Days Four, Five and Six: FE is starting to grow on me

Anytime that you can start a ten day mmo free trial leading up to a major family holiday is always a good idea…

Sarcasm aside what time that I’ve devoted to FE has been quite enjoyable. When comparing it to other recent mmo’s I find it to be more complete upon initial launch. While not a perfect game and lacks polish its upside is difficult to ignore.

What I've discovered about the game revolves around the crafting. Initially it's overwhelming as you do get plenty of manuals for various crafted items. When you use the manuals additional items that you can craft get added to your recipe list. As you do more crafting missions (which there are not enough of) the whole process becomes clearer. For crafting materials you can purchase from a vendor but that can be expensive. Instead it's best to go and salvage or scavenge what you need for the crafted item. This is where it appears daunting because it's not immediately clear where you can find items like weak botanical chemical. However after some trial and error I found that they got a better drop rate if you scavenge from plants (with a name like that it should have been obvious. I blame the spiked hot butter rum).

There are ten different crafting categories
taken from fallenearth.wikia.com
* Armorcraft: Making all manner of clothes and armor.
* Ballistics: Making rifles, pistols, crossbows, zip guns, submachine guns and assault rifles, and their associated ammunition. Note that these are not the only types of ranged weapon, but some of the known types.
* Cooking: Creating food that can help increase player performance primarily through the recovery of hit points and stamina faster (characters who don't have some food in their gut and a quenched thirst are going to be able to act fine, but will find their time spent recovering from injuries or exhaustion much longer).
* Geology: Allows the player to harvest minerals from mining nodes and to refine metals into higher-grade components.
* Medicine: Making first aid kits, anti-venoms, radiation treatments, etc.
* Mutagenics: Covers the creation of mutation injectors and other devices that support the use of mutations, such as gamma restorers.
* Nature: Making poisons, collecting materials from plants and animals, refining tradeskill components, etc.
* Scavenging: Allows for harvesting materials from the piles of junk that dot the Grand Canyon.
* Science: Making acids, sniper scopes, batteries, cars, refining tradeskill components, etc.
* Weaponry: Making clubs, knives, baseball bats, and other killing implements that are used up close and personal.

Within each category there are numerous recipes that requires skill levels to advance and create higher level crafted items. One of the things that I like about FE crafting is that you can queue up several items which will be crafted while you do other things. While riding my horse I was able to queue up several recipes to make additional bolts for my crossbow. Although this makes crafting convenient the caveat is that depending on the difficulty of the crafted item determines how long the wait is. In WoW you can queue up 25 items to be crafted and each items takes several seconds to make. In no time you've got all 25 crafted items to auction off or whatever you intend for them. That doesn't occur in FE. Recently I crafted three items for a quest and each one took a bit over eight minutes to make. So nearly a half hour later I was able to go and turn in a crafted mission when the items were made.

After the previous paragraphs it's obvious that I'm getting into the crafting. That is by design as I delved into FE it was with the intention of having a crafter. That isn't what I focus on when I play the game though. Instead I have been doing a lot of missions from my starter town of South Burb. I look forward to completing the South Burb missions and branching out to explore other areas of sector 1. Documenting that phase and sharing it will be coming shortly.