Artisan buildings

Each crafting and processing profession has an associated artisan building that players must construct and upgrade to give them access to place that profession's workstations.

If you want your Freehold to play a part in crafting and processing, artisan buildings will be something you’ll want to make room for on your Freehold. Since the highest levels of processing can only happen on Freeholds, having artisan buildings that benefit processing, and the stations associated with those artisan buildings, can make your Freehold an important component of the world’s economic chain. Constructing an artisan building will allow players to place the profession stations related to the profession of that building, and those stations can be placed anywhere on your Freehold where the surface allows. Profession stations do not need to be placed within the artisan building specifically. In addition, artisan buildings provide their bonuses to all stations on the Freehold.

Artisan buildings are freehold or node buildings that give general benefits to the freehold or node and allow the placement of workstations for artisan professions.

• Processing stations.
  • Freeholds are the only place that master and grandmaster processing is available.
• Crafting stations.
  • Players can craft up to journeyman level on freeholds.
• Freehold building blueprints are required for the construction of artisan buildings on freeholds.
• Currently freeholds have a combined maximum total of six artisan and business buildings that can be placed in addition to a homestead.
  • A minimum of two artisan buildings will be required to max out a particular profession.
  • Maxing the freehold building tech trees for that profession will grant access to all four of its workstations.
• Artisan and business buildings require permits and may incur upkeep costs.

Processing workstations

Lumbersmiths processing station.

Processing stations are of course a necessary component of taking gatherables into usable crafted goods essentially to fulfill what recipes require in order to make items. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-2 metalworking processing station in action.

We're trying to marry the visuals with what's actually going on with the station. So, if you have a job queued and you're trying to do errands throughout the node, or in your freehold or whatever, [you] should be able to look at the station and know what's going on with it: So you know he's there working and once he's done he's going to stop and you can be like, okay there's stuff ready to pick up and have some visuals associated with that. So, as much as we can have stuff rooted in world instead of throwing a bunch of UI in the player's face, that's something that we're trying to do and is important to us. – Kory Rice

Processing stations are workstations that are used to process raw materials into processed goods (crafting materials) at nodes or on freeholds.

• Artisan buildings are required to be placed on freehold (and node) plots to unlock placement of processing stations.
  • Each processing profession has four processing stations that unlock as players progress through their artisan building tech trees.

Each processing profession will have four stations; and the stations will come online as you progress through the profession. Each one of those stations will make goods that are immediately useful to the economy, to crafters, to other processors; and each processing station will build on itself and into the other stations. – Kory Rice

• Master and grandmaster processing can only take place on freeholds.

• Processing stations require fuel to process the required grade of materials.
  • Players can mix and match different fuels to fulfill the fuel requirements of a recipe.

Processing as it stands for Alpha-2's implementation is that there is a certain amount of prep work that's required first for the industry-specific component, which is the building. That prep work might be finding a certain amount of lumber to light the fire in kiln or whatever, to a certain temperature in order for you to process a certain grade of ore; and that grade of ore being malleable then into an ingot; and that produces that ingot so-to-speak. Now, in that process there's a gathering component, there's a preparatory phase, there is a time-related component. – Steven Sharif

• Processing stations have queue slots that allow jobs to be queued at that station. Processing jobs are processed sequentially for all players in freeholds. Processing jobs in nodes are processed sequentially per player, but concurrently with other player's jobs.
  • Processing animations in freeholds are visible to all players (as there is a single shared processing queue). Processing station animations in nodes relate to the processing activity of each player individually, as each queue is personalized per player.

Q: Can you provide more details in regards to the design philosophy behind why it's a queue system for freeholds but not for nodes?

A: On the freehold, processing can achieve the highest levels of processing. That's where the highest levels of processing occur. Nodes can only go up to a certain level of processing. Now we want to be able to throttle the amount of resources that can be processed at any given time in response to the fluctuation and flows of the economy. So, we want to make sure that the economy is a bigger ship when turning than being able to immediately start processing everything at once and get new resources out as the flow of supply and demand changes within the world. And because- again that's at the highest levels of processing; and you're sharing the available queues that exist at those stations. It's going to take time and it's going to take a long time for the higher level materials. – Steven Sharif

• There will also be time-related and gameplay elements that require the player to interact with processing stations. These elements act to throttle the introduction of processed materials from raw gatherables into the economy.

There's also possibilities that the machine you're using itself has some type of gameplay layer- should the kiln get overheated, and you have to throw some water on it or something. There are elements there in that process that we want to mimic this gameplay opportunity for players to interact; and not just be a time-sink. But time-sink is also a component of it as well, because that's the throttle for the introduction of processed materials from raw gatherables into the economy. – Steven Sharif

• Processing times, yields, queue times, and job sizes can increase based on node progression, service building upgrades, node policies, and relics.

