Hello everyone, I've gone ahead and catalogued the library on my new librarian character, Majes dra. Made for this occasion.
I made sure to grab any books dropped by new characters and sort everything else on their appropriate piles to get as accurate of an idea as possible
To give the short version of it there's currently 24 skill disciplines that are missing novice books.
Part 1: What's missing.
To give the long version, here's those skill disciplines and exactly what books they're missing.
Discord link to a more compressed list of missing books (couldn't embed)
Wow, that's a lot of books missing! Out of these dire categories, there's 38 books missing. That's... A lot!
But okay, we're just in a bit of a crisis and if we work together we can probably get out of it right?
Part 2: The cost.
To get everyone up to speed, this is a quick rundown of how new skillbooks are created/obtained.
1. The easy way, people scrounge in the library and rarely find a random book. (The chance is far too low for this to replenish the library though!)
2. Writing a book as a papercrafter, the process is as follows.
- Get materials from scroungers, brewers, and forest crafters.
- Find someone with the appropriate skill to dictate you the contents of the skill book.
- Write it down!
However, the -RAW- cost of a singular book.
- 10.5 bark. (10 paper, pen, book)
- 5 inkberries. (ink cup)
- 1 feather. (pen)
- 2 tree sap. (book)
This would put the cost of replacing all the books in the library that are missing at.. 399 bark strips exactly. (38 books)
Novice skills make up the majority of these, and replacing just novice books so people can get started is... 241,5 bark strips. (23 books)
That's also assuming the papercrafter is skilled. Failure costs an extra bark strip in the form of a pen, which is always consumed on crafting! Feathers are underused as is, so that shouldn't matter.
Yes, this is a lot, but frankly the problem has probably been ignored a little too long. However, I do think the system can also be a bit too punishing.
Part 3: Feedback/Solutions.
- Scrapping books.
I went ahead and sacrificed 2 old expert resourcefulness books. A skill pretty much nobody has close to maxed, as far as I can tell.
I got two paper once. The other book gave nothing, being presumably.. Too old to yield any useable paper.
Now, we can probably determine a few skills that can be curbed a little as a community, but that will probably only yield the paper for about 5 new books, being VERY generous here, as that would entail scraping 50 books, since most library books are old and falling apart.
- General resource gathering.
This might be hard to organise, but I suppose we could make gathering parties every now and then. If everyone donates 3 bark strips and an inkberry or two, this might go quick. But it'd still be a process of weeks as the island likely needs to replenish all of that.
- Slight skill book rework.
I do think it's not very fun to be a new player in the current environment. You have to repeatedly find someone that can teach you a skill. For most people that don't overly minmax, I assume that's 3 skill levels per lesson (novice an apprentice tier). Which comes down to 4 lessons with 90 minute intervals in between to reach the next tier. Meaning you have to wait 6 in game hours with perfect follow-through to even reach apprenticeship level.
New players generally have only a couple options for money making, albeit most critters are happy to help them with free lessons and on rare occasions, book donations/lending. But if they want to help get a book created they have to find a scrounger, probably scrounge for about two hours, and likely not have enough bark for even a single book. Bark and logs are also already needed for just about everything in this game, so the guiding scrounger may not be willing to donate their finds. This is if the new player can even figure out to do this.
It's also not really fair when many older players have always had skill books available to them, or they were the only novice, so making a new book or getting taught by a limited amount of teachers wasn't that hard. Notably, they'd usually have an apprenticeship book available after being a novice.
- Removed the mechanical gameplay suggestions as those were already addressed by Ethos.