It turned out that there were a number of skills that would allow a player to build a house. Some were more complex than others, and many of them involved mixing two or even three skills together. For instance, someone with the stonemasonry and carpentry skills could combine them to create a house using both materials, whereas someone with only the carpentry skill would have to make a house using just wood.
While I researched town building, Lincoln had been exploring the area around us, going as far as the woodland in the distance without entering it and then walking back in a circle. Every so often, he stopped and inspected something in the grass. He plucked leaves and pinched them between his fingers, rubbing them until they wore away. He brought petals up to his nose and sniffed them.
When he returned, he emptied his inventory out onto the ground, littering the grass with different colored flowers, stalks, and pinecones. Some of them were tangles of thorny vines, while others looked like the herbs you’d find in real life, except colored sunlight yellow or a deep purple.
I’d never played as a forager, ranger, potioneer, or any of the classes that involved heavy herb use. To me, if I could buy a potion in a shop, then I was happy.
Linc stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at his flowery trove. “Well. These must do something,” he said. “I don’t know what, but something. I need the foraging skill before I can identify them. Botany might work, too. Shame my real-life skills don’t transfer into BaS.”
“On the subject of skills. I’ve been reading into it. There are a few ways to build a house. The improvisation skill lets you fashion a hut out of whatever materials you can lay your hands on. Whereas carpentry lets you build a more stable structure but it takes longer to learn. Then there’s architecture, brick working, metallurgy. The more skills you have, the better a building you can create.”
Linc didn’t answer. He was kneeling in the grass again, studying his foraged loot intently.
“Linc.”
“Huh? Sorry, buddy. Got wrapped up in something. You were saying?”
I repeated what I’d told him, which Linc folded his arms and considered.
“How about this,” he said. “If we’re working together on making this a town, then I propose a division of labor. You do all the planning and building, and I’ll be in charge of gathering resources.”
Planning a whole town seemed like a task. Then again, until I met Linc, I’d been expecting to have to do that. At least if he was in charge of procuring resources, I wouldn’t have to make journeys to the woodland for timber, or go to the mountains to mine stone and metals.
The division of our skills seemed like the best way to do it, to me. IT left us free to specialize in specific skills rather than having to be mediocre at lots of them.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“Right. So I can call myself Head of Resource Procurement, can I?”
“If that’s what you wanna do.”
“Just sounds fancier, that’s all. I never wanted a desk job, but I’ve always envied folks who have fancy titles. Tell someone at a party that you’re a forager and they look at you like you’re begging for change on the street.”
“Seriously? I think it’s awesome that you do something different.”
“Then maybe you should meet my parents,” laughed Linc, “Because they sure as shit don’t agree. Now, as Head of Procurement, I have a lot to do. But the first is to ask ya this – what’s your title.”
“Builder.”
“That’s it?” said Linc. “Builder?”
“It’s simple. Does the job. a little like me.”
“Alright. Whatever makes ya happy. Anyway. What say you learn those skills you were blabbering about, and I’ll see what materials I can scavenge?”
“Deal. Listen, Linc. You’re new to BaS, aren’t you?” I said.
“Sure am.”
“Okay. I better tell you a couple of basics so you don’t make the mistakes I did on my first ever playthrough.”
“Ah, this can wait. Foraging’s a-callin me.”
“Trust me. You’re gonna regret not listening.”
“Alright…”
“So, we’re both level 1, okay?” I said. “That means right now, we have a skill limit of 1. We can learn one new skill, and we can’t learn another until level 2, at which point we get another skill slot. And so on and so on, for every level. What I’m saying is, be careful what you choose. Removing a skill can be done in towns, but it’s expensive, and you lose any ranks on that skill if you do that.”
“Choose skills carefully. Got it.”
“You can look it up online if you need more information on whether to choose a skill. Secondly, there are a couple of ways to level up. There’s the classic way – kill monsters and earn EXP. Then there are tons of quests you can accept in town where you get EXP as a reward. But we’re building a town here, so we aren’t gonna be doing much fighting or questing. Besides, we wanna be careful leveling up that way, in any case.”
“We do?” said Linc.
“Yup. However you choose to level up affects the kinds of perks you get. Leveling up through combat will mean you get to choose mainly combat perks.”
“Right. So we need a way of leveling that unlocks perks more focused to building our town.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s this third way of leveling up?”
