The Ooze is rising. Trick, treat, craft, and hold the camp.
October 1 - October 31 · Daily resets at midnight Eastern
October is Oozefest! The Ooze is rising out of the pumpkin patch and the camp has one month to get ready for it. Knock on other members' doors for candy, and on realm pages and news articles too: three quarters of the time you get a treat, and the rest of the time you get a trick. Donate candy, timber, bars and fish to the camp defenses to raise the Settlement Level, because every level of it makes everybody hit the bosses harder. Five bosses come one a week, each with three attacks a day and a chapter of the story, and the last of them walks up to the wall on the twenty-ninth. Smelt, tan and weave what you gather into gear at the Forge, then open a shop on your profile and sell what you do not need. The free 50-level pass pays Ectoplasm all month.
Arm the settlement. A full meter levels up the Militia and sends a strike at the boss.
Equipment
Lv 12
486 / 500 points · armour, jewellery, off-hands
Weapons
Lv 5
4 / 500 points · weapons of any kind
Siege Balls
Siege Balls
5
1 shot
Ooze Balls
35
7 shots
Fire Balls
116
23 shots
Frost Balls
107
21 shots
Blacksmiths cast Siege Balls from bars and forge the elemental ones from Siege Balls. Every trebuchet draws from these stockpiles, 5 balls a shot.
Resupply
Food feeds the trebuchet crews. Supplies build and upgrade the trebuchets. War effort donations fill both.
Food
3,146 / 10,000
Supplies
204 / 10,000
Candy
Any Candy
Lv 8
349 / 1,000·1 pt each
Wood
Pine Plank
Lv 7
524 / 1,000·2 pts each
Oak Plank
Lv 6
304 / 1,000·4 pts each
Maple Plank
Lv 5
421 / 1,000·6 pts each
Ore
Copper Bar
Lv 4
13 / 500·2 pts each
Coal
Lv 3
189 / 250·2 pts each
Fish
Any Fish
Lv 6
486 / 1,000·1 pt each
Food
Any Meal
Lv 3
151 / 250·2+ pts each
Ore and wood go to Supplies. Fish, candy and cooked meals go to Food (bigger meals feed more). Every donation also pays a Gold per item.
Projects
Preparing for the next battle
No boss is in range, so the crews hold fire. Each trebuchet keeps loading from the stockpiles until it has one full shot ready, then stops drawing ammo and waits. No Food is eaten and nothing is thrown until a boss arrives. Militia strikes bank until then too.
Challenges reset every day at midnight Eastern. Season challenges pay Pass XP - finish about half the month to complete the pass. The Gold challenges run every day, season or not.
Seasonal Challenges
Bucket Runner
Trick-or-treat 100 times.
+3000 XP
Fifty Swings
Land 50 boss attacks.
+2500 XP
There When It Fell
Be there for 3 boss kills.
+2500 XP
Master of the Forge
Craft 50 items.
+2000 XP
Shopkeeper
Sell 25 items out of your shop.
+1500 XP
Sweet Tooth Tithe
Donate 250 candies to the camp defenses.
+2000 XP
Community Thoughts (538)
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To anyone that still hasn't used all their attacks today: best time to swing might be in 1.5 hours when the Frost Ball trebuchet swings and gives the boss the Brittle debuff for extra +10% damage.
Exactly why I set one of them back to Frostball! These are huge for buffing our own damage. It is great to utilize one of them close to reset when people are getting their attacks in right away :D
Looking like this is gonna go right down to the wire. If you have lower item level gear, see if you can find some upgrades! If you can't craft them, someone else may be able to especially if you have materials. I know the system in place right now for trading is a bit obtuse since it has to go through everyone's shops which makes that a bit painful to get stuff made.
I'd really like to do a work order system so people could put in requests for people to craft things for them using their own materials so trades didn't need to happen.
If any archers wants some Scaled leather stuff, i just hit the treshold today!
