https://forums.station.sony.com/landmark/index.php?threads/update-notes-17-dec-2014-let-there-be-monsters.51046/
Apologies ahead of time for the white background. Just a simple drag and drop copy.
Caves
The Landmark cave system is being expanded and true layers are being introduced! Rather than altering the current surface caves, which would require popping off any affected claims in the area, surface caves will be removed from existing continents in the 12/15 patch. They will return in the new continents that will be generated for open beta. Beneath the surface of each island explorers will be able to explore through 5 layers filled with underground caves. Along with the cave and layer expansion, mining veins of metal and gems will be redistributed so that the higher tiers of resources are found in the deeper, more dangerous depths.
- Below the surface caves, large caverns can be found as part of the cave networks. These are very large, and within them, explorers may find ruins and buried monuments to explore for treasure; but also within the caverns lurk monsters who may challenge the unwary! Many of the buried ruins were created by Landmark players as part of our collaborative open development process, and will credit the creator.
- Be warned! Falling damage has been re-enabled. Be careful as you explore the massive cavern systems underground – there are some really long drops!
MonstersFive new types of monsters, some of which have never been seen before, will appear in the world. Each type has a unique mode of attack and strategies to learn. While there will be a few monsters found above ground, more will lurk in the underground caverns and around buried ruins, so explorers and adventurers seeking treasure in the deeper depths should be sure to take some sturdy armor and weapons.
Starting outThe starter equipment that all new characters begin with is now known as Adventurer’s Gear. Zero cost recipes have also been added to the Stone and Tech Forge that will let you replace these items if you ever need to. The full list of Adventurer’s Gear now includes:
- Adventurer’s Pick (this also now swings faster and hits a larger area)
- Adventurer’s Axe
- Adventurer’s Blade
- Adventurer’s Doublet
- Adventurer’s Boots
New equipmentIn Landmark, your choice of equipment is what determines what abilities you can use during combat. This allows you to try a wide variety of combat styles, and mix and match equipment to customize your fighting abilities to suit exactly what you want! Armor, weapons, and equipment use a synergistic key word system which allows items with matching key words to enhance each other’s effectiveness.
Four new weapons that are lootable and craftable. They are:
- Crescent-Bladed Broadsword (Two Handed Sword) – The wielder of this lightning blade can charge up large amounts of energy and release it into devastating attacks. Allies can gather around to benefit from the excess energy given off. This weapon is slow, but powerful and heals the energy of nearby allies. The play style is a lumbering damage dealer, similar to a barbarian.
- Obsidian Daggers (Double Daggers) - The wielder of this pair of affliction daggers can perform quick attacks while darting around the battlefield and leaving poison in your wake. This weapon focuses on movement and damage over time effects. The play style is a quick assassin, similar to a rogue.
- Darksteel Sword and Shield (Sword and Shield) – The wielder of this shadow sword and shield can channel and bend the shadows to become a defensive powerhouse. This weapon focuses on being defensive and protecting allies. The play style is a dark tank, similar to a shadow knight.
- Lucent Wand (Wand) – The wielder of this radiance wand focuses light into powerful beams to uplift and inspire allies. This weapon focuses on enhancing allies and protecting them from range. This play style is similar to a priest.
- The selection of craftable and lootable armor is expanding greatly! Over 20 new choices of armor have been added, including four specifically aligned with with key words for additional bonus effects when combined with matching key word weapons or accessories. Choose the armor that fits your playstyle and your look!
- A selection of new accessories are also craftable and lootable. They include accessories themed to enhance abilities with the lightning, radiance, affliction, and shadow themes.
- Note that there have been some changes to harvesting equipment also, including the replacement of Relics, all new picks, and a new sickle progression – see the harvesting section below (redistribution of voxel materials) for more details.
Key words systemKey words on equipment are represented as icons and colored text. Combining equipment that has the same key word can provide a bonus to abilities based on that key word. For example:
In the case of abilities, the background of the tooltip will be the color of the key word(s) of that ability. The list of key word types is as follows:
Collectible Recipes
- Only a few of the recipes for the new items will be known to crafters when the servers come up. Most of the recipes must be found from chests or looted from monsters. If you want craft all the new items, head into the caves and explore!
TransportationThe portal spire on each island is expanding into a full leyline network, which will include additional teleport points both above and below ground for ease of transport. The transport UI is also being upgraded to include more useful information such as which type of environments are found on which island. Each subterranean layer will have a hub that explorers will be able to travel to, but additional leyline points will need to be discovered before they can be traveled to.
- The Portal Shard item has been changed. It will now allow the user to teleport to the surface portal spire on a 10 minute cooldown. It is still consumable and can be crafted.
