Mining, Romancing, and Getting Backpacks - #MedievalDynasty - Year 1 Summer
Hello everyone and welcome back! Last time we finished off Spring by covering how to make money and use merchants, how to get started with farming and making fertilizers, as well as showing how hunting works. This would be enough for Racimir to keep himself fed and have the means to acquire goods that he can't make himself. You could play this subsistence hunter style for as long as you wanted and that's something the game entirely permits. But there's also much more to be done in the game so we'll proceed to showing it. When we wake at the beginning of Summer the notifications for the crafting skill upgrades and the quest completion pops up. Upgrading houses reduces the damage taken over time and the need for firewood.
And we once again choose to improve our smithing type skills. It pays to specialize becuase of skill synergies. Metal goods fetch high prices. The berries in our inventory lost 50% condition and will fully rot next season. In the past I've had issues with food items disappearing when dropped on the floor, which is why I use this method of rotting items in my inventory. But it seems that in recent versions you can reliably drop them on the floor in the resource storage building and the barn and they'll rot immediately when the season changes.
Different seasons may call for different clothing. We received some from Uniegost as a quest reward and found the rest near our house. This is particularly important for winter and we'll be wearing these when it comes around. Summer may benefit from heat resistant clothing at some points but you generally only require specialized clothing in winter.
The cabbages we planted last spring mature as the season passes and are now ready to harvest. This is a simple matter of going over each plot square and pressing the appropriate key. The process will be the same for other vegetables and you get both the vegetable itself and seeds. It helps to place your food storage building close to the fields so there's less time wasted in hauling it there. Once the harvest is done, you can double check by looking at the management menu.
Any squares you missed should show up as ready to harvest but there's none in our case. We can also use this menu to look at our buildings and check their condition. Buildings degrade over time and over time the damage will become visible. At that point you'll need to use a hammer and materials to repair holes in the building. Right now there's
nothing to do but you'll get an indication in this menu if buiildings require repair. We obtained 128 cabbages and 30 seeds. That's 8 cabbages per plot on average and that amount of cabbbages should be enough for Racimir to keep himself fed for the forseeable future. So nourishment is simply not a concern if
you take the time to plant a small plot like we have. 30 seeds is about twice the amount we originally planted so we should never have to purchase cabbage seeds going forward. The same applies to any other kind of plant, you always get more seeds than you used in planting. It's worth noting how the food we stored in the container degraded as the season changed. Different foods degraded by different amounts, but due to being in the food storage chest the worst was a 12.5% degradation. This means that even the most perishable food will last two years. Comparatively, the unripe berries that we deliberately kept in our inventory dropped by 50% condition. The food storage building is already showing its value
and I'm sure you'll agree that it was worth taking the time to build it immediately. In comparison to vegetables, grains require a significantly greater investment. I won't go into it in-depth right now but at the very least you'll need build a barn, and if you also want to avoid spending money then a smithy and a workshop would also be needed for the things you need to harvest and cook grains.
Grains are much better overall, and flax that you process into linen is a key requirement for many higher tech items, but the process is highly involved. Right now we just need to make sure Racimir has enough eat and cabbages are good enough for that. Aside from the labour and time involved, the only thing we need to worry about is making sure we have enough fertilizer on hand and we've discussed how to secure a steady supply towards the end of the videos covering spring. If there was sufficient need we could be plant a second crop of cabbages but that's not necessary at this stage. You should note that mushrooms are not available to harvest.
The only wild plants are medicinal herbs. And as we mentioned previously berry bushes that have been harvested have nothing come summer. This is a small but very nice touch from the developers. But here's a bush with ripe berries. You can see the purple spots from the ripe berries,
which is different from what bushes with unripe berries looked like and is another nice little visual detail. Harvesting a few shows that they give 0.5 food and 1 water per berry. So they're ok during summer as a source of water in inland areas but since they're only available during summer you should be prepared with a waterskin or something similar anyway. Newer versions have added a new animal, the lynx.
It seems to be about the size of foxes and behave similarly. The quest that brings us here will need us to provide 40 logs. Summer is one of the best times to do these quests because after harvesting whatever crops have ripened there's not much you *have* to do. Spring is the planting season for everything, so the primary focus is on planting and harvesting. Once your farming scales up you'll be spending significant parts of the season doing that. For example, a 12 by 12 field will take around a day and night to harvest, fertilize, and plant.
