https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm8l2p7t1U0
While I'm somewhat surprised this has recieved so little attention, I understand it coming right on the tail of the March 4th Community Stream has oversaturated the Pantheon news cycle. Let's talk about some of the things said here.
Economy: Harvested resources will be bulky. As seen on Minus' stream on Feb 4th, chunks of iron stacked to only 5. This might be a common trait harvested resources have, which can be particularly onerous since it took 3 chunks of iron to create a single ingot. (@Nephele if we're keeping the 3:1 ratio, please consider having chunks stack to 6.) Furthermore, not only will weight be an important measure in limiting inventory space, weight reduction bags will be valuable and will likely never reduce weight by 100%. (Suggestion: Monster dropped 100% WR bag with significantly fewer slots than bags of a comparable level. As few as 6-8 slots might be ideal. Flavor as a portable hole? Too silly?)
He's stated that there must be a way for old items to leave the economy and 'hand me down weapons' don't dominate the markets. Salvaging will be one way this is accomplished, but not the only way. He states there is an as-of-yet unrevealed way that a pure Adventurer will be able to destroy an item for a benefit other than cash (faction maybe?).
The environment will be an important foe in the harvester's quest. There will always be nodes of all types in safer areas for the harvester that wants to relax, but the rarest and most powerful ingredients will introduce a level of risk and be difficult to find. Imagine nodes guarded by monsters, nodes in high up places that only a skilled climber can access, and long harvesting times that run the risk of wandering beasts taking umbrage with your presence. Later in the interview, he mentions Harvesters can choose to harvest a node more quickly with a reduced chance to find rarer materials, or take their time and run a greater risk of an enemy wandering around. Nodes will be of different sizes, and the largest nodes will be able to be harvested by multiple crafters at once. (on Discord, I asked about Skinners and Boss monsters. He replied 'how many you got?')
Harvesting skill will directly affect how long it takes to harvest a node, scaling on the 'intended difficulty' of it (this feature is not yet implemented). Imagine a harvest taking multiple minutes due to your insufficient skill, and being struck by any creature requires you to start again. Resource nodes will often appear in dungeons, so if you plan on harvesting there make sure you have patient friends if your skill is not up to par! He once again confirms that all harvesting professions will require a tool to be equipped to be used, though the UI elements and ease of swapping to and from your tools have not been finalized. He mentions he does not want it to be required to hunt through your bags to find your tool and equip them manually.
There will be a progression in resources. Some materials will only appear in higher level areas. Despite this, many alloys will take iron, so even a master craftsman can find themselves picking up the ore placed into the market by a low level miner. One metal Nephele revealed is blood iron, a material made when normal iron is refined with an Alchemist created temper. This, of course, introduces an enormous variety of potential materials into the world where any given metal could possibly be modified by any of several Alchemist tempers.
Jewelcrafting will not use merchant bought materials, as happened in Everquest. Nuggets of silver were obtained from the same ore that chunks of iron were smelted from in Fortress DeViare. (Reminder: 'nuggets' denote precious metals smelted into bars used in jewelcraft, 'chunks' denote harder metals smelted into ingots used in blacksmithing) Furthermore, he confirms that Fishing will be an important skill for some Jewelcrafters as pearls can be found from Fished nodes. He further confirms that where you start and where you spend your time will heavily impact what harvesting skills would be useful to you as a crafter (a previous bean is that Dwarven Coldark Steel can be woven into cloth, meaning Mining would be useful to a Dwarven Outfitter as an example)
Shematics are the general term for the 'recipe' portion of a craft. They may be molds, patterns, plans, etc. depending on the item. Schematics, when examined, will reveal what is required for the item. A dagger, for example, would reveal it requires a dagger blade, a hilt, and an optional component (a previously revealed optional component is a celestium shard, such as the celestium shard of fire dropped by the boss in Cohh's stream. It would confer a fire proc to the weapon.) A dagger blade mold will reveal it requires two ingots of metal. Schematics may vary widely in what they require, and the number of optional components it can take on.
Common schematics are purchased from merchants, but also can be quest items given by NPCs (such as the schematic for a replacement wagon wheel, I would imagine). Every profession will have uncommon and rare schematics that vary in accessibility. (previously, an example of an uncommon schematic might be a stronger version of a merchant bought one, only unlocked at a certain level of faction with the merchant). The schematic system gives the crafter an enormous amount of control over the finished product due to the flexibility of the input.