“Skill use,” I said. “BaS is all about giving players a choice of how they experience the game. If you had to level up by fighting, then your experience is still limited whichever way you look at it, because you’d have to spend all of your time fighting stuff. So, there’s another way to level, and that’s by using your skills. Earn a skill, successfully use it enough, and you earn exp.”
“Right. So if I was a chef, for instance…”
“Then you’d level up by cooking things.”
“Got it. I’ll bear that in mind.”
Linc headed off toward the woodland in the northeast. The day was wearing on now, and the woods had an unwholesome darkness that hadn’t been there when the sun was at its highest. Linc, at least, knew enough to avoid straying too close to it while we were low level and unarmed.
While he was gone, I checked the guides on the Blade and Sheesh website and scoured their skill list. The top building skills like architecture were hard to get and required me to have some lower crafting skills first.
You gained skills in a few ways in BaS. One was by repeating a related action until you got the chance to learn the relevant skill. Another was to read a skill tome, which were available in book shops. Finally, you could jump the queue and just pay a master or skill trainer to teach you a skill.
What this meant was that a skill like architecture was out of my league for now. Even if there was a city nearby, I A) didn’t have money to pay tuition and B) hadn’t leveled my intelligence enough to be able to earn a skill.
Further down the list of skills was carpentry, a sort of catch -all skill where woodwork was involved. The requirements for carpentry were as follows:
Carpentry: ‘Apprentice’ level requirements:
Power: 2
Agility: 4
Intelligence: 4
[Optional] 1x instruction from a carpentry master
The ‘1x instruction’ meant that I had to find a carpenter NPC and get them to teach me, usually for a set fee. Players who reached the master level could also become trainers in the skill, selling their expertise for gold. They weren’t allowed to undercut NPC trainers, however, so there was no possibility of them selling enough training to boost someone to master level for a stupid price like 10 silvers.
I couldn’t afford to buy carpentry instruction just yet, so I was going to have to learn a skill that didn’t have any cost attached to it.
When Linc returned from his exploration six game hours later, which in reality was fifteen minutes, he bought with him a load of timber that he’d found in the woodland.
“Hopefully this will help,” he said. “I didn’t realize that my arms’d feel tired in here. This place is way too real sometimes. One of my first acts as Head of Procurement is gonna be to get a cart or something.”
“This looks great. Thanks.”
Most of it was just branches that he’d found on the forest ground, which he’d collected after piling the rotten branches to one side. The ones he was left with were long and short branches. Thin and wide ones. A very varied selection, and not the kind of wood we could use to make houses. Still, it would be useful.
“There’s no shortage of trees, let me tell you,” said Linc. “The herb picking gets better the deeper into the forest you go, too. But it gets dangerous.”
“Did you run into trouble?”
“I died, Josh. So yeah, you could say that.”
I must have missed Linc straying far into the woods to get attacked. Maybe I did need to have a talk with him about that after all.
“What penalty did you get?” I asked.
“Lost half of my inventory. And I got a speed debuff for five minutes. That’s why I wasn’t back sooner.”
“If you’d gone back to the place where you’d died, you could retrieve any inventory items that you lost. They won’t stay there forever, though. You gotta be quick. Anyway, maybe avoid the deep forest until we’re better provisioned.”
“Ah, damn it. That’s where all the good stuff is, it seems like.”
Linc took all of his gathered herbs from his inventory and began studying them, trying to earn the foraging skill. Meanwhile, I got to work on some skill learning of my own.
First, I searched through the sticks and branches until I found four that were as long as my forearm and an inch wide. I set these on the ground. Next, I took some of the vines that Linc had brought back. I tore the vines into stringy strips.
After searching around the fields for a while, I found five rocks that were the size of my hand. They were all shaped differently, but with one similarity – they had at least one edge sharper than the rest.
Using the sharpest rock, I gouged a slit at the top of one stick, carving the wood until the slit was four inches long and two wide. I slotted one of the sharpened rocks into it, then used vine string to secure it in place, wrapping the string around it until it was about as secure as it was ever going to get.
Item Improvised: Crude Axe
You have made progress toward the [improvisation] skill.
“Hey, Linc. Linc.”
