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Thanks… and thoughts on respawn rates? Like for the NPCS… or just leave alone?

We noticed a couple small camps near our mini starter base respawn pretty frequently.

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The server I play on uses 1.5 for that setting. If things respawn too quickly then consider raising this (1.5 is +50% to respawn timers, and 2.0 double rate). With a small server you can probably do 2.0 or 2.5.

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Hi @AstroCat
I would suggest to minimize the XP gains from just time spent, and crafting and harvesting.
My settings are, as others suggested too:
-damage taken from any source (monsters, NPCs) increased 1.3
-thrall damage to enemies decreased to 0.8
-thrall damage taken increased 1.2
-the whole day/night cycle longered to twice its original, with a bit of night (0.5, so doubled) added
-xp gain general halved, xp from time spent/crafting/harvesting minimized to 0.1
-resource/npc respawn timers longered to the maximum, 10

If you get used to vanilla settings, this would seem pretty rough, at lower levels in light armor, you can die from a single exile armorer if you are not careful.
Plus, you can add some rules, to make it a “challenge run”, such as no stationary bases, no T4 thralls, etc.

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I wouldn’t adjust the resource gathering, build costs, and so on, too much (if at all) on your first play through. It’s good to see the vanilla game, imho, so you are familiar with it before beginning to make alterations.

But it really does depend on your play style preferences. Some people really like the slow grind with resources, feeling like they’ve had to earn their place in the world. And some people want to have resources and levelling super quick so they can get to end-game PvP.

One thing I might consider is turning your building decay off, though. If it’s just you and a couple friends on your own private server, and you play infrequently, then you don’t want to come back 3 weeks or 3 months later and find your base gone. The decay timer prevents clutter on busy and official servers, so it has its uses. But you may want to turn it off on your own server, and only consider adding it back if you begin to notice that things are too cluttered. You can also help as you go by dismantling things you no longer wish to use (old bases, or scattered campfires and campsites that are no longer used).

With respect to day/night cycles, I like a night time that lasts long enough to make it noticeable – and to make light sources and torches and so on have some real purpose. But again, this comes down to what you’re looking for in terms of realism and immersion. There’s no right or wrong answer there.

With respect to purges, you may want to have the setting set to all three of your group being online to trigger it – at least for your very first purge ever. Once you’ve experienced one or two of these, and you have learned more about how to defend against them, then lowering the it to 2 people online, or even to 1 person being online, may be something you are comfortable with. I like the purges feature myself, but they can be unnerving if you’ve never faced one before!

Later on, once you’ve all played the game for a while – or if you decide to do new playthroughs from the beginning – then you may want to alter the XP and resource gathering rates (and thrall and pet conversion rates) to make them go by quicker. But I would try to stick with the base rates to start. Converting thralls takes a LONG time at the beginning, but there are things that help: 1) taskmaster thralls that help speed it up, 2) building more and bigger wheels of pain, and 3) catching a thrall and letting them “cook” while you’re offline. It’s slow at first, but it becomes less of an issue later on. Same thing with resource gathering, too – because the better the tools, and the better your Attribute perks are, the more resources you can gather too. It’s always important to upgrade your pick, axe, and sickle (imho) first, because those are the tools that get you your most critical building materials. To me, that’s a more satisfying way to increase your resource gathering than altering the server settings. But again, to each their own. Ultimately, it’s your game to play as you see fit.

Welcome to the forums, and have fun in the Exiled Lands!

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Thanks for the replies…

We are more of the “Some people really like the slow grind with resources, feeling like they’ve had to earn their place in the world”. We are in no hurry and will be playing casually and enjoying the “immersion” in the world. We don’t need it to be punishing though, but so far we’ve felt a nice progression with the leveling and doing the journeys. We’ve just started exploring out from our newbie base.

I think sticking to vanilla mostly so far for us has been challenging enough and fun. The respawns seem a little too quick, so perhaps a slight tweak to those.

What we are thinking now:

Player XP Rate Multiplier: 0.4 ← this is feeling right so far
Day Cycle Speed: 0.5 ← liking this so far, more of both, so they matter and add variety.

NPC Respawn Multiplier: 2 ← thinking of trying this. Might seem more immersive with a little more time before the camps repopulate? More is longer right?
Logged Out Character Remain in World: uncheck? We have it on now, don’t see any issues so far.
Drop equipment on Death: uncheck? ← this seems like cheating. :slight_smile:

Disable Building Abandonment: Checked
Disable Thrall Decay: Checked <–ok? Since just our group of 2-3?

Purge Level: 6 ← this ok, or should we lower it?
Minimum Number of Online Players: 2 ← so no Purge is not at least 2 of us
Allow Building: Checked ← this ok?

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Looks like a pretty decent first start to me. All those things look good actually.

