The Grind is Broken: Why a Single Full Kit Takes 2+ Hours

[KeiaTypeBeat 3276]

lol at the orcs

[Zarsies 6795]

My conclusion (not solution) is that I surrender and /d20 at any instance of PvP because gear is unattainable. :' ( **** my stupid vamp unlife

[TrendE 1347]

LOTC would be so back if the server returned to iron kit, defender default & vanilla food.

A player's greatest concern in a fight should be about their character's death - not losing pixels that took them hours to get. Pretty sure that the server's peak was, coincidentally, when the grind was at it's lowest.

Bin the plugin-slop. Return to Arcas.
 

 

[Chuuwys 502]

Crazy to read this right after finishing my run for the day last night. I did a 3/4 full run, having missed three regions of the map but doing a combo mining+herb run. With access to only three nation mines, only two of which hold Neth or Iron, I tend to rely more or less entirely on wild nodes for my supply and tend to blend both into a single route if I'm playing solo. A combined run can take 3-4 hours. A mining-only run can easily take 2 hours if I'm not completely locked in and am collecting every ore along the way that I currently have mapped. It doesn't even get me a full kill and this doesn't include the leather cost.

 

As Prim said, there's also the fact that as nation mines got rolled out, there's now less and less wild nodes to work with as the resources are pulled away and relocated into locked mines, as evidenced by empty node rocks. Don't get me started on the fact that Iryalen had NO ORES WHATSOEVER for the first two months of the map - we had rocks, we had gaps in walls, but not a single piece of the ores meant to be on the tiles. That's two months of materials lost because they straight up weren't implemented until we got a pasted mine, and that only happened because I pointed it out and it got ticketed to the tech team.

 

We've also tried to determine the patterns of node placements. Across the map I've noticed about three areas where terracotta remains on the terrain where there was likely a node planned, then removed in favour of something else or abandoned during placements. On top of this, we've also tried to determine - are nods placed in groups of three? Groups of four? It seems as though the majority of herb nodes are done in sets of four, while others are in sets of three depending on what they are (for example, amberiddle has 16, two sets of 8, beardweed has 8, but drakestail has two sets of three). But some herbs seemingly break that rule altogether, so it becomes a guessing game of whether or not a mistake was made or if it's an intended feature to limit the herbs. Or perhaps a miscommunication somewhere. Who knows? 

 

I hit every accessible iron+neth node I am aware of on the map, but if one run barely gives a kit, and seeing as roleplay tends to take priority over farming, it's hard to build up mats. It's not realistic to expect someone to take 2+ hours of their day grinding that could be spent on roleplay to not even get a full kit, and there's the very real fact of course that not everyone has access to every mine to boost the total gains. Add the risk of roving farming groups or bandits, and it sets the scale of risk/reward off kilter. I wouldn't mind if there were more uses for some of the ores but priority goes to neth+iron, and those are few and far between in the wild.

[Rig 17579]

Primary issue I experience is that I need to choose between role-playing or mining with my playtime everyday. A lot of my time on is spent AFK while I do RL housework or my side gig. LoTC's time sink expectations are not reasonable for adults who are outside of university. Fact is, I play to RP, and I'm never going to choose mining over role-playing. A happy medium would be making certain ores common, but making some scarcer (e.g., netherite). That way there's not gear scarcity, there's just big scarcity for top-notch gear.

[winterblood 11181]

the amount of god awful implementations of these plug ins at the start of this map genuinely made me take a break from the server because i could not be assed to put up with it

 

unrelated, i STILL get massive fps drops in the geyser biome despite having the setting activated to show less particles and my pc is good quality 

 

why cant techs be regulated as lore pieces are

[PrimnyaQuorum 3998]

I will always advocate for /surge kit to provide a basic iron kit [armor, sword, shield, shortbow, arrows, food] and for everything else [horses, armor, ranged weapons beyond shortbow, neth, raid items, etc] to be behind the "grind". There is is literally no reason for it to be that PvP is locked behind what is basically a mina + 25 individual paywall for access to a nation mine to barely scrape by enough kits with dedicated superfarmers. All the resource system has turned LoTC into is a half-MMM/quarter-PvP/Quarter-RP server with the most god-awful shoving of pvp/mechanics into things, with the best effort of communication of why things are this way being isolated/'rouge' staff members offering their own thoughts on a wholly private process, and not any form of meaingful change or chance to influence the direction of things in regards to the grind/pvp/etc. 

 

Genuinely, what's the hope for here? We're going to entice retention with a custom system that is undocumented beyond individual player efforts [and moderately gatekept as a result of their individual efforts], a half-ass mix of mechanics and lore, and all of this only explained if you join the right discords and ask the right people and don't get trolled like most of the time by staff who seem to enjoy their isolated nature instead of offering the help they volunteered to provide to the server? 

 

Who's enjoying any aspect of this?

[Adelemphii 1766]

I love these number posts because it puts to text what I feel personally as a single person supporting a small 4-5 person group's pvp needs. For 2 months I was hitting Orcs + Urguan + Norland mines every day twice a day, and I got a fair amount of resources to get roughly 15 basic kits of both iron and netherite (not counting leather because I am leather poor!, also not counting bows and arrows!)

 

Suffice to say, I felt burnout before the war even started, and granted my group has since fallen apart and so I've altogether stopped mining because I'd rather dedicate my interest to fixing the server.