That's going to be very important as you get to very late game processed materials that are required. Because some of these things might have days to process within a station, but if you have spent the time and done the work to advance that processing station you could cut that down considerably, perhaps even greater than 50 percent; and that's going to have a significant impact on your ability to either control markets or to create goods. – Steven Sharif

• Processing stations are distinct from crafting workstations that are used to craft finished goods.

• The developers are considering a decay system for processing stations similar to item decay for gear.

Q: Do processing stations wear out over time? Do they have to be repaired?

A: That's something that we're still discussing internally. It is coded in such a way where it's an easy variable for us to change that. There are material components that are necessary to feed the machines to keep them up and running, or it could be based on how you interact with the fuel components. If you overheat- overcharge with fuel, that can create like a system degrade similar to your armor decay, which then you have to feed materials in order to rebuild maintenance-wise. Right now it is not implemented. With that in mind, the only maintenance required is going to be through taxation. And depending on the number of permits that you have placed on the freehold will increase the amount of taxes that are necessary to be paid for the freehold. – Steven Sharif

List of processing workstations

• Apprentice Crushing Station
• Farms
• Fishery
• Freehold farms
• Metalworking stations
• Mills
• Novice Debarking Station
• Stables

Crafting workstations

Crafting a Nightblade weapon at a weaponsmithing station in the Winstead node in Alpha-2.

There's going to be a number of different types of selectables that you can incorporate as part of the crafting process; each of them having unique results as part of the stat block for the weapon, but also increasing the quality, predicated on the quality of the selectable that you're contributing. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-2 armor smithing station work-in-progress UI.

Crafting stations (also referred to as Crafting benches) are workstations located on freeholds or within nodes.

• Recipes have slots for required and selectable crafting materials. Adding higher rarity selectable materials increases the rarity of the crafted item. Choosing different selectable items can also result in crafted items with different statblocks and unique properties.

• Different tiers of crafting stations represent the quality of the items that can be crafted.
  • Higher tier crafting stations are unlocked with node progression.
  • Players can only craft up to journeyman level on freeholds.
  • Upper-tier crafting benches within a node are accessible by its citizens.
  • Legendary crafting benches are present in the Academy unique building of Metropolis (stage 6) Scientific nodes.

• Crafting stations can pull inventory from a player's personal storage and warehouse storage from the node that the crafting station is in.

• There is no limit to the number of players that can use a crafting station at the same time.

• Crafting stations are distinct from processing stations, which are used to process raw materials into processed goods (crafting materials) at nodes or on freeholds.

Q: Can crafting stations be mobilized / moved and can they be placed anywhere in the world?

A: It depends on the crafting station. There are going to be different tiers of crafting stations that represent the quality of item you're looking to create within that specific profession. There's going to be crafting stations that can be utilized by players within their freeholds and then crafting stations that are resigned only to the development of particular nodes, within particular areas, or particular buildings... There's a wide variety of those things to make it a more dynamic experience and something that caveat how players decide to build the world and what the value of those things are. – Steven Sharif

List of crafting workstations

• Armor smithing stations
• Hideworks
• Laboratories
• Ship workstations
• Smithies
• Stoneworks
• Textile mills
• Weapon smithing stations
• Woodshops

Freehold building tech trees

Freehold building tech trees allow freehold owners to specialize their freehold buildings.

• Freehold building tech trees are building-specific.
• Freehold building tech trees can be reset/respecced for a cost.
• Maxing the tech trees for a particular profession will grant access to all four of its workstations.

In order to fully spec out a particular tree of one profession, you will need in most cases, at a minimum, two of the buildings for that particular profession. And that also grants you access to have all four of the workstations that that profession's building provides; and then you can spec into those territories. So you're occupying additional levels of permits in order to achieve that broad spectrum mastery over that particular profession, as opposed to specializing within the mastery of that profession. – Steven Sharif

Freehold building destructibility

Player housing designs and decorations are retained and can be placed again later if the housing is destroyed during a node siege.

• Blueprints for homestead, business, and artisan freehold buildings, including progression and upgrades, are returned to the player.
• A possible design idea is for items such as furnishings to be boxed in crates that are accessible inside the new home.

List of artisan building skins

Cosmetic freehold building skins for artisan buildings.

• These skins can be placed on any artisan building, regardless of type.
• Artisan cosmetic skins go on artisan buildings and not the individual profession stations themselves.

• 

  Altar of Silence

• 

  Altar of the Venerated

• 

  Boundless Basin

• 

  Dünthol’s Forge

• 

  Gateway of the Visionary

• 

  Hunter's Dwelling

• 

  Plague lab

• 

  Prism of the Frozen Glade

• 

  Py'len's Greenery

• 

  Reposeful Pavilion

• 

  Solemn Promenade

• 

  Stables of the Oasis

• 

  Starweaver's Workshop

• 

  Tempest Watchpost

• 

  The Blazing Gate

• 

  Velkor's Eye

• 

  Vermilion Menagerie

See also

• Freehold buildings
• Node buildings
• Processing stations
• Crafting stations
• Business buildings