The design goal is to make each crafting class a full experience. Ideally, the player will feel the same about making an alt to do another crafting profession the same way a pure adventurer would make an alt to try out a new class, rather than feeling like they can't experience the full crafting system without making alts. Gathering resources and workshop time for crafters will be equal in the amount of effort and richness of the experience, though they will not be equal in amount of time it takes to do them. Crafting content will include the same array of quests an adventurer should expect, from small quests to large quests that have an impact on the game world.
The Mastery system the adventurers use to improve their abilities will also be implemented for both crafting and harvesting, though the precise implementation has barely been discussed, much less decided upon. They are focuing on making sure the base system is completed first. There will definitely be special tools and equipment implemented for both gathering and crafting. They are looking into these tools having a durability system, but no final decision has been made.
Mostly, Nephele doesn't want Crafting, Harvesting, and Adventuring to be seen as seperate entities. They really are all one game and they feed into one another. He gave an example of a potential obstacle in a dungeon of a drawbridge with a 'finicky' mechanism. A sufficiently skilled crafter could fix it, but this is not the only way past the obstacle. A Druid might create a vine bridge instead, or a Summoner might create a ladder on the far wall.
Boats will most likely not be in at the launch of the game. Nephele really wants boats to be in the game, but they need to have a reason to exist beyond 'boats are cool'. Gameplay associated with them needs to be developed before boats can be implemented.
Climate and time of day will absolutely impact the way resource nodes spawn. Nephele stated he wants to have weather impact nodes as well, but he is not promising it is possible to implement that the way the current system is set up. He mentions an idea that floated around the forums that involves random events affecting node spawns, but again he can't promise anything.
Specialization for crafters is another thing that final decisions have yet to be made. He, personally, has not yet decided if it would be better to have specializations to be narrow or broad. This is the 'Mastery' system for crafters he mentioned earlier in the interview and it will be seperate from the Adventuring Mastery system. He promises that any choices to make early in the game will not lock you in to anything you can't take back, you will not be locked into a specialization until the mid-game at the earliest.
Item durability in general is still being discussed. He promises that if they do end up implementing durability in items that crafters will be able to repair. There will certainly be broken items (available as loot) that requires a Crafter to repair it to functionality. Usually this will be a piece of an item that will be used as a component in a recipe (obsidian hilt?!?!?).
Nephele wants there to be a reason to use lower level consumables. To do this, he wants to avoid level-based progression of consumable recipes. Alchemists and Provisioners will have some, limited ability to make things in the field rather than back at the workshop. This will likely include some penalty in effectiveness, but if the pick-up group wants to dive into the Cavern of Burning, an Alchemist doesn't necessarily need to go back to town to create a handful of Fire Resist potions.
Vendors are unfinished. One feature Nephele wants to implement is to have some vendors have 'preferred items' that they pay a player more for while paying very little for other items. Flooding the market of a town with a specific item will reduce the prices merchants are willing to pay for them. At the moment, Vendors don't have a limit on how many items they can be sold, so 'dumpster diving' is not possible since they just show all the items they've been sold at the moment.
At the moment, Housing is a bit of a contentious issue in Pantheon. He doesn't want to include Housing just for the sake of it, and he wants it to enable new forms of social gameplay. Guild Halls are a definite no as of now. He dislikes how insular it makes Guilds, and wants them to engage the community instead of hiding in their Guild Hall.
Random things
Finally, in the dev roundtable there's a really excellent conversation about itemization and progression starting at around the 47:30 mark. It's worthy of its own topic, to be completely frank, and I am thinking about writing a PantheonPlus article about it instead of making a forum topic.
might I suggest the keep the "camping" of nodes to a minium is to have nodes only show up to people with said skill and the approriate level to harvest said node. I feel if you do not have the skill to harvest the node then how would you know what to look for to harvest. I mean all of us can look outside and see many veriaties of plants but without knowledge of the plants how do you know what that plant is? Same can be said about most any harvesting skill as well, without knowing what iron looks like in the ground how would one know what it looks like to get it? Once harvested anyone can help carry it. I am not sure if this was an idea but perhaps have wagons in the game for harvesters only so that they have options to transport larger quanties of materials. Each material may require other items in the wagon to be transported in a crate for example for ore, sacks for plants and such.
