Skills

Though it is before release, and there isn't much information on the skills in the game. Clockwork Labs put out a blog post regarding skills and levels and their plans for BitCraft.

### How Skills and Progression in BitCraft is Different From Other MMORPGs.

In many MMORPGs, leveling and progression are closely related to combat. You do more damage or attack faster if you level up a certain skill or set of gear. of course for a combat centered MMO, this makes perfect sense. However, this is not the only way to design an MMO. The way BitCraft is being designed makes it so the sidelined systems that are not dealing with combat in other MMORPGs are made into "first class citizens" in BitCraft, and are the stars of the game. In BitCraft, rather than having a combat-centric overall level, the characters have a set of skills each with their own level.

### Skill Design Philosophy.

Importantly, no single skill is necessarily given a higher status than any other. Skills in BitCraft are designed to map pretty closely to real-world skills. And just like real-world skills, you get better at them as you practice them. Clockwork Labs want players to be rewarded for just doing the thing that they like doing with relevant experience as they do them. And they do not want to force players into a class or profession before they even get a chance to play the game.

A list of some known skills:

*Carpentry - Cooking - Exploration - Farming - Fishing - Forestry - Hunting - Masonry - Mining - Smithing - Tailoring.*

Instead of highlighting an overall level in the game, we highlight whichever skill is a player’s *most practiced skill* or whichever skill they prefer to be highlighted. This means that in game, you could be known as a “Level 34 *Apprentice Forester*”, rather than a “Level 34 player". By highlighting a player’s prowess in a particular skill we also aim to allow players to *specialize*, without them feeling like they’re falling behind because they aren’t focusing on their “main level”. That being said, you’ll be perfectly able to rebrand yourself as a "Level 5 *Smith"* if you’d like a career change.

Each skill in BitCraft is designed to have *long term progression* built in. BitCraft is not a game which only starts once you reach max level. The gameplay is very much about the journey. It’s about building relationships and knowledge of the game world as you skill your character. Clockwork Labs is designing each skill to have potentially years of content. this kind of per-skill long-term progression is critical to designing a game world which is resilient to “coolness inflation”. very long-term progression also strongly encourages *specialization* because for most people it’s impractical to progress every skill to the max simultaneously. This means that your average player will only be deeply skilled in 1 or 2 different skills since there’s only so much time they can devote to the game and it’s more rewarding to be highly skilled in at least 1 area.

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In the BitCraft discord, a question regarding how "grindy" the progression will be was answered by a Developer.

*Does the game have a heavy level of grinding?*

> "BitCraft is designed around creating long-term progression for players. It's one of the key things that distinguishes it from a game like Minecraft. We, of course, focus on  designing content to be fun, new, and interesting, but there is some grind. The actual amount will depend on your playstyle. Becoming a true master of your craft will definitely take a while. However, if you plan to become a successful merchant you probably just need to be good with numbers. If you want to lead a city be sure to brush up on your social skills." **- 3Blave**
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Specialization will drive *player collaboration*, because specialization requires with different skill sets to cooperate to get things done. Cooperation also makes it more rewarding for players to spend most of their time on a single skill since they’ll be able to utilize other players’ skills through cooperation to reach the high level game content more quickly. Specialization can also drive the creation of vibrant economies. In order for large-scale cooperation to develop, players need a way to cooperate with other people without needing to trust each other. This is most easily accomplished through trade and commerce.

Another important point about skills in BitCraft: while skills are an essential part of player progression, they’re not the only way to progress in the game. Players can also progress by amassing wealth or items, through changing the landscape to suit their needs, through building advanced buildings and towns, or building up a network of social connections and relationships. Ideally, all of these other ways of progressing in the game should feel just as rewarding as skilling if players would prefer to go down that route. We want players who choose to progress in these other ways to also not feel inferior or left behind because they are not skilling. Assuming we can achieve this in a satisfactory way, we’d even like these other types of accomplishments to also be displayable in lieu of skill level.

One of the most important aspects of skills in BitCraft. While there are many aspects of your character you can show off in BitCraft, skills are accomplishments that should \*only\* be achieved through hard work. Just as in the real-world, becoming a master of your craft can only be achieved through *practice and dedication*. In this way, skills in BitCraft are, in other words, **Medals of Honor**.

### Progression Philosophy & Implementation

For a more in depth explanation of Clockwork Lab's progression thought process and philosophy, they have a blog post dedicated to progression.

BitCraft is designed from the ground up to achieve these goals:

* players will be able to make true progress in a fun, meaningful way for many years
* players with different levels of progression can play together and collaborate
* new content is not only added at the end of the progression, but throughout the game
* designed in a way that does not require all players to complete all of the content

If a game's content is focused on combat power and combat level, there is a problem that needs to be addressed. In this case, it’s not really possible for players with different levels of progression to play together. With BitCraft, Clockwork Labs is taking a completely different approach. Instead of combat being the sole focus of the game, the game emphasizes practicing skills like fishing, farming, forestry, and Smithing. Obviously less exclusive focus on combat is part of the pitch of the game, but it’s also critical to solving the problem of players at different levels of progress being able to play together. For example, when players work together to construct a new high level building, the building requires not only high level materials, but also a large amount of low level materials that can be collected by any player including a low level one. If the efforts of both types of players are needed, they can collaborate regardless of the disparity in their accumulated progress.

One way Clockwork Labs plan to address the issue of the differential rate at which players progress is to scale level progression logarithmically with experience. The most dedicated players will play your game an exponential amount more relative to more casual players. Scaling levels logarithmically with experience allows casual players to make substantial progress and be relevant while still allowing extremely dedicated players to outpace them in level without them being ridiculously overpowered. You can think of this approach as a smooth infinite softcap.

Clockwork Labs believe that time gating, if done well, can potentially feel immersive and rewarding. For example, while something like weekly login rewards can feel like a chore, having to wait for your crops to grow is both realistic and immersive. Rather than feeling like meaningless waiting, that kind of time gating requires planning and preparation and makes high level agriculture all the more impressive and meaningful.

Rather than expecting that all players will reach some sort of “end-game”, Clockwork Labs are placing more of an emphasis on the journey, rather than the destination. BitCraft is a game about building a new civilization. The process of building and constructing is what should be fun. Therefore, Clockwork Labs aim to add new content to the game throughout all levels of progression, rather than just at the end of the progression. In BitCraft this new content takes the form of new biomes where players can create new towns, new items, new skills, new social features, and new places to explore.

Clockwork Labs' end goal is to design a world where people can spend time with their friends, make new friends, or even make new enemies and designing a game which progresses people through an endless stream of content, but instead to give people a reason to socialize, collaborate, or compete with each other. While progression is core to the feeling of accomplishment players get from playing BitCraft, it means so much more when you can share that accomplishment with other people. An MMORPG is a chat application, the progression just gives players something to talk about.

Thank you to 3Blave and the rest of Clockwork Labs for writing these wonderful blogposts that give fantastic in-depth insight into Clockwork Labs' design philosophy for BitCraft.