Homesteads
Homesteads
Each player can claim one dynamic location found through exploration as their personal homestead. It stops the location from expiring, and prevents other players from interacting with it (though you can make it discoverable if you want to open a shop there or something). These homesteads are a form of open world housing.
Building Structures
You can build various structures there, ranging from a simple house where you can store goods, cook, and sleep - to dedicated crafting structures like a furnace or mill. What you can build, and what you can grow or harvest is dependent on the location you picked.
Note, that some types of gatherable resources remain when claiming homesteads - ruins, tracking, and foraging are all removed. Below are some activities you can do at homesteads:
Activities
- Farming - Crops grow best in their native biome, and when grown elsewhere they suffer penalties. Most locations have 3-6 features on their map - where each feature is usually a resource like a grove of oak trees, or a collection of raspberry bushes. You can choose to continue to harvest at that feature once you claim the location, or you could clear the land and farm another suitable crop.
- Mining - Unlike farming, you can't swap out a mining resource for a different type after claiming a freehold.
- Logging - Harvest trees for wood resources
- Bush harvesting - Gather berries and other bush resources
- Fishing - If your location has water features, you can fish there
- Crafting - Build crafting stations to create items
- Resting - Your homestead provides a safe place to sleep and recover
- Animal Husbandry - Raise and care for animals
Quality Degradation
For all homestead resource gathering (farming, mining, hunting, fishing), the quality of your harvestable resource will degrade over time. Meaning, even if you seed your garden with Q4 wheat, eventually after a few generations it will start to become Q3, then Q2, etc. To maintain quality, you must infuse your crops with an outside supply of high quality seeds/animals/etc. The point of this is to encourage the continued exploration for new locations with high quality resources. Otherwise once a sufficient number of players established high quality freeholds, there would be little incentive to explore and find new locations.