So my OCD kicked in pretty decently when I first started the game and I've only ever visited one area away from my starting city. I just keep going deeper in the caverns. I only have been able to complete one mission in this area so I've pretty much just been visiting every single building and cavern I can get into. Reaching 100% visited becomes an obsession. Finding my way to the bottom is an obsession. Now I'm finding myself underpowered fighting tier 5 mobs, especially bosses. This raises a few questions:
This is an infinite world, so exploring 100% is literally impossible -- the more you explore, the more it generates!
- How deep do caverns typically run? I think I'm into my fourth or fifth "set" in this area. Boss fights at this point are very hard which I think is a combination of not leveling up my city and not learning new spells.
Infinite, most of the time. They just keep going and going, getting hard and harder, until you can't progress because you die. Which can be a fun side challenge, but it's really not the point.
- Inability to learn new spells is another problem. I've collected so much stuff throughout these caverns that I'm really surprised that I can't craft a single spell. I was surprised to see the start guide on this forum saying that after the tutorial you should be able to craft a throw stone spell from jade that you have mined. Maybe I missed the tutorial gems but I have collected a lot in the area I'm in that it feels odd that I'm not able to craft anything. I have 4 jades and 114 sapphires when I look at settlement stockpile.
The guide is actually out of date, we're working on that -- it's out of date by several months, actually. You can't craft any new spells because you're not doing missions; missions are the only way to progress in the game, or to get new spells. However, some degree of side exploration is also pretty much required in order for you to be prepared for missions (having enough wood platforms, the right enchants, enough vitality stones, unlocking unlockables, etc). So side exploration like you've been doing is far from worthless. It's just not something that I'd spend more than about 20% of my time on, 50% max. Because there's no way to progress in the game while doing that alone.
- Would I be better off finishing missions instead of "dungeon diving"? I've sunk a lot of time into just exploring and fighting.
The game is designed so that you'll have to do some of both, but also so that you can come to it with a "what do I feel like doing today" sort of mentality and enjoy whatever it is you're doing then. But if you've had a long time without doing any missions... yeah, that's going to stagnate your character in a major way.
Kudos to you for getting so far with such pitiful versions of your spells, by the way -- you're going to want to play on a harder difficulty, clearly, because if you can do that then the standard difficulty of the game will be no match for you!
I'm loving the game but I have reached that point where I know that there is a lot more I can be doing in game to make it interesting.
Cheers, thanks for that! One of our goals last week and this next week has been to make things clearer. I think we've made some important strides in the last week, but still have a lot to do this next week. The other big goal is actually making missions themselves more interesting, and having secret missions (that let you do some missions via exploration of the sort you're doing). Both of those have a bunch of functionality that will be coming out in just the next couple of hours, actually.