- The Stone of Recall has been added to the game. The stone is a permanent, non-consumable item that will allow you to teleport to the surface portal spire of your current island as well as to any claims you own. There is a 30 minute cool-down between uses. The stone will be included in the starting inventory of every newly created player. Those with older characters can acquire a stone by visiting the resupply chest at any portal spire.
- In addition, when digging between caves you will now find that pulverizers now dig through terrain faster and have a larger destruction radius.
- Powered Pulverizers and the Calibrated Rockgrinder now have a faster dig speed when compared to the basic Mechanized Pulverizer.
GraveyardsWith the addition of NPC monsters to the world, the chances that adventurers will experience death has increased! If you die on the surface you will return to the hub. If you die below the first layer you will revive in one of the graveyards which are scattered around the underground layers.
When a player dies in the wilds of Landmark they now have the option to revive themselves at the spot that they died. However, to do this the player needs to spend a Spirit Anchor. Spirit Anchors can be crafted at any workshop.
Comments
Grab your pulverizers, because resources are moving underground! With the arrival of underground layers our various tiers of surface and subsurface resources have moved into the extensive cave networks that can now be found deep beneath the islands of Landmark. While this change makes the search for resources a far more interesting and exciting prospect, it also makes it a bit more challenging. But don’t worry! We’ve taken this into account and made a number of changes to our tiers, the resources assigned to them, and the way those resources are used to accommodate gatherers, crafters, and builders alike.
The resource/harvesting changes below have also been added to the in-game help system (the ? button on your bottom menu) so you can refer to it at any time.
Redistribution of Plants
Plants have always been biome specific, but they were also designed with a progression in mind that required a layered world. With the advent of those layers our underground botanical progression dreams have finally been realized! To accommodate this new progression we’ve adjusted the tiers at which certain plants spawn and in some cases also swapped around their home biomes. As a result the following distribution changes have occurred.
As with plants, our stones, metals, and gems have been redistributed and pushed underground to fill out the vast array of caves now found beneath the surface. However, as we considered the implications of underground gathering in the deepest layers of our world, we also decided to move forward with a long idle plan to streamline our gathered material list with composite materials. The result of this plan is that fewer materials are found in the world, but those materials can now be combined to create composite materials. For example, rather than mining a Mithril vein you would create that rare metal by combining Iron and Gold.
The point of this change is to simplify the goals of gatherers when hunting for resources underground, making it easier to focus on a smaller selection of veins, which in turn should make it easier to accumulate those resources in sufficient quantities over a reasonable period of time. To accommodate this new resource plan we’ve adjusted the tiers at which certain material veins spawn. As a result the following distribution changes have occurred.
Landmark isn’t a game about grinding levels; it’s a game where everything you gather and create has value, and we want to ensure that's as true for crafters as for builders. To accomplish this, we are introducing composite resources. These are materials used specifically for crafting, and they include low tier resources in the creation of high tier composites.
These composites are called "Cut" materials on the crafting stations (e.g. "Cut Rubicite"). This means some resources that were formerly mined directly are now created by combining other resources; for example, rubicite is no longer a mined ore, so to craft an item using rubicite, you would first create cut rubicite out of copper and gold.
The full list of resources that are now composites includes the following.
We don't want the gathering of resources for building to be onerous. Thus, while composites are our solution for gatherers and crafters, we've created a similar system to allow builders to make many building materials out of the resources they gather from the world. Our solution here is the introduction of Blocks, which work the way wood and glass have already been functioning. By giving builders recipes to craft blocks, which are only used for building, we can allow a much more generous conversion rate than we could when you were building directly with mined ore. In other words, instead of one unit of mined rubicite equalling one placed voxel of rubicite, the block recipes allow a small number of units of mined copper and gold to convert into a large number of placed voxels of rubicite. Wherever the resource you want to build with is not directly mined in the world, look for a block recipe to build with!
The full list of resources that now involve Block conversions includes the following.
Harvesting Accessories
We’ve always been unhappy with the cumbersome item swapping gameplay promoted by our existing harvesting accessories, but with the introduction of monsters throughout the world that problem has only become worse. We debated several possible solutions, but in the end decided that to properly address this problem we needed to retire our existing harvesting accessories while finding a better way to provide those bonus stats. Unfortunately the mechanism we are currently planning on using to provide these stats isn’t ready and will have to be included in a future update. So for now we are doing the following.
The big change here is the new salvaging system, and when we say big, we mean massive. Salvaging introduces a new item creation loop that is fueled by items with real value. These are the weapons, armor, and accessories dropped by the monsters of Landmark; items that have function and purpose, and that can now be used to create items that fit your specific play style. Our monsters have also been granted item drops that teach new recipes, fulfilling a long desired goal of making recipes collectible.
