Gathering and crafting minigames

Gathering and crafting are presented as active systems built around short minigames rather than passive progress bars. The stated design goal is to keep professions interactive and to avoid idle mechanics in which a player clicks a node and waits for completion.

The system is also framed as part of the game's anti-bot strategy. Minigames, manual loot collection, and other interaction requirements are intended to make automated gathering more difficult, even though botting is acknowledged as an ongoing problem that cannot be fully eliminated.

Design goals

The profession design emphasizes player input, challenge, and proportional reward. Passive harvesting and autoplay-style mechanics are rejected in favor of interactions that ask the player to perform an action.

This approach is described as serving several purposes at once:

• making gathering and crafting more engaging than a simple timer,
• preserving a sense of play during routine activities,
• creating room for skill expression and quality outcomes,
• adding friction against bot automation.

Manual loot pickup after gathering is retained for similar reasons. Although a one-click autoloot option is recognized as a possible quality-of-life feature, it is treated cautiously because it could also simplify bot behavior.

Gathering minigames

Woodcutting is a node-based minigame whose difficulty scales with the node and required profession level. On completion, materials drop near the node for pickup.

Repetition is expected in MMO loops; the design question is whether each minigame stays engaging, not whether it repeats. Long-session tedium risk is acknowledged as legitimate feedback.

Fishing depends heavily on movement weight and timing—hard to judge from video alone; hands-on testing is the intended bar for evaluation.

Herbalism is comparatively simple at this stage (essentially flower picking with little extra interaction). A possible future extension is light surface stone picking while traversing the world, distinct from full mining nodes.

Crafting quality and profession mastery

Crafting minigames can raise item quality when performed well. Cooking exemplifies the pattern: strong execution can upgrade a basic dish to a higher-quality version of the same recipe.

The intended logic is that repeated practice improves outcomes. Profession progression is therefore tied both to character investment and to familiarity with the activity itself.

Separate levels or expertise tracks are said to exist for each gathering and crafting profession. As a profession level increases, minigames for equivalent-level nodes become easier.

Bot prevention and free-to-play concerns

The anti-bot discussion is tied closely to the game's free-to-play model. Because entry is free, bot accounts are considered especially dangerous if preventive measures are weak. The stated position is that the game should not make botting easier by default, even if no single system can stop it completely.

The design goal is not to make the game unpleasant for legitimate players, but to avoid convenience features that disproportionately benefit automation. Preventive design and active enforcement are treated as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

Planned testing

The profession systems are scheduled to be part of the public playtest beginning on 30 April. Feedback after hands-on testing is treated as more reliable than reactions based only on footage, and further polling after the test is presented as likely.

Source

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• Published: Sunday, April 5, 2026 at 7:06 PM UTC