Last night our guild joined the “we have a farm wagon” club. Fannel, Brokenwind and I were online pissing and moaning about our inability to grow the stupidly random thunderstruck trees needed to craft one.
Your Guess is as Good as Mine
No one knows for certain the circumstances that cause a tree to be “hit by lightning. There are lots of theories but the rarity of the occurrence makes it nearly impossible to know for sure. Our guild has planted illegal tree farms consisting of hundreds of trees, without producing a single one. Others have done 1K plus trees and have come up empty too.
It's a Big Deal
Farm wagons and merchants ships are the only vehicles capable of storing multiple trade packs for transport, each having slots where trade packs can be placed. Having placement racks allows you to carry more trade packs than you have bodies, greatly reducing the effort needed to move your goods. Both of these vehicles require two thunderstruck trees which because of the rarity and demand, are going for 1.3K gold each and up. 1K gold, honestly earned in game, is A LOT OF MONEY in AA. The construction also requires other relatively high cost components as well.
Mo Money
This is a significant achievement for us. On a given day I can produce 6 to 8 trade packs. However, I generally only transport 3 or 4 because it requires that many trips. Each trip takes roughly 15 minutes using safe routes – PVP restricted zones. Only doing that many a day artificially limits my income versus potential. After we crafted the farm wagon I was the first one we did a trade run for. I crafted 9 trade packs which we were able to transport in one trip – 6 stowed in wagon and one of each of our backs.
The route using a wagon took 3x as long but it’s still a much bigger income yield. When I go solo, I sail half way there which cuts out half the land route and on my donkey, I can climb over hills and cliffs for a more direct route than a wagon can utilize. Minus the recent hellish lag, it should be only 2x the amount of time. There are no passenger seats so two members are riding on top of the pack crates. The horrible lag caused our bodies to stutter and jigger around which made us fall off quite a bit. Regardless it was better than doing it solo times four.
Frequentkey joined us for the second run which was on Brokenwind’s behalf. Frequent’s shenanigans are just a step off of Fooshy foolishness. It was hilarity all the way ‘round. A few times I could hardly talk from laughing so hard. We’re not ever going to be the first to complete PVE progression or be a top PVP guild. Hell most of us have barely done any content to level. But I’ve never had more laughs in a guild than I’ve had with this group.
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