Bark is a resouce that is REQUIRED as fuel on 2 stations that you unlock pretty early on (lvls 10 & 19) and are constantly in use in order to produce enough materials for crafting, upgrades, and repairs. At lvl 20 you unlock Journeyman Mason, which has pieces requiring lots of insulated wood, which is made with dry wood and resin, both of which are products of a bark fueled dryer.
After every major update I start a new game to test how rebalancing affects new players, and while using a pick on the dead trees does provide a fair amount of bark, the areas with dead trees early on are few and far between. This is made worse when other players build structures too close to the trees, causing them to despawn permanently, making an already rare resource even more scarce.
The Improved Carpenter’s Bench comes in way too late in level progression to remedy the increased demand for bark once you learn Journeyman Mason; besides, this bench doesn’t need to have a monopoly on bark production to be relevant, since it should still be needed to craft the high end weapon handles that unlock just a few levels after the bench itself. So please, Funcom, give us the bark!
So long as players don’t build near dead trees, which is a problem I’ve been running into on my server. Its the main reson I ended up writing this suggestion, because back then I could produce bark without having to look for dead trees, and now that i have to, the number of nodes are decreased because of poor structure placement
What if we had two types of bark? With the lack of fitting terms, we could have low quality bark and high quality bark. Low quality bark would be received from utilising any tool (able to scratch a tree) on a tree, while high quality bark is received from the carpenter’s bench when any type of wood is processed into planks et cetera.
Honestly, the lack of bark is a pain in the â– â– â– now.
Removing it as a byproduct of woodworking shouldn’t have been done. Lowering the amount you get for it, maybe. But not removing it completely.
I’ve been involved in woodworking. When you start with a rough block of wood, there is a TON of damn bark you have to get rid of first. If you are squaring it there are even more wood chips and debris taken off to achieve a uniform size.
I guess a new tool for scraping bark would be considered “unbalanced”, in that we could harvest bark from any tree.
But still, we need a more reliable way of getting bark. Or else those stations need to add in a secondary fuel.
I fail to sense an imbalance factor here. I think this could be a viable approach.
Perhaps make the pick give us bark as a main product instead and not break the trees. When enough bark from the tree is torn, the graphical mesh of the tree changes to reflect the depleted resource node.
It’s unbalanced because there are a damned ton of trees around. So a dedicated bark scraper would somehow make things “too easy”, since it’s a dedicated fuel source.
Being able to collect bark like this would easily give us a huge surplus of it.
That would cover all the Dryer and Tannery could ever need. Which further supplies us with Dry Wood, which is essentially the best fuel in the game.
I think it was balanced enough as it was before the change. Regular trees are abundant, dead trees arent (even less so if players build on their spawn points), so having 1 unit of bark for every 10 wood we turn into shaped wood isnt breaking the game.
The sickle could be the tool to gather bark on trees. You can’t get one before lvl30, it isn’t too early in the game to unbalance it, imo. The pick used only for bark on trees might make bugs with the pickaxe.
We don’t need another tool in the game. There’s already a skinning knife + a cleaver + a sickle + a pickaxe or a pick + an axe. That’s 4 or 5, that’s enough. There’s only 8 slots in the wheel.
Level 30 is way too long to wait to be able to reliably get bark.
For starters, you get the Dryer at level 19, but if you could only reliably get bark at 30, then it’s a useless station at that point.
You get the Tannery at level 10. Without reliable access to bark to fuel it, you are screwed out of a LOT of the lower tier armors that require leather.
You also get screwed because the Tannery is the only way to get Tar. And you need Tar to make Steelfire, which is required to manufacture steel in the first place. Which you need to craft the Sickle.
So limiting the harvest of bark to a Sickle is the most terrible idea you could have, as it currently works. If there was an Iron Sickle obtainable at lower levels, then it becomes more reasonable.
Personally the Sickle would be too flimsy to hack off bark. The skinning knife would be more appropriate, but it’s animation is wrong.
They can just increase the drop rate from when you use the pick, but i doubt they will do that since thats basically the whole point of dead trees (drop secondary resouce more often)
Frankly I never had problems gathering bark with a pick at lower level. I just use it with trees and not dead trees so I get logs and barks because I noticed dead trees gives a lot less bark than trees using a pick, but gives mostly branches and a few dry wood using an axe. So I chop tress with a pick and dead trees with an axe.
The main problem I’ve found to craft low level armours is getting enough skin to make enough leather. Axe or picStoneaxe and stonepick don’t output a lot of skins or hides. It’s only when you got a skinning knife that you can start to really farm for leather.
I usually only get 1 or 2 bark (if any at all) per tree when i use a pick on regular trees while also reducing the amount of wood i get on every swing that doesnt give me bark. Not a fair trade. Meanwhile on dead trees almost every swing yields bark, and whatever dry wood i get in between is just an added bonus.
There’s also a huge number of dead trees available to new players, if you know where to go looking for them. I guess on highly populated, active servers it could be an issue. That said, I think adding passive generation of bark back to the stations (let the improved one generate more) isn’t a bad idea. There’s a certain level of tedium inherent in survival games, but the approach Funcom has taken in this regard has been inconsistent.
Also it seems really weird that the trees around Shattered Springs give a little bark, but wood. They are clearly dead trees and should be giving Bark and Dry Wood.
I just camped out on a ledge overlooking the springs. So setup a steel foundry.
Whether or not the improved bench generates more bark, its main selling point should be its unique ability to craft handles for lvl 60 weapons. Making bark exclusive to a crafting station you get at lvl 57 was completely unnecessary.