There are actual historical records for some medieval construction projects. The records of the Welsh castle building program of English King Edward I are among the best documented that I know of.

You can also get some idea of cost and effort for the actual constructions by using modern estimation figures. The methods of building masonry (i.e., brick and stone) structures on the scale of houses has not changed all that much since ancient times.

I think your figures are in the right order of magnitude, or close to it. Cathedrals, in particular, took centuries to complete. Sometimes this was due to running out of money, but a lot of it was because the projects were quite difficult and stretched the limits of physics, engineering capability, and the materials in use.

Things made of metal are durable goods. If each character only needs a few swords worth of metal taken from the ground each lifetime (recycling covering the rest), and that 1 year supply takes maybe 1 hour to mine at 5 mins per sword worth, what will all the miners do after a few weeks when the iron supplies are so plentiful that they'll cover the amount of metal needed for a year? Production of the raw resources needs to take a lot of time or the market will be flooded very quickly and the mining profession will fade away. Sure you could pad time by making smelting take a long time, or by making metals so hard to find that the average miner will spend 90% of their play time wandering around hoping to find ore, but is that so much better than having to work through a lot of rock to extract metals bits at a time?

Posted By Kaynadin at 6:02 PM - Thu Mar 08 2018

Things made of metal are durable goods. If each character only needs a few swords worth of metal taken from the ground each lifetime (recycling covering the rest), and that 1 year supply takes maybe 1 hour to mine at 5 mins per sword worth, what will all the miners do after a few weeks when the iron supplies are so plentiful that they'll cover the amount of metal needed for a year? Production of the raw resources needs to take a lot of time or the market will be flooded very quickly and the mining profession will fade away. Sure you could pad time by making smelting take a long time, or by making metals so hard to find that the average miner will spend 90% of their play time wandering around hoping to find ore, but is that so much better than having to work through a lot of rock to extract metals bits at a time?

I think he meant 5 minutes to mine the actual node itself but I could be wrong, if not there is a lot that can happen while trying to mine though..Don't forget about losing energy, having to build the mine in the first place, sleeping, eating, find more nodes of iron, repairing of their own gear, cave-ins, attacks by animals or bandits, wars, weather changes that can slow down or halt progress, and iron can be used for a ton of things. Also, we are only speaking about iron, there are other materials they can mine as well. Digging tunnels is a job miners can assist with, without having to dig up ore exactly. I'm sure tons of people want underground dungeons or rooms.

IMO doing a skill base gathering challenge for 5+ minutes is a very long time for a 1 sword pay out. If they want to limit how much ore we can carry at one time to also make the process a bit longer I think that would be fine.

Something I've wanted to point out for a while for the "size of a parcel" thing in that image (a bit off topic) is that 64x64m is just an acre rounded to metric.

For the time to gather materials for a sword- that's why swords were expensive, I guess.

I'm not sure about construction in general, but as far as cathedrals go, I know IRL Europe's cathedrals were multi-generational construction projects. Absolutely titanic jobs.

Based on what Snipe said, you will probably need to hire an alchemist, which would be the equivalent of a chemist today, to be able to do such a job.

The processing jobs will make big money in the early game because it will probably take a large amount of skill to achieve maximum extraction.

Posted By Fudgemuffinator at

I think the ratio of time spent gathering to time spent crafting should be 3:1. To simplify, it would take 10 gatherers 1 hour to acquire the materials required for a crafter to make something that requires 1 hour of work. There should be more gatherers than crafters, no?

My taxation survey indicated that even among commoners, more people planned to be producers than gatherers. NPCs may end up carrying a large part of the load if that trend holds.

Let's start with a standard 1-h sword with nothing fancy on it. Common quality. Iron 1-h swords weigh 3lb. or 1.36kg on average.

>

• Mining the iron. Just enough for a sword. 150 minutes attacking an ore vein with a mining pick.

Recall that iron ore isn't just iron. It's iron oxide (rust) at best, so you have to collect at least double the weight you need in iron.

You've drastically underestimated the time required to smelt the ore to iron. Biringuccio cites 8-10 hours to smelt a good quality iron ore on the smithy hearth. There are economies of scale, but even a medieval Milanese bloomery would take half a day or more to make a ~40lb bloom that then requires further working before true forging begins.

Your guesses on the houses seem about right. I still remember what Caspian said so long ago. A small house would take a few days to build. I sometimes think people forget just how hard this game is aiming to be.

Posted By Rasigan at 09:16 AM - Fri Mar 09 2018

I think 2.5 hrs of mining time is far too long for the amount of iron enough for just one sword. This is not rewarding to a player. Two and a half hours of staring at a wall and clicking. I think you maybe allocating this much time to it because you have not considered traveling time. Which i think should be included for the proper time calculations. Also, take into account material loss due to bandits on route.

Well really depends on many things. If you have found an iron vein, then sure, it really shouldn't take too long to mine the iron out. If you are unlucky and need to find the iron, that could take any amount of insane time. I'm not sure if there be some "way" to find minerals underground. But if there isn't, expect to be mining rock for a long ass time.

Remembers the time I was playing 7daystodie and trying to find some ore, many many hours I wasted. Yet I didn't even need to worry about all the support of the mineshaft, could only carry so little etc.

Also some hope for low-budget, low-time, low-skill-barrier house-building highlighted in this video

Posted By Snipehunter at 4:05 PM - Thu Mar 08 2018

If you can only load 2000 kilos of stuff into a wagon, to use a completely random max value, would you rather load 2000 kilos of refined iron or 2000 kilos of rock containing roughly 2% iron?

Depends on what I'm doing with the rock. If it's only 2% iron, no way am I wasting my time smelting it! I must have some other purpose in mind, and maybe that's worth more to me than a bunch of blooms or bars of iron?

Posted By Snipehunter at 7:05 PM - Thu Mar 08 2018

I'm not going to confirm or deny how long it takes to mine or or make a sword here, but here are a few things to consider:

1) There's a finite amount of iron in the world. If mining iron is a quick process you will run out of iron very quickly.

2) Mining is more than just getting the iron out of the rock. Very little iron is going to be "harvestable" on the surface in most biomes. That means you're going to have to tunnel, so a large piece of the "time it takes to mine" might actually come not in the extraction but the prospecting of the ore in the first place.

3) A miner is likely to smelt the ore themselves as well, given the logistical challenges of shipment in Elyria. If you can only load 2000 kilos of stuff into a wagon, to use a completely random max value, would you rather load 2000 kilos of refined iron or 2000 kilos of rock containing roughly 2% iron? So extracting the ore isn't the only timesink involved in mining even if your prospecting is already handled, at least for most folks.

As you can probably tell, there are cases for lengthening and shortening the time it takes to extract ore in those points. I just wanted to provide them for your consideration.

Hope that helps! :)

If all what you are saying is to be in some way implemented into the game exactly or an altered version i cant wait to get to play. I think there is a high need in the rpg world for somewhat a better alternate life sim. From my knowledge something on this scale and style has never been implemented into a mmorpg that has a constant evolving world.

With this id hope it balances out how much effort and reward this is to not discourage players who just dont want to mine or grow food all day with little to come of.

Everything stated in the OP is about right. And that certain projects should take longer to complete. This will get players to cooperate and work together on projects of great scale. Though it will also inhibit players that prefer to play solo. So having realistic build/harvest times will have it's pros and cons in the sense that some players just won't find it appealing while others may like the realism and feeling of accomplishment at the end of a hard month of work building a house.