I want to go ahead and give you guys a sneak preview of our plans for the ranch assistant system. This system is currently in the works: look forward to it being fully functional in 7.4, though some small parts of it might be ready by 7.3. I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions:
Ranch Assistant
System
After completing certain quests and events, certain NPCs will become ranch assistants that you can have work at your ranch. You’ll have a limited number of ranch assistant slots, so you can only have so many working at your ranch at any one time (at the moment, we're planning on 5 assistant slots and one special slot for the NPC you choose to marry). Any assistants that you don't have working will still be in your ranch assistant pool, however, and can be switched in later. Based on which ranch assistants
you have assigned you’ll get special ranch-wide bonuses.
Assigning Tasks
Ranch assistants will be able to be assigned tasks to repeat every day or week. Different assistants will be capable of different tasks. Assistants can be assigned as many tasks as they have the energy to do.
- Breeding: The ranch assistant will be able to be assigned monster pairs to automatically breed together every day; they will always breed for as many times as the two monsters are capable.
- Caretaking: The ranch assistant can be assigned to a ranch building where they will raise the happiness of all the monsters each week as well as grant stat bonuses based on their own stats. They will also automatically harvest all monsters in the building whenever that monster builds up all their stored hearts, without the downsides of an auto-harvester.
- Sell Consumables: The ranch assistant can be assigned to sell your consumables every week. You can also indicate that only consumables under a certain level of quality should be sold, or that only consumables that were produced by your monsters should be sold (and not items you've gotten from events or through alchemy).
- Gathering: The ranch assistant can be assigned to bring back a collection of random items every week. The type, number, and quality of items will be determined by the ranch assistant's own special abilities.
Breedable
Most ranch assistants will also be able to breed with the monsters on the ranch, and will have their own stats/traits and appear in the breeding menu. Some ranch assistants will be the exclusive source of particular special traits. If an assistant is in your pool, you’ll be able to use them for breeding even if you don't have them working on the ranch.
Assistant Stats
STR – Gives a small bonus to the special assistant effects
of each other stat
DEX – Reduces the energy cost of adding new tasks for this
assistant
STA – Increases how much energy this assistant generates
each day
CHA – Raises how much happiness they confer on monsters in a
pen when caretaking
WIL – Reduces the chance of bad events or task failure
FER – Better chance of passing on any of their unique traits to
offspring
Bonuses
There will be a wide variety of bonuses for having particular ranch assistants active. Additionally, all ranch assistants will have special hidden bonuses that you'll have to discover through experimentation. For example: Alita: The player generates 10% extra energy each day,
Hidden: this bonus is increased based on the number of ranch assistants you
have unlocked
Now, the other thing I wanted to announce is that we're looking for fan suggestions for monster requests (that is to say, the bronze, silver, and gold requests that NPCs make for monsters with certain stats/traits, etc). We're looking to put in a large volume of these and I thought it might be a fun area for fan participation.
Monster requests can consist of stat, trait, monster type, and/or gender requirements, as well as a small text blurb from the NPC requesting the monster.
Example: Roxie might ask for a monster with high STR in order to help her move things around the shop, or Kay might ask for a monster with Geyser in order to fill up a revitalizing cum bath.
If you'd like to submit some ideas, go ahead and post them in the comments here on the blog! We'll pick out ones that we're particularly fond of for inclusion into the game.
Finally; S and Fleet and I are going to do a bit more streaming of us playing some ARK tonight since it's a Sunday. If you'd like to join us, check out my Twitch channel here:
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