Anything besides Blacksmithing is slow progress, because you also need ingots of appropriate level to craft your stuff. I dont think that is necessarily a wrong system, but it does slow us down, just stating a fact, i dont mind it. So iv been trying to dig for coal as well myself to get to Cobalt. Made my first three ingots, and all three Scaled torsos were kinda crap, but hey, its a start! :D at least Scaled stuff doesnt want salt, so i might try to get something decent provided i get the cobalt and coal going :D
You can get the torso in my shop right now. Nothing fancy, but looks like an upgrade for you. I will be crafting more stuff in upcoming days when i get more Cobalt Ingots, so will put more stuff in the shop then, so look out :)
One of the big design decisions that we will see more of going forward is more cross-contamination of the professions as a whole. The goal is to get more people working together. It's definitely possible to level all the professions up, but I do want to try to incentivize people to specialize more. I have a lot of different ideas for this, but really need to think about what's going to work the best with the way we're enjoying the game. I know everyone loves to see all the progress bars go up, I do too lol
So here are some rambling thoughts - I don’t think we are gonna make it for this one. The big boost to the spider seemed reasonable based on how fast we torn through the skeleton. But that synced up with our power spike - everyone hit the next levels of gear in crafting. Materials were available, the lower tier still gave some XP, and you didn’t have 23 people needing the shop reset to get a 6 pack of salt. Also, some of the higher level things need more which compounds the problem - that coal donation on the supply camp is a huge trap since we could probably all go through 100 each today and are lucky to have a handful. Looking ahead, it kind of gets worse. Piling on, some things need to be gathered from the fighting, which is fun, but costs 2-4 times more energy, takes a really long time to roll the creature that might have what you want (how much silk and beast bones can I use right now? None 😀), and even then it is still a dice roll of whether it drops what you are looking for. I was in the neon spot since one had cobalt and another had salt, but after dozens of rerolls, I only got in 3 fights on those guys and they dropped the common stuff instead. Not a terrible system but at this pace, I might hit the next level tier by end of month, not week. And if bosses are even bigger then I think we are done unless we pick one person to just gift all the supplies and then our blacksmith god can choose who is worthy of decent gear…
Always love to read everyone's thoughts, and you're definitely right, we hit a progression wall. Honestly, when Sidequest was designed I didn't expect us to even make it as far as we did in such a short period of time. The rate at which everyone geared up was super unexpected. I based things based on how I knew people used the site and I expected a small amount of boost to that, not for people to go so hard on everything hahaha. It was a great thing to see though!
I do have some work on improving the overall curve and the inability to farm materials at a rate that feels good is slightly problematic, but that's mostly because the first couple of stages of progression were just too fast.
One big thing that is going to help is with a combat change. With a change to combat, the way mobs can drop loot is going to be reworked as well and instead of the system being entirely crafting or "find a random item once a day when using the site" based, we will start to see actual loot drops from creatures. I have a lot of work to figure out exactly how the loot tables for that are going to look, but it will be a way to build upon our progression systems.
I also need to tweak leveling. Our site leveling system that arrived way before Sidequest was properly announced has a hilarious curve and now with all the added ways to get experience, it doesn't even make that much sense for the lower levels. Right now as a level 14, you can fight level 40s without an issue due to the just immense power of gear. This isn't the planned design of course, it's just a holdover until I can balance leveling properly. Part of me even wonders if we truly need levels to play an important role in the system though. It's great progression in your typical game, but it usually means you need to keep adding more levels over time as you add in more content to give people things to push for. I'd much rather have gear matter more than your level, your level being more of a website thing that gives people an idea of your time spent on the site and not how powerful you are. I'm considering changing our areas to be more item-level based, so if you encounter an item level 40 goblin, you can understand as an item level 30 character, you're probably going to have a bad time. Item level is a way better sense of power than just our level itself. That does kinda suck too though because with levels themselves not mattering, people can just skip to the end of progression if someone offers some higher-end gear for low-level prices. Balancing this suuuucks.
The next couple bosses, without spoiling anything, are going to be different than what the first three bosses have been so far and I'm excited to see how that plays out. Oozefest has been a huge test, and next month is suuuuuuuper cool and soooo different than Oozefest which is going to be very exciting to see how that goes. I don't want every single event to feel the same, I want them each to have their own unique properties to keep things feeling fresh, but everything is also just about learning and most importantly learning to design games even better.
One thing that is going to be happening soon... tomorrow... is the introduction of abilities. No more will you "Attack" a boss but based on your class we are introducing an attack that is specific to each class. This is a very very very basic version of the end goal, I need a lot more time to get the end goal finalized, but my goal is to add a ton of depth to how combat works and to truly make it a collaborative experience between everyone because the idea of a very social rpg is exciting to me. You know how the Trebuchets apply debuffs? Yeah, that's a sneak peek at what is to come with Sidequest as a whole.
One thing that I've wanted to do for a literal decade (before Out of Games, just legit general games) is to let people form parties with others, and to be able to let someone control a party of characters that belong to other people so multiple people can be playing the same game, with them not all needing to be online at the same time and to be able to organize a party in a specific way that you can make smart decisions to augment the entire power of the party, and then to go even further in collaborate with other parties of people to take on foes in an orchestrated way so one party can buff the next party and protect the next party and so on. I don't know how long it's going to take to get Sidequest to that point, we definitely need more players to really get to that total vision I have for it, but I have some huge ideas that I can't wait to play with and test out and just get feedback on.
One thing we might do is allow people to have multiple characters. Probably would have to be different classes (so you can't just stack multiple warriors for example) for the sake of balance, but it would add in some interesting potential to the game. That's probably a lot farther away though because the core needs to become really good first.
Sidequest realm home
Brannoc Emberbeard
Sylvaine Moonweft
Arachney
Mei Lingbao
Hollis Timberjaw
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