You'll be wanting more fields if you use linen for regular clothing manufacture. Alternatively there's mushrooms that are only available in Spring so you might want to gather those. The same applies to a lesser extent in Autumn because once you have animals you'll want to make sure you have Rye to make animal fodder and Autumn is a perfect season for Rye. There's also unique mushrooms in Autumn, so if you intend to cook mushroom based dishes regularly then you'll need to gather enough of them.
In contrast, Summer has very little that requires your attention. You might have to harvest the Spring crop and you might want to plant a few cabbages but that should leave you most of the season free. It's a good time to travel around to sell goods, purchase animals, recruit villagers and romance a prospective wife. Travelling before you have a horse can be quite time consuming and you need to take that into account.
The reward for Uniegost's quest is some dishes that you can't make yourself. Unfortunately that doesn't include the recipes. You'll have to pay for that once you reach the right tech levels. Doing some of Alwin's quests will give rewards like onion seeds so it's worth doing a few. Just as a side comment on quests, don't be in too much of a hurry to do them other than speaking to Sambor and getting the fur hood and fur boots. Everything else is optional so don't prioritize quests above having a functional village.
Aside from the set quests, NPCs will have random quests every season. All will give dynasty reputation and some kind of reward. Some will give tech points so keep them in mind later on when you're trying to unlock new techs.
Bear in mind that these random quests will automatically fail at the end of the season and you'll lose dynasty reputation so don't be too keen to taken on these random quests. If you find yourself needing to provide items that are beyond your technology level then remember that you can use money to acquire these items. The main quest requires us to do three quests for NPCs and flirt with someone.
The game is based on creating a dynasty. When Racimir dies his heir will take over. And for that you need an heir. That means you need to get a wife and the sooner you get one the better. There's several Diplomacy perks that help during dialogues. The key one is Empathy because it allows you to see the personality type of NPCs, but you can detect that by paying attention to responses. Romeo helps with making each flirt
have more effect on attraction but it's not one I tend to favour because you're not going to be romancing people often enough to make it worth spending a perk. The conversation mini-game is now reserved for flirting only. In the past it used to be the case that you could speak to anybody and recruiting villagers required you to gain a certain amount of relationship with them. So you could gain diplomatic skill by just talking to villagers, but now you generally gain skill by selling goods. Summer and Winter
are good seasons to go around selling your goods because ther'es more free time then. Another change is that you can attempt conversations daily instead of once a season. This is a significant improvement because previously you had to guess someone's personality and it could easily take years in the game to be able to recruit or romance someone. Personally I think that it would be better to have the old system of being able to speak to everyone to befriend them, but keep the new perks that make it easier to detect someone's personality and the daily conversations.
When it comes to romancing you can only flirt with recruitable NPCs. My favourite wife used to be Alina the sheperdess becaue by the time you married her her farming skills were quite advanced and she was one of the younger NPCs you could marry. Whether you're looking to recruit them as workers or partners, the priority should be on recruiting them young. The maximum skill of the random NPCs seems to be capped at 3 and they can only improve
via working so having as much time to improveme them as possible should be the most important consideration when recruiting. A 19 year old with skill 1 vs a 21 year old with skill 3 is a matter of personal preference but vs a 31 year old you should always recruit the younger NPC. Luckily Kunegunda has some good skills and is on the younger side.
There's two ways to gain affection. You have to either choose the dialogue options or give gifts that match their personality. The better the match the more attraction you gain. Asking a few probing questions will give you some information on them. In this case she likes having fun and isn't too much into hard work. The second answer reinforces that she's into interesting experiences. Again she prefers avoiding hard work, is into hunting, and likes to have a bit of a drink.
You can only have so many conversations each time you flirt. The conversation can also end sooner if you choose an answer they dislike a lot. You can flirt with as many people as you like until you actually marry someone so take the opportunity to do that and learn the conversation mini-game. There's a cave north west of our town that's safe to access and the best location for any mining you'll be doing. We can find a pickaxe outside but you can easily make more with just 4 stone and one log for a stone pickaxe.
Mineral deposits will show up as rocks with flecks of metal on them. Early on you can only mine copper and tin. You'll need smithy tech levels and at least one smithy building to smelt ore into metal bars and to forge with those metals. Smithy 1 gives you access to copper tools but unlocking smithy two allows you to smelt bronze from copper and tin bars. Once you unlock the mine in the building tech tree you'll be able to construct mines that will give you access to iron ore deposits.
