I won't go into great detail in this blog post, but rather in the forthcoming EC Pages. I'll also be getting the new How To Star Your EC page up at some point here when I'm sure of the best method.
The new features added include, at the core, the ability to produce your own supplies and the removal of the Secret Market. No more SMIs! Now we just get Employees for passes... which I'll explain in a minute.
- We now produce our needs. Every need. EC Benefits (and since the inventories are merged, stuff for your horses), EC Supplies (boxes, greenhouses, showers, and new updates like tractors [for meadows] and water troughs [for boxes] and all that good stuff). We can also produce bonuses, like Bell Boots and stuff. If you like, you can buy these things in the store instead.
- You can get one kind of resource from the three available EC locations: Beach, Mountain, Forest. Forests have wood, Beaches have sand, and Mountains have iron. Other resources include flax, leather, straw, and wheat bran.
- Lessons are updates so that now, you can arrange whether your boarders do mostly missions or mostly lessons. The skills and stuff will be about the same, but missions allow you to gather stuff for your EC- the thing your EC has. So if you set the ratio of missions to lessons to 50/50, then half the time people will get to do lessons, and half the time they will get to do missions. These missions bring in your EC location's resource, so if yours is on a mountain, you'll get iron. In the forest? Wood. Etc, etc.
- The employees are back!.... Kinda. You can hire a type of employee for thirty days, for 1 pass. Of course, I'll never be doing that, but whatever, lol. This is basically the replacement for the Secret Market, which is no more. (I almost miss the whole SMI thing, purely because in a way, it was so very absurd, lol).
- All of your producing is done in Workshops. There are three types of workshops, (just like there's three types of greenhouses and boxes and meadows.. etc etc) and you are given a small one to start with. You can purchase or craft more but, just like the meadows, cannot have more than five going at one time.
- You can now raise cattle to get leather, another resource. This is done from the meadows page and takes a full month and costs a bit of Equus. It's basically like planting cattle, lol. It does mean that you can actually raise six crops, because a cattle pasture doesn't count toward you five-crop limit, since it takes so very long. And no, you cannot raise cattle in a greenhouse. I'll just quote Ow's awesome answer here: "No, you cannot. They are not tropical cows." LOL.
- We've lost the ability to put our horses in the box or meadow. This means no more earning stuff like apples in a meadow, or finding bonuses in your box while BLUPing. Presumably, there is something to make up for the lost energy abilities, but I don't know what. I haven't found it, whatever it is, lol. On a side note, what has happened to the divines that have a chance of earning a [blank] when entered in the box/meadow for the first time each day? Have they been relegated to the likes of the Sleipner? Hmm....
So... that's the updates rundown! I'll be working on updating the actual EC pages within the next couple weeks. There's going to be a lot of them and I only write one at a time so, I don't plan to be a speed demon in doing this. ;)
As always, Happy Howrseing,
~Cass <3