Salvaging
Salvaging expands the crafting system by introducing the ability to break down extra equipment items into magical components. These components can be used in the new recipes to craft new equipment for your exploration and adventure! You will also get Ether Shards from salvaging, which will be an important currency in the future.
As with our other crafting systems the salvaging system is accessed via its own crafting station; the Ether Stone (shown above!). These vastly ancient devices can be found at every hub, and can also be crafted if desired. The Ether Stone breaks apart most items, converting them into various magical components that can be used to craft similar items, e.g. salvaging several weapons produces an Aspect of Destruction, which can be used to create a specific weapon with unique properties. Matching salvage components exist for the following item types.
Recipe Changes
The most notable change to recipes in this update is that many are now earned from monster or chest loot, rather than being granted automatically. As all recipes were previously granted automatically this means that existing characters will no longer have many of the recipes they previously had. The full list of recipes that are now dropped is somewhat large, but we can confirm that the list only includes a selection of items with the following types.
Upgrading
The upgrading system is scheduled to undergo some significant changes between 12.15 and our next big update, however until those changes hit our Live servers we are putting a soft hold on the system. You will still be able to use relics you’ve already collected, but you won’t be able to collect any more for the time being. A larger implication of these upcoming changes to upgrading is that all upgradable items now drop and craft as Average quality only.
Refining
Many new recipes have been added to the refining stations, including composite and block recipes. But this is only a single step towards our long term goals. When the refining system comes online we intend to make blocks the de facto item type used for material placement, with refiners being the primary avenue through which blocks are acquired. In anticipation of this change we’ve made tier 1 refiners far more accessible, reducing the cost to craft them considerably.
Mastercraft Bracer and Tech Forge
As a result of the upgrading changes mentioned above, namely the removal of randomized quality from crafted items, the mastercraft bracer and tech forge are receiving some changes this update. Instead of increasing the quality floor when crafting an item, both of these items will now refund a number of salvaging components when a recipe is completed.
Tooltips
Tooltip improvements are here! This change brings some much needed polish and visual flare to the basic tooltips we had before. Tooltips now have a delay (yay!) as well as improvements to the way we display abilities, item quality, keywords and more.
We’ve got a huge list of new props for you this update, including some really great FX emitters that drop exclusively from NPCs and chests!
Decorations
Furniture
The Linking and Triggering system allows you to “Link” two or more props so that interacting with one will “trigger” the others. Some examples:
Setting up links is easy:
Place the two (or more) interactable props on your claim and right-click on the one that will start the link; select the new ‘Link’ option. (By interactable prop, we mean any prop that currently does something when clicked on - like a light turning on and off, or a door opening and closing.)
Area Tool
A new tool has been introduced for use with linking and triggering: The Area Tool. This tool allows you to create a custom area that can then be linked. Some more details:
Checking or breaking links
To confirm what a link is doing, or break a link, simply right-click on the starting prop again, choose the "link" option, and look at the connecting link line. Clicking the white chain link icon will break the connection.
Voice chat
Voice chat comes to Landmark! The first iteration of In-game Voice Chat (Vivox) has been added. It has basic functionality but will allow you to speak to others in Proximity, Party or Guild channels.
How do I enable Voice Chat?
I might really get into this game finally. I have a lot of info to catch up on, though...
Once the dungeoneering tools are in and mobs can be placed and tuned on plots this triggering system will completely change the playability factor in Landmark.
Just off the top of my head: Fence in graveyard with a gate and a switch. Flipping the switch opens the gate but also triggers fog emitters placed throughout the graveyard and triggers text, "you dare trespass on the resting place of my people..." Around each grave stone is a spatial box and crossing this box spawns a skeleton or zombie in front of that gravestone (hopefully the spawning animation for them will be crawling out of the ground). Once all of the zombies or skeletons of the graveyard are taken care of this triggers the door of a tomb entrance, revealing a harder boss type monster with additional text (maybe uploaded voice over?).
There can be more below in the tomb, maybe a multi-level crypt, but these ideas on a massive scale, beings there can be LOT of plots, means a lot of content even if the total number of "builder" types playing are low. The builds in Landmark thus far have shown this.
Every effect emitter I've tried to place has disappeared. The sizing tool doesn't work on them. I am a noob at creating world objects.
*Fucking post editor. I wrote a more detailed statement, hit the wrong key and lost it all except the above.
Odd. I have about 6 or 7 on my claim and havent had any issues. And I am able to resize them no problem too.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Yes, They are accessible from the spire.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Yes. They had to remove surface entrances due to possible claim problems. As the previous poster said you can use the spires and choose local travel or use a drill and start drilling down.
Hopefully when they wipe we will get surface entrances and will be able to walk all the way down to layer 5 instead of having to drill / teleport.
The problem for me in the caverns is I often get somewhere then the game crashes. I log back in and end up at ground level. It's very frustrating.