idolized him. 

In any case, we did get the ability to add color to furniture, though it wasn’t really well done on most pieces of furniture. 

Some of my Architect’s Prices

Armoire (beginners)	125 metal	875
Armoire (Masters)		8000
Armoire (wooden)	250 metal	1250
Bookcase (beginners)	75 + 75 Metal	950
Bookcase (Masters)		2500
Bookcase (wooden)	150 metal + 100 metal	1250
Cabinet (wooden)	200 metal + 150 metal +25 metal	1250
Café chair	75 metal+ 25 metal	500
Café Table	90 + 60 Metal	500
Café Table (Masters)
Candle Bestine	20 organic +15 fiberplast + 20 metal	500
Candle Coronet	20 organic +15 fiberplast + 20 metal	500
Candle Dearic	20 organic +15 fiberplast + 20 metal	500
Candle Restuss	20 organic +15 fiberplast + 20 metal	500
Candle Theed	20 organic +15 fiberplast + 20 metal	500
Chair (Brown scoop modern white pedestal)	130 non-ferrous metal + 25 metal	965
Chair (small square orange)	50 +25 Metal	500
Cheap café table	50 + 20 Metal	500
Chest (Beginners)	60 + 30 Metal	500
Chest (half circle type)	90 steel + 120 steel	1250
Couch (long orange)	90 + 80 Metal	500
Desk Lamp Bantha Gives Light	20 metal +15 metal +20 mineral	500
Desk Lamp Bantha Non Lighting	20 metal +15 metal +20 mineral	500
Desk Lamp Rancor	20 metal +15 metal +20 mineral	500
Dining table (super long wooden oval)	250 non ferrous + 250 aluminum	3500
Divan (purple)	80 metal + 120 Hide	1100
Droid Detection Device	50 metal + 50 metal	1100
End Table	50 metal + 20 mineral	710
End Table (Masters)
End table (wood arched legs, lip at back)	75 non-ferrous +50 aluminum	875
Freestanding Lamp Azeron	40 metal + 50 metal + 15 metal + 20 mineral	500
Freestanding Lamp Blueleaf Gives Light	40 metal + 50 metal + 15 metal + 20 mineral	500
Freestanding Lamp Blueleaf Non Lighting	40 metal + 50 metal + 15 metal + 20 mineral	500
Freestanding Lamp Razorcoil	40 metal + 50 metal + 15 metal + 20 mineral	500
Freestanding Lamp Tallbirch	40 metal + 50 metal + 15 metal + 20 mineral	500
Futon	175 metal	1025
Kitchen Chair	80 metal + 35 metal	845
Large Bed	150 metal +250 wooly hide	1700
Large Couch	150 metal + 100 hide	1250
Large Potted Plant style 1 (tree)	30 mineral + 30 wood + 20 chemical	770
Loveseat (cream and rust)	90 metal + 140 hide	1190
Metal chair	100 metal + 15 steel + 45 metal	980
Ottoman	80 metal + 150 hide	1190
Reclining chair	80 metal + 20 steel +120 hide	1160
Small Bed	100 metal + 150 wooly hide	1250
Small couch	100 metal + 100 hide	1100
Small modern end table (glass top curved leg)	50 non ferrous + 40 aluminum	270
Small Potted Plant style 1	25 min + 20 wood + 20 chemical	700
Small Table (black)	40 metal +40 mineral	740
Sofa Chair (Purple)	250 metal + 200 hide	1850
Squared metal chair	75 metal + 25 metal	800
Table Top Lamp		500
Table Top Lamp Corellia		500
Table Top Lamp Coruscant Gives Light		500
Table Top Lamp Coruscant Non Lighting		500
Table Top Lamp Naboo		500
Table Top Lamp Tatooine		500
Toolchest (short, red front)	50 metal + 40 metal	770
Toolchest (Tall Green)	75 metal+ 50 metal	875
Torch	20 metal + 20 metal + 1 gp electronic module	500
Upholstered Chair	90 metal + 150 wooly hide	1220
Wooden Chair	90 wood + 45 wood	635
Fountains, Braziers		8000
Streetlamps and Statues		8000
Paintings (regular size)		10000
Paintings (large ie Krayt, Lucky Despot)		20000
Table (glass top)		1025

Lamps, beds, sofas and paintings were always my best sellers.  Street Lamps were popular and I made and sold every model.  You could put them in your house or in your City if you were a mayor.

My Architect originally meant to be a Chef, but once she had made an item or two from the general Artisan Skill Tree her heart belonged to Architecture.