 

That is to say, let's talk a little bit about the Surge Rewrite:

I'm slowly getting to a point where I'll need to start running tests on the Surge rewrite which will make balancing these things super super easy (trust me, it's really worth it).

 

At this point in time I have basic combat sorted with support for enchantments, custom effects such as bleed or concussions, tridents bows and crossbows, and varying armor types. I'm looking to make a simple combat set with as close to a 1:1 similarity with current surge for simple testing, and I hope to gather some people for testing within the coming 1-2 weeks (So long as I don't fall off the face of the earth again lol).

 

As of the moment, here's what a weapon config will be looking like:

Spoiler

 

Everything above the crafting category stuff is likely finalized for the foreseeable future, but the crafting is likely to change as I am just starting to implement the menus for crafting and it's a slog.

Here's how the Armor config looks at the moment:

Spoiler

Now the Armor config is more likely to change, I'm not very sure I enjoy how complex it is at the moment..

 

These configs are written to avoid hardcoding these values, so that in the future these values can be updated and changed in real-time without plugin or server restarts. I plan to develop an in-game menu where approved staff groups can access and tweak these values from inside the game without having to rely on someone with console access.

 

Items in-game will also update in real time, at the moment I have some debug values shown but I plan to touch this up in the future.

 

All in all, it's very WIP but it's coming along. All values in the screenshots are dev values to make it easier for me to TEST, so don't take them as gospel.

[Harold 3386]

The harder you make it for people to feel comfortable on the server (gear, food, home), the less dynamic and frankly 'new' RP you will get. That makes the map feel alive. Thats the very ethos LoTC was founded on. Thats why voting gives you Minas.

 

When you make it too difficult, it leads to less generic wildcard new people sticking around and more phoned in friends from elsewhere for the usual clique groups, and then the cycle continues. New ideas feel less common, 'the same old same old' becomes the norm and it generally feels stale. When you couple this with no war, a sleepy Admin team, you get a general feeling of ill will from the player base, and toxicity increases.

 

Its a balancing act that I dont think LoTC has ever really gotten right, but understandably its worse now than its been in a fairly long while and you're not even six months into a new map - thats a problem, and a big one that I dont think the Admins really know how to fix. 

 

 

[KBR 2046]

20 hours ago, Xarkly said:

Great study.

 

Major problem I see staff side is that economy and war economy isn't regulated whatsoever by mods (who handle conflict, raids, war) but by tech (who don't). It was unbelievably frustrating trying to figure out how to rebalance PvP stuff for this map (i.e. lower gear costs = raiding is easier/more accessible/lower stakes) only for the economy plugin to put a complete roadblock on that vision, with no remedy in sight. 

 

We cannot fix any of these problems piecemeal. 

This is a frustrating issue. Moderation interacts with the playerbase constantly and should therefore understand the ground-level impact, but can't fix this because tech-team controls the economy systems. This seems like a huge disconnect between who sees these problems and who can solve it.

 

3 hours ago, Adelemphii said:

Suffice to say, I felt burnout before the war even started, and granted my group has since fallen apart and so I've altogether stopped mining because I'd rather dedicate my interest to fixing the server.

I appreciate your response, and that a reworking is coming, but these problems have been burning players out for months now. Adjusting drop rates or material costs should just be a config file change that would take minutes, not months. Why tie relief to a full plugin overhaul when a temporary fix could happen today, if not weeks ago? I'm just curious as to who or what is blocking the easy fix. 

 

10 hours ago, TrendE said:

Pretty sure that the server's peak was, coincidentally, when the grind was at it's lowest.

Truke?
 

[Adelemphii 1766]

18 minutes ago, KBR said:

I appreciate your response, and that a reworking is coming, but these problems have been burning players out for months now. Adjusting drop rates or material costs should just be a config file change that would take minutes, not months. Why tie relief to a full plugin overhaul when a temporary fix could happen today, if not weeks ago? I'm just curious as to who or what is blocking the easy fix. 

Plugin changes that interact with PVP require admin approval, so it takes someone asking the admins about getting permission to change the numbers, then having someone change them.

 

I don't have enough knowledge to request the number changes myself, but if someone presents approved numbers to me I can work to change them in code.

[Borin 7645]

arcas pvp stuff, with lances and pikes. thats all u need man. simple iron crafting recipes. heck, a big stone world with iron and stuff that spawns in it would be cool so u can actually go mining for stuff rather than the 'grind' being to run around and right click blocks.

[monkeypoacher 8052]

On 1/21/2026 at 8:49 PM, Random said:

Imma be so real though, while I'm not the biggest fan of the grind I'm a big fan of slop low tier bandit personas with nothing other than pvp gear on them having to grind that long again after I have them D40

 

this is like being amused at making a fish have to swim in water

[Turbo_Dog 3566]

On 1/22/2026 at 1:22 AM, PrinceJose270 said:

If u suck at pvp darel the 5 year old musin with 1000 hours on hypixel duels is going to smoke you.

Maybe you should of hired him over the stone olog 

[KBR 2046]

@Daisy

I believe the consensus shows that the current numbers are an issue. (150 votes say it is, 24 say it isn't.) 
Can we get some reductions in cost (atleast or otherwise) in the meantime while @Adelemphiiworks on the surge rework?