Idea: Tar Pits (New building or mining node)

One of the things I’ve noticed people do in the game is use the tannery not to create leather, but just for the tar. Only the tar. I do it myself and end up with thousands of unused and unneeded leather.

My idea is to have a new building piece called the Tar Pit. It would be fairly large, roughly the size of the Wheel of Pain. The idea is that it is a passive tar generator that uses thralls as the determining factor in how much tar it produces. The fuel is food and thralls (the thralls don’t get used up though).

Here is an example of numbers I think might be balanced (since it is a passive generator).

Thrall slot uses a taskmaster. The taskmaster reduces crafting time. The base might be 120 seconds per craft, while a T4 taskmaster would reduce time to half. The Tar Pit needs thralls and food placed into it’s inventory, just like the wheel of pain, with a maximum of 4 thralls.

For each thrall, you get 1 tar from each craft. For each level above 1 for each thrall, the craft time is reduced 2.5 seconds. At 4 level 1 thralls with no taskmaster, this would be 4 tar every 2 minutes. At 4 level 4 thralls with a level 4 taskmaster, this would be 4 tar every 45 seconds.

As a standard crafting piece with 15 slots for the inventory, this means the pit could hold 1000 tar with 4 thralls and 1 stack of food.

At worst, with only 1 level 1 thrall (and 1 stack of food), the Tar Pit fills in 43.3 hours with 1300 tar. With a full compliment of level 4 thralls, the Tar Pit would fill in 187.5 minutes with 1000 tar. (3 hours and 7.5 minutes).

For comparison, a tannery will make 1 tar every 20 seconds, with or without a thrall. This results in roughly 5.5 hours to get the same 1000 tar, but you will also result in 2000 leather you don’t need.

I think it provides a good place for older thralls as you level and get better ones, and at end game helps ensure you aren’t just making leather for the tar.

You could also just scrap this whole idea and just add actual tar pits to the jungle area you could mine for tar, that could work too. Either way would address the issue of making leather for the tar and throwing the leather away.

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I like the idea of adding tar pits and even quicksand to the map. More survival hazards from nature!

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Like the concept. This would be cool to have FC explore in some fashion. Between coal in the presses and hide on the tanneries, tar seems to require a significant amount of micromanagement compared to other resources yet it is such a central resource to many crafting operations.

This idea was suggested in EA, there wasn’t any traction on it from the devs, to many other features to build then as now. As for the leather, when you start gathering combat thralls for your base that leather will disappear rather fast equipping those thralls. So depending on your play style not a complete waste in leather.

My advice with this, get the modders on this. Have them create and add tar pit nodes in a few places around the map. The devs don’t have a problem adding popular Player made mods to the base game. Worth a try.

I think having a recipe to combine Oil and Coal to make Tar would work. I’m not going to go into specifics but I think this would work. Have the recipe be in the alchemy station. This would replace the awful fluid press way that is currently in the game (no offense devs, 5 coal to 1 tar is not worth it. Especially with a 20 second press…). I came up with this using the interwebs, Wikipedia to be exact.

Wikipedia says, “Tar is a sticky black liquid made of thick oil. It is a natural substance, oozing out of the ground… Usually it is made by heating coal inside a chemical apparatus…”

just put coal into the press; 5 coal equals 1 tar.

That said, the fluid press needs to be level 22 or something not 28.

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Maybe a way to convert tar into oil … whether the fluid press to squeeze it?

But if you squeeze coal, doesn’t that result in ‘diamonds’ rather than tar ('cause that’s how Superman did it… just don’t ask how he filtered out the impurities and realigned the molecular carbon structure) – (yes, that’s a huge amount of squeezing, but, just saying…). I’ve never seen anyone get tar from a lump of coal. Not even Superman. :wink:

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I like the idea of tar pits added as an environmental node/hazard of some sort that you gather tar from, rather than having it solely as a byproduct of other items. If FunCom can implement, great. If not, no big loss – its easy to either use or discard excess leather.