With a great struggle, Linc tore his attention away from a strange-looking plant he was studying. I was quickly learning that Linc had that rare kind of attention span where if something interested him, he would get absorbed in it deeply to the exclusion of everything else. My cousin, Moe, was the same if you put a soldering iron in his hand and placed a circuit board in front of him.
“What’s up?” said Linc.
In answer, I broke the number one rule of schools all over the world – don’t throw scissors. Only instead of scissors, I tossed the axe to his feet.
He picked it up, inspecting it by turning its handle around.
“Not bad. Not bad at all.”
“It won’t let us chop down trees or anything, but maybe we can hack branches off.”
“Thanks, Buddy. Here. Take this.”
He tossed a plant to me. It was a long-stemmed plant with two blood-red furry balls growing on the end.
“This is a healing plant, supposedly. It’s supposed to be boiled into a potion, but eating it will restore your health, too. Just not as much.”
“Did you learn the foraging skill, then?”
“Nope,” said Linc. “I’m using the Blade and Sheesh website like you told me. But when I learn foraging, I’ll be able to focus on a particular resource and my map will start showing me where those things are. Be right back. Gonna explore a little more.”
With Linc gone, I made four more of my crude axes. I placed them in a pile beside me. It was when I finished the fifth one and set it down on the ground with the others, that I got a notification.
You have learned a skill – improvisation.
Rank: Apprentice
A resourceful skill that allows you to create crude tools and structures from various materials.
Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] improvisation?
This wasn’t the greatest skill to commit to a slot, but I was a level 1 player. I didn’t have much choice. I needed to earn EXP, and if I wasn’t going to be fighting stuff, then I needed a skill that I could use to generate it. And if improvisation came in handy in town building, then that was great.
I also needed to make money, and this was a step in that direction. For instance, I could sell my crude axes to a merchant NPC when I saw one. They wouldn’t fetch much gold – especially not without a bartering skill – but every penny helped.
When I accepted the skill, a notification told me that [Apprentice] improvisation had been added to my usable skill list.
Testing it, I put 1 stick, 1 string vine, and 1 rock in my inventory.
I mentally clicked on the improvisation skill.
Ingredients:
1x wooden stick
1x String vine
1x asphalt rock
Available Improvisations:
Crude axe
Crude Bola
Crude knife
Crude spear
Crude hammer
The bola was a weapon where a lump of stone was tied to the end of a rope. I’d never used one, but an educated guess told me you either swung it at stuff or maybe swung it around your head to build momentum, then released it. It didn’t have much of an attack rating, but it was good to know that I could create a weapon even if it was rated as ‘crude’.
The other things were more useful to me. The knife would have all sorts of utilizations, whereas a hammer was going to be key in building structures. Likewise, we could use crude axes to cut branches from trees and collect them for timber.
Right now, I just wanted to test the skill. So, I selected ‘crude spear’, thinking that Linc’s resource gathering might also include hunting.
A timer appeared over the ‘improvisation’ symbol on my skill list. It was there for just five seconds, and then a spear appeared at my feet.
Kneeling down, I picked it up and inspected it. It was a shoddy thing, really. It amounted to just a sharpened stick. The beauty of it was that it had taken me no effort at all to make it. Without the improvisation skill, I would have had to sit there with a sharp stone and spend time sharpening the tip of the spear. Now, as long as I had the ingredients in my inventory, I could make a spear just by giving a command.
When Linc returned two hours later I tossed the spear to him.
He flinched and lifted his arms up to his face.
Since I hadn’t been trying to kill him or anything and hadn’t put force into it, the spear fell by his feet.
“You dope,” I said. “Even if PVP was enabled, do you think I’d try to kill you with something like this?”
“Caught me by surprise, is all! I keep hearing growling sounds coming from the woods, and it sounds so real that it’s gotten me on edge. Anyway, what’s this?”
“A spear,” I said.
“I know. I mean where’d you find it?”
I told him about my improvisation skill. Linc was impressed, and told me in return that he’d earned the apprentice level of survivalism, which included a foraging aspect. As much as it pained him to be an apprentice in the game in a skill that he’d mastered in real life, he was happy to have achieved it.
“If only skills transferred into the game,” he said. “Or even vice versa. Like, imagine you could practice a craft skill in the game, and then use it outside. Come to think of it, why isn’t that a thing?”
