The game design branch is responsible for drafting the blueprints for Age of Aincrad. We work hard to try to give balanced mechanics and build an immersive world for all of you to enjoy. Recently, we’ve been working hard to finalize all of our skills, and so we’ll start off our series on game design with a small peek into our harvesting and gathering skills.

In Age of Aincrad skills are player attributes that reflect a players experience and proficiency in a specific field. As the player increases in level, done by constantly using a skill, he is able to progressively do harder tasks, such as mining stronger ores or cutting down finer wood. For this blog entry, we will briefly discuss our harvesting and crafting mechanics.

Harvesting Skills:

Different types of harvesting can be done everywhere you can find something to harvest from, for example ore outcrops or lakes with fish. Harvesting is composed of: Mining, Fishing, Woodcutting, Archeology, and Thieving. In general, the purpose of harvesting skills is to provide the players of Aincrad with a source of items that act as precursors to craftable gear. Lower level harvesting items will produce lower-tier items, and so if you want the very best gear in Aincrad, you will need to find the very best harvesters.

Crafting Skills:

Using the resources which the player receives via Harvesting Skills, the player can craft various gear and items, so long as they have the recipe. Recipes list the ingredients needed to craft an item and are required before a player can actually craft the item. The current crafting skills are Alchemy, Cooking, Smithing and Crafting. Each skill produces different sets of items aimed at serving different purposes in the game.