You Should See Farming, Right Now.

Aetolia is proud to announce the first skill of our Agriculture skill group, Farming.

The Agriculture skill group is all about craft goods and commodity generation. You are now in charge of the economy, my friends.

Farming is the production of fruits, vegetables, produce and raw materials. What makes farming EXTRA special is that these farming plots are on a new type of map. Each city and community have designated areas housing farming plots. We will expand on plot maps in the near future. You may only own one farm plot per map on release.

Raw materials can be grown, harvested, and then processed into commodities. This is achieved through production, which is housed within your city. Materials can only be sent to your city via a caravan, which you request from your farm shed. Each one has a new designated area dedicated to material production.

• Lumber Mill | Trunks into Wood
• Tanning Room | Cow Hide into Leather
• Clothier | Cotton into cloth. Hemp into rope.

Here is the order of events when using the new system.

1. You grow the raw commodity.
2. You harvest the crop, or tree, to your shed.
3. You request a caravan to come collect raw commodities and ship them to a city for processing.
   • Players can attack your caravan to steal the unprocessed goods! Defend your hard work!
4. You are charged a gold cost for the production.
5. You pick up your processed commodities from the city warehouse once it has been refined.
6. You can then sell your commodities back to the cities. They need them to keep production rooms open, which you need to continue producing commodities.

This keeps the whole system in your hands on a fully interactive level by bringing in new ways to offset your costs by selling to the city, but the cities also make gold by charging you for production. Profits can be allocated to the trade ministry for future purchases, and around we go. It will be a delicate balance for you to find.

One problem we encountered early-on while planning the Farming system was the density of information you need to train yourself to recognize from all the different symbols and colours of your field’s text map. We had a crazy idea: Let’s make graphics for it!

Our goal was to lower the barrier for getting involved with the Farming system by using a fully OPTIONAL graphics addon to help you better understand your farm with a quick glance.

The graphic map sits as a small display on your Mudlet interface that you can drag around and position it where you please. The map will show up automatically upon entering the farmland, and disappear again when you leave.

This is only available on Mudlet right now, and we’ll be working to get a Nexus version of this available ASAP. There’s a few more complications getting something like this onto Nexus vs Mudlet, and we didn’t want to delay the release of the Farming/Production system anymore. We have no plans to expand support of this to MUD clients other than those two.