Woohoo! First posts in a year-and-a-half? Great to get this forum started up again.
So here's what settings is working on:
Recently completed: revision of Shield Making quests
Currently (0.6.2 and earlier) shields are made using "Diagrams" rather than the standard crafting books we've all come to know and love.
The problem is there is a LOT of them. So to make them more in line with other crafting, the individual diagrams are being phased out in favor of a progression of shield making books from which you can make several kinds of shields each. Thanks to eonwind, Tuathanach, and Lumi for their work in sorting the rules. Lots of new shields are being introduced and it coincides with rules changes in shield effectiveness. I'll let Rules explain those details.
So with these changes there is a big impact on the quests used to reward these books. There were a total of 14 quests giving 16 books (1 book, Catalog of Shields, and 15 diagrams). Many of these quests had nothing to do with crafting other than their reward. So this has now been reduced to 5 quests repurposed for the 4 new books. The remaining quests have been given new rewards and one has been greatly expanded into practically a whole new fun quest. A couple others have been eliminated. (Including that whole weird sequence where you give away your Golden Shield Diagram then later get it back). These quests will be wiped for everyone so you can go through the quests again and get their new rewards. So when the new update goes through, be sure to check with Trasok to get started in shield making. And no, there will be no wipe of preexisting shield making skill, so you advanced crafters can just zip through the quests. On another note, some of those small parts that could only be bought from NPCs will now be craftable as well. So you'll have a choice between buying standard quality versions from the NPCs or making higher quality parts yourself.
In progress:Bow Making is a long standing skill desired by the community. Rules worked out the process some time ago (thanks to eonwind, Tuathanach, and skelbellor!) but the quests have been on the to-do list for awhile. Cirerey completed the first quest and got started on the 2nd but left the team in December 2013. So it was shelved a bit as settings had other pressing projects in progress. Now Tuathanach has been gracious enough to pick up the project and complete quest #2 and with the help of Lumi, create the final quest as well.
The 3 were recently polished into working drafts and loaded on the test server. So we've been going through and testing them. Under the category of "this is why we test these things" the first quest wasn't going to quite work as is, so I decided to simplify it and reloaded it yesterday. I like it better this way. We're still in the process of testing these quests but they should be ready for the next update! So get ready to make some bows! \o/
Next up:After finishing off the bow making quests, I plan on FINALLY finishing off those last two alchemy quests. There is one more advanced, very special book to be rewarded for those highly skilled in alchemy. These 2 quests were quite ambitious and ultimately got put on the bottom of a very large pile of projects. But I actually did some writing on it a few weeks ago so it's just a matter of time to get back to them and finish them up. They won't make this update but will be in a future update.
