I have just loaded a new inter-circle conflict system, focusing on collecting and using shards with various powers. Here's how the system works:

- Every now and then, shards fall down upon the continent. Isolated shards fall every few minutes, and bigger groups of shards fall every few hours. Shards can only fall into outdoors rooms on the main continent, outside of influence of any organization or affinity.

- There is a new ability in Survival, around the Skilled rank - Shards. If you have it, you can HARVEST SHARD to harvest the shards. This process takes 20 seconds and is interrupted if you perform any aggressive action or receive damage.

- There are two types of shards - blue ones are the common variety, red ones are rare. Shards are groupable and riftable. All shards are new - you can't use any older shards that you may have stored from earlier events.

- Shards can be used in two ways - they are required by various new abilities that you can now unlock, and they are also required to actually unlock those abilities in the first place.

- To unlock abilities, you need to collect the shards and put them into the generator - you can probe it to see how many are stored. Red shards count as five regular ones. Then, those with the War privilege can access these commands:

CITY SHARD SKILLS - list of all unlockable skills currently visible to you, along with their current levels

CITY SHARD SKILL <name> - displays more information about a skill, as well as currently visible abilities within it

CITY SHARD UNLOCK <name> - initiates unlocking of a new level within a skill, assuming that you meet all the requirements. This takes 24 hours to complete.

CITY SHARD ABORT - aborts previously initiated unlocking, if any


You can only see the skills for which you meet the pre-requisites, and within each skill, you can only see the ability offered at the next level. Everything else is hidden.

There are no notices given for the shards falling, be it the big drops or the small ones. This is intentional - the notices are available, but you will need to unlock the appropriate skills first. The purpose of this is to give you an initial period to become accustomed to the system.

Initially, you have either three or four skills available on the list - this is only a small subset of what is available, the full list currently contains 22 skills, most of which have 5 levels (there are a few that have 10 levels). A few of the skills do nothing beyond unlocking other skills, some offer a single effect with a gradually increasing effectivity, but the majority of them offer different new abilities or effects at each level. You can only see the next level within each skill, not the full tree.

There is no other way to use shards right away, but you will eventually unlock abilities that utilise them. At that point you'll need to balance out the usage and unlocking of further new abilities. The millog is updated when new shard(s) are added to the generator, but no notice is provided for harvesting.

Which skills to focus on? That decision is entirely up to you, but I strongly recommend getting the first three levels of Shard Detection first, as you are going to be at a severe disadvantage otherwise - without these, there is no way to find the shards other than blindly stumbling upon them.

Finally, I should note that all the unlocks may be subject to change if they prove to be problematic for any reason.



Garryn


Penned by My hand on the 4th of Ferinus, in the year 661 AD.