Salt is the last resource you can get from mines. Obviously you can't make salt tools, instead you can use it in a hunting lodge to salt meat in order to preserve it for longer. It's not possible to automate mining until you unlock mine tech so you'll have to do it manually early on, but you get rocks from each deposit so you should have more than enough be able to easily make as many picks as you need. One of the biggest limiters on you is carrying capacity. Regardless of whether you spend your time hunting, mining, or farming everything involves carrying something and often you want to maximize your carrying capacity to avoid having to make multiple trips.
Equipping Pouches and Backpacks allows you to do that. They become available to craft via the sewing tech levels and are crafted at the sewing hut, with the largest becoming available at sewing tech level 3. The second approach is just to buy them with money. For most items I recommend crafting things yourself but for those items that you only need to craft a few times or aren't available yet it's actually more cost effective to just buy them.
A large pouch and a large backpack are the perfect example of that. You'll only need to buy them once and together they'll cost only about a thousand gold, which is less than the cost of the plans even if you had access to the tech to make them. You should make it a priority to get them as soon as possible. Later on the same applies to saddles and mount paraphenalia once you unlock and build a stable. After a few days of crafting and selling to expand your carrying capacity, you'll have progressed your crafting tech levels a bit.
The tavern gives us access to recipes you can cook from plants and meat. I've talked about why I prefer cabbages previously and for me that means that I wouldn't want to buy any recipes other than pottage because I won't be growing any other crops until later on so it's a waste of money to buy recipes I won't use. I also avoid building the workshop until level 2 because the wooden products don't sell for enough to warrant a separate building for that.
If you need bowls and plates for cooking it's actually quite viable to buy them because they sell for 6 gold each and you get 10 uses out of each before they break. We're also pretty close to unlocking smithy 1 and that's something you should be aiming for because as we mentioned it when talking about mines it allows you to process ores into tools. In building tech we've unlocked the woodshed that allows us to automate logging and allows us to make planks. Planks will become important once we unlock simple houses because they're necessary to craft the highest level roofs. That's also when you'll want to start recruiting villagers other than your wife.
The hunting lodge is not important at this stage because of our cabbage farming and clothing can't be made until we unlock sewing tech. You could build one for salting meat but it's not that critical. The barn is most useful for grains but it also allows you to make your own fertilizer so it's something to consider building in spring next year when the planting season comes around.
Resource storages aren't necessary until you bring NPCs to your village. That's where they get firewood from and where materials and tools are taken from and placed into once they have jobs. That includes your wife, so while you're increasing the attraction with your prospective partner you should work on having at least one resource storage in your village. In my case i go for two. One is in the village itself, but the second one is outside the mine we spoke of earlier. The reason is that resource and food storages have a global shared inventory. Anything you put in one shows up in all others.
That mine is the only location where you can put a resource storage right outside the cave so it's perfect for teleporting resources to your village without having to physically carry them. So you save yourself work and increase your storage capacity at the same time. The other critical building is the smithy. It's necessary to make sickles so they're a prerequisite for farming grains. Copper knives also sell for about triple of what stone knives do so once you have a smithy you shouldn't be worrying about money after that.
All in all smithys are a must. The smithy has three workstations. The workbench allows the crafting of wooden and stone weapons. You can make many of the same bows and spears that a hunting lodge allows you to make so that means that a hunting lodge is optional if you have a smithy. The anvil allows you to craft metal tools from bars, while the forge is used to smelt ores that you mine into bars. The ratio is two ores to get one bar. As I mentioned before you don't want to buy every recipe available unless you have money coming out of your ears. Most metal tools require metal bars plus logs and sticks. Weapons often require linen or wool thread so keep in mind that cultivating flax or keeping sheep will be something that you have to do at some point.
A critical recipe is copper sickles. You could use stone sickles but both require the smithy and copper tools last longer so there's no real benefit of using stone sickles. The same argument goes for copper shovels vs wooden shovels.
Knives give you the best money per copper bar so if you're looking to sell metal tools for money that recipe is also a must. A lot of your decisions on what copper tool recipes to buy will be dependand on what you plan to do with bronze tools. Bronze bars take copper and tin bars, so it takes double the amount of work to get the materials for the same bronze tool compared to a copper tool. So it's not obviously better to use bronze tools.
It's perfectly viable to go straight from copper to iron tools if you want and personally I tend to sell bronze knives but rely on copper tools unless I have a lot of spare metal bars. Summer together with Winter is one of the seasons where you have a lot of time so it's the perfect time to do activities like selling and recruiting that require a lot of travel. We discussed how to flirt with a prosepctive wife, significantly increased our carrying capacity, and introduced how mining and smithing works in the game. A bit more preparation and flirting and you'll be ready to start a family.
2021-09-23 06:30
