@ShadowBolt25 @Lychee @Truly @arnisd

Hey guys, sorry about the mess, I'll try to sort this out. I've been trying to be SUPER CAREFUL about not changing any of the rules Suicune's Fire has put into place and have been trying to respectfully help her at the same time. She worked super-hard on this and unfortunately got really busy JUST as this launched.

Hey, why are things suddenly taking so long to get resolved?

Eh heh, part of this is my bad. Well, for one thing, Suicune's Fire and myself both work fulltime and for her, things have been a NIGHTMARE lately, so please don't blame her for the slowdown. She wasn't expecting her new job to be so time-consuming and it was a major reason why I volunteered to help her out (if you weren't aware, I'm the guy who actually made Stalkers RPG and have been a GM for Season 1, 2, 3, and that Squawkers parody version, so this is definitely not my first rodeo doing this). For me, I have some time after work. Not a whole lot, but generally around 2-3 hours or so, so I volunteered that time to help with this.

Yes, I'll admit through most of October, so this past week and then some, I've been doing Inktober 2019, which is an artist challenge involves pushing yourself to do a piece of artwork each day. As I told ShadowBolt25 and a few other people, as of yesterday I've decided to pull the plug on that because it's badly eating into the time spent on this and it's definitely clear you guys are unhappy about the effect that's been having. Rest assured, with the book closed on that, I'll be focusing way more time into this and doing more narrative posts. Again, I wanted to try it and I didn't think it would be a problem, but I just don't think it's working out at the same time with this. Sorry about that.

Hey, it says in the rules Forging example you only need x1 Padded Strip and x2 Iron Ore, but in the Item Directory it says you need 1 Iron Ingot and 1 Padded Strip!

Hmm, yeah, that's a good observation. My guess is the rules were written at a different time than the blueprints and maybe it was meant to be updated, but just got overlooked.

Here's what I'll do.

I'm going to let DracoBolt (ShadowBolt25) get a free dagger on the house and I hope that clears up the disconnect between what he was hoping to do and what Lillian (Lychee) was going to help him with. I'm not going to work it back into the narrative in the interest of getting things moving along rather than going back to edit a narrative most people have probably read by now anyway. It's definitely clear you guys want to get the show on the road. Also, one free [Iron Dagger] isn't like I'm handing over a game-breaking Excalibur anyway. XD

I'm also going to... *takes a deep breath* unlock combining materials for you. I hope Suicune's Fire will be okay with this, but I think once she realizes the chaos that's been caused because of this, I think she'll understand. Basically, it goes like this:

Macro-Weed Fibre [2] > [Padded Strip]
Iron Ore [2] > [Iron Ingot]
Titanium Ore [2] > [Titanium Ingot]
Obsidian Ore [2] > [Obsidian Ingot]

Combining materials also won't eat away your actions. You're free to do that as much as you want and there's no advantage to keeping materials as Ores or Fibres if they can be combined to make Strips and Ingots.

I don't think it's going to be a show-stopper to put the green light on allowing you guys to do this. This Forging system is her creation, and I think she intends it to be a fun extra where some players will gather materials, while others put those materials to work and create weapons and things out of them. To me, I feel it's a really cool and clever idea, but bear in mind it's also new and this system was only JUST introduced this Season. So it's new to me too and this is my first time working with it, but I have a pretty strong idea of where she is going with it. The other thing is as it's a new system, we're also trying to figure out the best way to make it work. Think of it as being a Beta. Not everything may be 100% flawlessly executed the first time around, but rest assured, as soon as we see something that needs to be corrected, we'll try to get on that as soon as we can.

On an official basis, I'm also going to make an update to the rules example that you need the Iron Ingot to do that, not just the Ores.

Hey, why do we have separate inventories and a team inventory?

Yeah, I see where this is causing some chaos, but there was a reason for this.

We introduced consumable items back in Season 2. Crazy thing was, back in that Season, NO ONE was using them. We had the theory that players were reluctant to use them because they felt it was team property and they'd have to go through the trouble of asking everyone permission to use them, even if they were the player who originally found the item to begin with! So she and I had some chats about that and she decided to implement individual inventories so if you were to find Oran Berries that you wanted to save for yourself in case you got injured, some other player wouldn't gobble them up right when you were relying on saving them for a rainy day, leaving you having to Rest or have a Medicine friend come along. Also, we figured it would be WAY easier to ask just one person for one of their items than to get the whole team's approval. And the same goes for the Equipment items and cash as well. Imagine finding 600 splinters and getting the itch to buy some cool equipment item you've been eying for a while, and then someone else goes and blows all the money you found on something you totally didn't think was necessary. So yeah, you can see where the conflict is on this.

But as you guys pointed out, this does create a problem when it comes to Forging and materials. I think the best solution to this is to figure out what items should go into the Team Inventory and which ones should go into Individual Inventories based on how they're used.

Here's my idea, let me know what you guys think:

Money, Consumable, and Equipment items should be both. If they were obtained from a side mission, that's great, but there was a team effort in getting those, so it only seems fair that the whole team can make use of them. However, if someone finds something like money, equipment items, berries and such on their own time, those should be theirs, at least unless they decide to share them with the team.

Materials should be entirely shared, because as we're seeing now, ore and ingots are getting stashed away in personal inventories to peeps who aren't using them. The players who have Forge need immediate access to those and it would be a LOT of trouble to have to ask the Scavengers to share all the time.

Key items like Utopian/Abyssal/Side Mission Articles - Really no reason why these would need to go into an individual inventory. Everyone and anyone may need to make use of these.

If you guys think this is a good layout, let me know, but if you have another preference, just let us know and we'll work with that. :3 No worries.