Does this game still take lots of real time for basic stuff?

[ImTimIsMe]

I played during one of the betas, and one of the biggest setoff's for me was how much it felt like a login, do your daily "chores", and logout until tomorrow, kind of game. That and the monetization layout. Felt like it rivaled Overwatch 2 with their pricing

[Piperbird]

It depends on what you want to do. It's a make your own fun type game. You can log in and do your dailies if that's what you want to do. Or you can work on whatever goal you want to make for yourself.

I still need 2 fish to finish the bundles, so I've been working on that. But I keep getting distracted by flow groves every hour. This isn't the best game if you have ADHD, because this is a very 'ooh, shiny!' type game.

I've been playing since July of 2021 without ever buying anything, so I will probably toss them a couple bucks and get an outfit eventually. They just really haven't put anything out yet that I like.

[Aili]

From my experience, most of the basic stuff doesn't require waiting for resets. Each in game day cycle is equal to 1 irl hour I think. The only "chore" I can think of is watering your crops if you're growing something, but that's every in game day, so each irl hour you can water your crops. I guess there's villager interaction resets, each in game day you can talk to them to increase relationship levels, and each irl day you can give them a gift. There's no penalty for not doing the things that reset each hour or each day, you can do whatever you want with your time in game. I guess if you really want to focus on building your house and each room takes 8 irl hours to build, that's going to suck. For the most part, you can run around the world and hunt, fish, mine, and forage to your heart's content without waiting for anything.

I can't speak on the monetization, I'm completely free to play. But the store is only cosmetic items and doesn't change gameplay, so you don't have to buy anything if you don't want to.

[mana]

Yes, starting off, you will end up having to wait a fair bit of time for things to process (like logs into planks), crops to grow, housing parts to build. Eventually you'll have a surplus of the supplies you need, but it takes time to reach that point.

The other replies cover everything else, but I thought I would make mention of these time gated things since their posts didn't.

[ZeroGiven]

Yes, the devs have decided to go with time-gates, in lieu of actual content.

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by ImTimIsMe:

login, do your daily "chores", and logout until tomorrow

"Chores" reset weekly, so you don't even have to log in that much.

For a while there I was just logging in on Monday, doing all my weekly's, then logging out until the next Monday.

[Batabii • Suikoden I&II HD]

Very little content is "realtime". Crafting machines are usually done in less than an hour, crops progress at 6am each ingame day (so once per hour), the only thing that takes a significant amount of waiting is building a house. Even quests that say "check back later" usually just take a few minutes.

[stretch]

I can only suggest that you try to keep all your crafting benches running full time even when you don't actually need the materials. It's likely you will at some time. I usually have a very healthy buffer of stuff stashed so anytime I actually want to make something complex the resources are there. I don't think I would enjoy it if every time I wanted to make something I had to wait for materials to be crafted.

So yeah there can be a lot of waiting and you will always get stuck with the long wait on housing but you can kind of avoid a lot of it too.

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by stretch:

I can only suggest that you try to keep all your crafting benches running full time even when you don't actually need the materials. It's likely you will at some time. I usually have a very healthy buffer of stuff stashed so anytime I actually want to make something complex the resources are there.

Not to mention that the finished products usually take up less space than the raw materials.

[Batabii • Suikoden I&II HD]

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Originally posted by stretch:

I can only suggest that you try to keep all your crafting benches running full time even when you don't actually need the materials. It's likely you will at some time. I usually have a very healthy buffer of stuff stashed so anytime I actually want to make something complex the resources are there.

Not to mention that the finished products usually take up less space than the raw materials.

Not to mention that the crafting machines themselves have inventory slots to save you storage chest space.

[Sir Reginald FondleBox IV]

Originally posted by stretch:

I don't think I would enjoy it if every time I wanted to make something I had to wait for materials to be crafted.

I had this issue when I finally decided to make furniture sets had all the mats but very quickly ran out of logs and fibre (that's how i figured out there are fibre trees you can harvest) but I was also still at 1st storage cap but now I am up to iron I like to keep a healthy stock of planks (and every other resource) but will admit the lower storage cap did prevent stockpiling decently, although I enjoyed the challenge/balancing act.

[Batabii • Suikoden I&II HD]

Originally posted by stretch:

I don't think I would enjoy it if every time I wanted to make something I had to wait for materials to be crafted.

You would REALLY hate minecraft then. Especially since you can't just log out and play again later.

[Ailes]

I don't necessarily get the hate for this either. This is pretty normal for these kind of games. Pretty sure Stardew Valley has some of this too. If you ask me figuring out these systems and balancing and mastering them in an effective and efficient way is one of the appeals of these games. There are certain games where I despise this stuff, but not so much here.

[stretch]

Originally posted by Batabii • RDR2:

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Not to mention that the finished products usually take up less space than the raw materials.

Not to mention that the crafting machines themselves have inventory slots to save you storage chest space.

You can use the production queue to effectively store stuff and if you don't collect the planks or ingots it's storage for those too. Just be sure to have space in there for what you are crafting and it's fine. Can be a bit of a juggling act but works for me. I usually had those acting as storage before I upgraded my chests. Fiddly but works.

It's a balancing act between raw materials taking space, intermediate materials taking space but less than the raw materials, choosing which intermediate materials to make (globes or plate glass etc) and maybe actually making a finished product and keeping that around. Whatever you choose it's still going to take the edge off the time wasting this game likes.

Originally posted by Batabii • RDR2:

You would REALLY hate minecraft then. Especially since you can't just log out and play again later.

I have no clue about minecraft so thanks for the warning.

I was a little bothered by the 8 hour build times on houses but since I only did that 10 or so times (a lot more 3 or 4 hour ones and many 1 hour ones) and I think once I even had 3 or more of those going at once it wasn't rage quit stuff.
I often suggest ways to work with or around things like this because after many years I have realised that devs mostly don't even play their own games and actually have no real clue WTF they are inflicting on their players. If they did they wouldn't do it.
For myself I struggled with the minimum chests for way too long because I didn't even realise you could upgrade them. Way too long.

There are a lot of games I look at crafting times of 10 or 15 seconds or so and just wonder why? What is the point of making people wait for stuff? Some devs seem to imagine players actually enjoy tedium. I wonder if sometimes it's just to inflate total play hours and make games look like they have more content than they actually do. I am usually pretty cynical about dev motives since they constantly seem to make design decisions that warrant cynicism. There has to be some ulterior motive and that seems as good a conspiracy theory as any.

[Batabii • Suikoden I&II HD]

I'm so used to terraria's instant crafting that I am always mildly annoyed when other games take even 3 seconds to craft something. But it's not going to stop me from playing them.

[Ailes]

It makes sense to have the slightest crafting delay, so that you won't accidently craft something you don't need/want. Unless the respective game allows you to instantly craft back/recycle things at no loss of materials. That's super rare in such games though or comes with its own hardships. Of course there is a difference between 3 seconds, 5 minutes and 6 hours. But as mentioned earlier navigating and mastering such economics is in my opinion part of the appeal of such games. Again: even the highly beloved Stardew Valley has some of that.