It’s been a while since I’ve talked or written about Nightingale in depth. In the last patch Inflexion added the ability for players to connect to one another directly, but no private hosted servers quite yet…not that I know anyone else playing this. They also added a few other bells and whistles, so since I haven’t played in a few weeks, here’s what I’ve been up to.

Housing Upgrade

I started out with a small wooden house whose sole purpose was to put a roof over my crafting stations so they would perform effectively. As time moved on, I decided to upgrade to a stone house. Since my estate cairn is in an abeyance zone, there’s not a lot of danger to my property; the only thing going on is the forest spirit stomping around on the other side of the hills. Still, the wooden buildings looked kind of ramshackle, and as an up and coming Realmwalker, I felt I deserved something better.

This isn’t the best building I can unlock, though. I have access to the Tudor designs as well, but those require a lot more materials than I have on hand right now, so stone it is.

Also, my design aesthetic sucks. No matter what I do, it still ends up as a cinderblock design.

The inside isn’t much better. I’m primarily concerned with getting my refined crafting stations unlocked and built. I have about 95% of the basic stations unlocked, but only about 40% of the refined (tier 2) available to me. The problem with refined stations is that they require a lot more specific materials like metal shafts, wire, and wooden poles, whereas basic tables only use wood and stone. Building the tier 2 tables requires I have tier 1 tables on hand to create those advanced materials, after which I can destroy the basic tables assuming I have a tier 2 to take it’s place.

Hired Hands

I’m still roaming around with Stephen as my adventuring companion. I need to upgrade his gear, though, as he’s only GS 16 whereas I am GS 20. I plan on crafting myself some better gear with the T2 tables, so Steve will get my hand-me-downs.

As I make my way through the realms, I have been stopping by the camps of NPCs and helping them out with building, repair, and defense. Once these tasks are completed, I picked up a few “calling cards” from some of the NPCs. This allows me to hire them on once I have stations built on my estate. The one you see above is a mining station.

I have Edith working this one, while Susan is working the wood station nearby. Over time, these NPCs will collect resources (invisibly, apparently, as I don’t see them on my land) and place them in the global estate storage, meaning I’ll have a whole lot of materials to return to now and then. Considering each station can harvest multiple resources (wood can accept bundles or sticks, mining can be stone, rocks, tin, quartz, or other rocky resource that is in the current realm), I guess the idea is to have multiple, hire multiple NPCs, and enjoy the free resources. I don’t know what the current max NPC hireling limit is right now, so I’ll just build a stockpile of one resource and switch to another as needed.