The Trades Update: Nine Skills, Fourteen Bows and a Long-Overdue Pay Rise

Wanderer has nine skills that are not combat, and for a long time they have not been paying their way. Today all nine earn more — some of them a great deal more — and, just as importantly, every point of XP already banked in them has been raised by the same amount.

The new rates

The ore chain has gone up by a fifth:

The side trades have gone up by considerably more:

Why the numbers are so uneven

Because the problem was uneven. A fifth more Mining XP is the right size of correction for a skill you level by swinging at rocks in a steady rhythm — a rock is never far away, and the XP adds up while you walk.

Carpentry is the opposite. Before you can earn a single point of it you need logs, and before the logs are useful you need a sawmill, and the bench itself is somewhere else again. Three separate errands stand between you and one Fishing Rod. Paying that the same way a pickaxe swing is paid was never going to work, and a tenfold rate is what it takes for an evening at the bench to feel like it moved you somewhere.

The same reasoning sets the rest. Fishing, Stonecutting, Cooking and Sawmilling all pay per slow, deliberate, single action rather than per swing, and each has a gathering step in front of it. Foraging, which is genuinely quick and constant, needed only the same gentle nudge as Mining.

Nobody starts behind

A rate change on its own quietly punishes the people who cared most: everyone who has spent weeks filleting fish or stewing mushrooms would have watched a newcomer catch them up at triple speed.

So the change was applied backwards as well as forwards. Every player's existing XP in all nine skills was multiplied by that skill's new rate, in a single pass over the live world. If you had a Cooking 26 built out of six weeks of glowcap soup, you did not keep a Cooking 26 while the next player raced past you — you now have a Cooking 37.

The jumps vary. Most players have gained one or two levels in the skills they had touched lightly, and considerably more in anything they had genuinely invested in. Several people gained four, five or six levels in one skill. The largest single move on the server was that Cooking 26 becoming a Cooking 37.

Nothing was taken from anyone, no skill went backwards, and level requirements on recipes and equipment are unchanged — so a jump in level is a jump in what you can actually make.

A smaller fix worth knowing about

While the rates were being reworked, the way the numbers reach you was tidied up.

The forge, the sawmill, the carpenter's bench and the cooking pot all show you what a recipe is worth before you commit to it. Those listed figures and the XP that actually landed in your skill could previously drift apart. They now agree by construction: the rate is applied to the figure the game shows you, so what a recipe says it pays is what you bank. Worn cosmetic bonuses and live event multipliers still stack on top of that, as they always have.

Carpentry finally has something to build

Raising Carpentry tenfold only meant something if there were more than one thing to make with it. There are now fifteen.

Fourteen bows, one for every ten levels from 10 to 140, each named for the wood it is cut from: Beech, Hazel, Oak, Elm, Applewood, Elderwood, Pine, Maple, Willow, Spruce, Snow Fir, Frost Spruce, Birch and Pale Deadwood. Every one is a real weapon rather than a curiosity — a Beech Bow hits exactly as hard as a Bronze Sword, a Pale Deadwood Bow matches Obsidian — and being a bow, it lets a fight start six tiles away instead of one.

The recipes are built the way a bow really is. Three staves of the bow's own wood form the body, and then one plank of each older wood is laminated in as backing, one more every third tier. A Beech Bow is three beech planks; a Pale Deadwood Bow is seven planks of five different woods. The wood a bow is named for is always the wood its recipe is built around.

Bows are not smithable. The forge will not offer you one at any level — the carpenter's bench is the only place a bow comes from.

The bench can now fail you

Carpentry used to be the one crafting skill that always worked. It now behaves like the anvil.

Every craft rolls for success, on the same curve the forge uses: harder recipes are riskier, and every level of Carpentry above a recipe's requirement improves your odds. A failed craft splits the timber — no item, a little consolation XP, and each plank has an even chance of being salvaged from the wreck.

Successful crafts also roll for quality now, climbing Standard → Refined → Rare → Epic → Relic one rung at a time, exactly as smithed gear does. Working well above a recipe's requirement is what makes the good rolls likely. Only the bows can carry a quality; tools are always Standard.

And a mallet to swing

All of which needs a tool, so Carpentry has one: the carpenter's mallet, the bench's answer to the blacksmith's hammer. Nine rungs — Beech, Hazel, Oak, Applewood, Pine, Willow, Spruce, Frost Spruce and Pale Deadwood — each raising both your success odds and your quality odds, from +0% up to +34%, the same ladder pickaxes and hammers already climb.

The line bootstraps off work you have already done and then off itself. The first mallet asks only for the woodcutter's axe you needed to fell a tree in the first place, and three beech planks. Every mallet after that is cut using the one below it — held, not consumed, so you keep the whole set as you climb. From then on a mallet is required for real bench work, though the Fishing Rod is deliberately left outside the gate: it is a step some players are part-way through, and it stands between them and Fishing.

Go and look at your skills

If you have played at all in the last month, there is a good chance something has gone up while you were reading this page. The fish are biting, the sawmill is a fine place to spend an evening, and Carpentry is — at long last — a real trade, with a mallet in one hand and a bow on the bench.