Blacksmith Quest Scoring | Patreon Weekly #214

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share my current plans for the specific objectives for the blacksmith’s quest.

There’s also a new Patreon Poll! In this poll I’d like to gauge your excitement toward some of the larger content additions I have planned.

Dark Gold!

A major focus of the new blacksmith quest will be mining for gold, just as it is currently.

Gold will appear semi-randomly in the quest environment in smaller and larger clusters/veins, instead of being scattered purely randomly as it is right now. I think concentrating the gold like this makes things more fun overall and means I can have more of the stuff without things getting too tedious.

In terms of how gold collected will translate into rewards and scoring, I’m currently considering a system which steadily scales the amount of score per gold down as you mine more of it, up to a limit of 40 pieces. The current formula I have in mind for this is 100*gold – 0.9375*gold^2, rounded to the nearest 5.

That formula results in the following:

• 1st gold = 100 pts
• 5th gold = 90 pts (475 pts total)
• 10th gold = 80 pts (905 pts total)
• 20th gold = 65 pts (1625 pts total)
• 30th gold = 45 pts (2155 pts total)
• 40th gold = 25 pts (2500 pts total)

This leads to a max of 2500 points from 40 gold, and levels would probably spawn with a little more than 40 gold overall. This means that exploration is encouraged, but the player won’t be required to be super thorough to get a decent score, and they won’t need to clear every little bit of the map to get a perfect one.

Other Objectives

Some of you may have already noticed that the gold score limit of 2500 is 500 less than the 3000 points the blacksmith quest currently awards. I’m considering giving a second objective to the quest, which would award another 1000 points when completed.

Previous I talked about a secondary mineral that might spawn alongside gold but be rarer. I’m ditching that specific idea in favor of a second objective. So far all of Shattered’s quest reworks have had some sort of single pivotal moment involving a mini-boss level challenge. I expect that without a similar moment the blacksmith quest will feel a bit lackluster. With that in mind, each region will have some form of special objective that will require overcoming a challenge in order to earn bonus points.

As an example, the crystal caves region might have a single room with a giant central crystal. A special item is located at that crystal’s heart, but to get to it you’ll need to steadily whack the crystal with your pickaxe to break through. Of course, the locals are likely to be VERY unhappy about this, so you’ll need to balance defending yourself with picking away at the crystal.

Objectives like this not only add more flavour for each quest type, but also provide an opportunity to weave the mining mechanic in with regular gameplay in a more intense scenario. Expect to hear more about specific regions and their unique challenges in future weeklies.