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We discovered when fiddling with settings that some are multiplicative and some are exponential (or so it seemed). We wanted to increase NPC respawn timers because, on our server initially, they were respawning before we’d even managed to get all the way through one larger camp. We increased it by quite a few degrees but respawns were taking forever. We ended up changing it to around 1.2 which I think is about 17 minutes or so; enough that we can get through and actually loot, but not so much that the area stays cluttered with bodies for long periods of play time. It’s something we might still tweak later, but this is one of those settings that small changes make bigger differences.

I much prefer the settings that are intuitive on how exactly they impact slider they represent. (Just tell us the minutes, like with purge sliders!)

Speaking of purges, 6 is max difficulty. With that, you have the chance to get purges with the max number of waves (varies depending on purge type) and higher number of enemies per wave. Enemies will also have a higher damage multiplier against your structures. You won’t always get a level 6 purge (if your purge is set to 3, you can get purges between levels 1-3, and if 6 all levels have possibility of spawning). It might be worth trying a lower level purge for your first one or two, as Narelle suggested, just to see how it works. Also, where you build influences what kind of purges you can get and some are more punishing or less fun than others. Keep in mind that there is a section along most of Noob River that won’t spawn purges at all, if you’re playing on the Exiled Lands map.

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Yeah we tried 2.0 for respawn but it seems really long, gonna try your 1.2.

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Me and my other half are playing with some friends and we have reduced the xp gain a lot so progression is much slower. Since we build much we have set the farming rate to x2. This gives us a little boost but doesn´t make farming obsolete. I have also increased daytime lenght and set the time for the wheel of pain to 0.3. So we do not have to wait for hours for our thralls to be done.

@Xevyr mods I can recomment.

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I am going to move XP down to 0.3, we are almost 20 after just a few days of play. So far harvest at vanilla has been ok, but we’ll see as we start making T2 and higher stuff for our 2nd base we just started.

Our server is 24/7 even though only 2 people mostly. So for now leaving timers at vanilla since it will run overnight. But if it gets too annoying maybe we’ll tweak as needed.

We are happy with Day Cycle Speed: 0.5, days and nights “feel” right at 1 hour total.

And yes totally using @Xevyr mods. :slight_smile: Our current modest mod list:

Frequent_meteors.pak
Actionbar_Scale.pak
Simple_Minimap.pak
ArmorStats_in_Bench.pak
IdeaPoet_AutoLightsOff.pak
SoundFxOverhaul.pak
Inventory_compactor.pak
CustomMusicAddOn.pak

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Told you 0.2x is roughly where it feels normal :smiley: Things just line up… but 0.3 is fine too, as long as it’s less than half the original it doesn’t feel too bad.

Hmm :thinking: I could recommend adding Proximity Party to that as it was designed for similar situations where a few people play together with each having a follower or two.
What it does is shows the healthbars of anything around you that is part of your clan (players / thralls / pets)
Like this:

image
image1920×1080 264 KB

You can configure how many entries are shown or the detection radius around your character as well as move it anywhere on the screen

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The most important things to keep in mind when it starts to seem like building and crafting costs are getting too expensive:

  1. Your tools (especially picks, axes, and sickels) need to be upgraded to the higher tier as soon as possible (iron, steel, hardened steel, star metal, and so on), AND fitted with the best tool upgrade mods – to ensure that you are getting the most resources for your time.

  2. Your crafting benches need to also be upgraded as soon as possible, to reduce the materials costs associated with making key items (especially the most common building blocks, like shaped wood, iron and steel reinforcements, insulated wood, stone consolidants, steel-fire, and so on). It used to be the case that crafting thralls reduced a lot of the building costs, but now it is primarily done by the higher-tier crafting benches themselves. So the flip side of gathering more resources with better tools, is needing to use less resources by upgrading your workbenches. In a lot of ways, the upgraded bench is more important than the crafting thrall you can put into it – although thralls still do bestow benefits in others ways (usually by unlocking recipes you might otherwise not have access to, or by speeding up production).

  3. If you’re going to be doing a lot of resource gathering and building, and not a lot of fighting adventuring, for a given period of time – then re-spec your Attributes to max out your Expertise perks. This will also give you bonuses to resource gathering, carry limit, and (with the final perk) unlimited encumbrance. This makes everything so much easier, because you gather faster (or get more rare ingredients) and no longer need to worry about weight limits. You can always re-specc again later on when you want to go adventuring, thrall-capturing, dungeon-crawling. But for gathering and building, maxing out your Expertise is super convenient. (And at level 20, which is roughly where you indicated you were at, you can max out ONE Attribute – so you can already get unlimited carry weight at your current level. Just use Yellow Lotus potions to re-spec… it’s not overly-burdensome to do it, and it also allows you to re-do your Feats/Knowledge at the same time.)

So if you pay attention to all three of these things, and keep upgrading when your level allows you to unlock the next tool tiers, or the next bench tier, then you should have no problem with the vanilla resource settings. (And on your own private server, you probably have less to worry about in terms of raiders stealing your stuff!)

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