“Because learning a skill usually requires some kind of muscle memory,” I said. “But we aren’t really using our muscles. It’s all about the pads on our temples. When you pick something up in BaS, you aren’t actually grabbing it with your hand. It’s just an electrical impulse or something.”
“Just seems to me there are better applications for this kinda tech than a game.”
“Tech goes where the money is,” I said.
The sky above us had been darkening for a while and now it was completely black, save for the whites of stars winking at us from digital galaxies far away. This meant that maybe forty real minutes had passed, since it had been early morning when I began my playthrough, and game days were just shorter than an hour.
With the coming of the night came a chill. Not as cold a chill as in real life, since nobody would want to play a game where they froze their asses off, but a notable chill nonetheless. It was on the very edge of comfort, where if it was any colder it would have been unpleasant. It was a clever balance – enough to add to the immersion, but not enough to make you want to log off.
“How about a fire?” said Linc.
“How about a burger and a beer?”
“I’m serious. My survivalism includes fire lighting. But I’ll need a knife.”
I passed him the crude knife I had made earlier. Using some timber, Linc made a fireboard and cut an angular notch in it and then made a depression in the wood. From one piece of wood he cut a spindle and he bent a more pliable branch to create a bow. After using string vine to create tension on the bow and spindle and then creating a little tinder nest, Linc announced that he was done.
“Voila. A one hand drill for fire starting. Bon Appetit.”
“Did you take French lessons at school?” I said.
“No, why?”
“Never mind. So we use the drill to start a fire? I saw this on Survivor Jones once. It took him ages.”
“Survivor Jones wasn’t playing BaS,” said Linc. “And he didn’t have the survivalism skill. Aaaand…the guy’s a giant fraud.”
“You got a problem with Survivor Jones?” I asked.
“All his shows are scripted. Guy hasn’t spent a real day outdoors on his own in his life. Don’t forget, on these shows where it looks like he’s stranded on his own…who’s holding the camera?”
“Good point,” I said.
With a working hand drill, Linc’s survivalism allowed him to start a fire simply by selecting the skill. One second there was nothing, the next there was a fire glowing red and orange and spreading a welcome heat over me. If I had tried to use the hand drill, it would have taken a lot longer since I didn’t have a relevant skill, Similar, Linc couldn’t craft improvised tools with the speed that I could.
I sat a little closer to the fire, salivating over the prospect of catching a rabbit or hare and toasting some meat.
Suddenly, my healthbar glowed red, and a quarter of it drained away.
An arrow was sticking out of my thigh.
“The hell?”
Linc stood up, pointing. “Over there! A weird…uh…thing!”
I got to my feet and yanked the arrow out. I didn’t feel pain, since the full immersion regulations signed two years ago prevented it. Instead, I felt pressure on my thigh where the arrow had been.
More arrows whizzed at us. One stuck in the mud near my right foot, while another smashed through into the fire and sent embers flying. Linc got to his feet, holding the crude knife I had given him.
From my inventory I took out my crude spear, which I had about as much confidence in as a sword made from chocolate.
“Holy fuck! I wasn’t ready for how real this would feel. My heart’s pounding,” said Linc.
“See anything?”
“Nothing. Whatever it was is hiding now.”
A scream pierced the stillness of the night. It was a strange, guttural scream made from something almost certainly inhuman. It was soon followed by another scream, and then a third.
Then, a shape emerged from our east. It was a woman, and she held something in both her hands. She tossed whatever it was at us. Then she tossed another. Then another.
In the glow of the firelight, I saw what they were – corpses. More specifically, the corpses of three grunders. Grunders were one of many low-level creatures in Bas. Waist-height and possessing basic intelligence, they were group hunters that could use weapons such as bows and arrows and swords. They looked like hairless rats that walked upright.
“Are you guys trying to get killed?” said the woman.
The green tag above her head revealed her to be a level 3 player called Hilly-Rose. She was shorter than Linc and me by a few inches but she more than made up for it in muscle tone. It looked to me she’d leveled the old-fashioned way by killing stuff, and this has increased her power ability. In turn, the change in attributes had shown on her physique.
Unlike Linc and me, she was wearing a leather chestpiece and leather gauntlets that covered her hands and most of her forearms.
“Sas said there’d be three of us,” said Hilly-Rose, “But I was beginning to doubt anyone was showing up. So I went looking for fun.”