Trove Progression: Crafting, Fishing, and Building

Trove offers a wide array of progression options for the dedicated player, some of which I looked at earlier this week. I’ve also written on movement progression in Trove and discussed whether or not the overall end game model is a shallow grind. Today I’ll be looking at a few of the remaining options for progressing your character in Trove: crafting, fishing, and world building.

Early on in Trove you’ll want to craft as many stations as you can for your cornerstone or club world.

Crafting Progression

Crafting in Trove includes gathering materials, obtaining recipes, creating mounts, forging gear, crafting decorations, and leveling the three professions: gardening, ringcrafting, and runecrafting. I’ve already discussed gear progression in a previous article and will touch on recipes and decorations later which leaves the three professions and mount crafting. My experience is limited to ringcrafting and gardening but leveling runecrafting should follow the same pattern as those two. Currently in each profession there are five tiers that require 50 skill points each to unlock, 250 being the maximum number of skill points. As with any other crafting system the higher tiers require more or rarer materials. As you are leveling classes you should be keeping everything you gather that is listed as a crafting material which includes the fairie dust, bleached bones, robotic salvage, and anything else that drops from mobs. I would also recommend you get in the habit of gathering sunlight bulbs every time you see a giant sunflower as you will need quite a few of these to level gardening.

As you level ringcrafting you will progress through the same ranks as with the other gear slots with the final tier allowing you to craft shadow rings. Unlike many MMOs, the only way to obtain a ring slot item in Trove is through crafting, either yourself or by paying another player with flux for a crafted ring. Advances made in gardening will allow you to make decorative grasses and other plants and it will unlock the ability to grow crafting materials like glass bottles and steed feed. In the highest tier of gardening, you will be able to craft a mount and grow primary blocks for building, however the latter seems less efficient than gathering in the open world or purchasing from the cash shop. Lastly, as you level runecrafting you will be able to craft your own recipes for decorative blocks and in the final tier you will be able to craft tomes, an equipable item that over time grants various materials depending on which tome you craft. If your goals in Trove are primarily focused on building or collecting, you should focus on gardening and runecrafting. However if you want to create the best set of gear in Trove, you should focus on ringcrafting.

Here is the basic Meownt and one of my earlier attempts at building a cornerstone house.

When I first looked into crafting in Trove, I was mostly excited about being able to craft mounts. However this area of crafting will require a lot of materials gathering and a little luck. Firstly, you need to level your gardening at least to 150 in order to grow steed feed. You’ll need a lot of the sunlight bulbs and fertilizer to do this so make sure you are gathering the former and growing the later (which is in the first tier of gardening). One important detail to note is that growing fertilizer must be done indoors while steed feed (and most other plants) must be grown outside. Some plants even require a specific biome or season so if your plants aren’t growing try placing them somewhere else or check the tooltip for other requirements.

Once you have the fertilizer and the steed feed you’ll want to look at the recipe lists of the various mounts to determine what else you need to collect. Several of them require a base mount—either Pemblock or Meownt—in order to make an alternate version. However these two mounts are random drops off of any mob in the game and can be tricky to obtain. Your best bet is to pay for one with flux which is itself obtained most efficiently by deconstructing gear and running challenges. Lastly, there is also a mount in the final tier of gardening and runecrafting which requires maxing out each profession. Needless to say, whichever mount you choose be prepared for a lot of work before you are able to craft it. And before you even get started, look over them all as many require the same crafting materials and you will need to make some choices.

I’m still rocking the simple raft and tattered sail, I have yet to make one of the good boats.

Fishing and Boat Building Progression

I haven’t put much time into fishing yet so this will be brief. First of all, obtaining a fishing pole requires glim and can be purchased by a pirate vendor in the hub world. This NPC will also sell you your first raft and tattered sail, all of which can be equipped by going to the character panel and clicking the empty boxes for ship, sale, and fishing pole. You will also need to purchase some bait before you head out to sea. Your first fishing pole will only work in regular water and can be used from the shore or on your ship so long as it is not moving. Pro tip: pressing “W” will cause your sail to billow more and more increasing your speed while holding “S” will cause the sail to progressively collapse until the ship is no longer moving. Hold “S” until your ship stops in order to fish.

Here is the pirate cove in the hub world where you will buy your first raft, sail, and fishing pole.

To my right is the crafting station for advanced fishing poles, ships, and sales. It’s right in front of the wooden boxes but is difficult to locate if you don’t know where it is!

Once you’re ready, press “F” to cast and “F” again to reel in your catch when you see the bobber move. As you catch a variety of fish they will be logged into your collections tab. Deconstructing the fish you catch will earn you all kinds of loot, including crafting materials like the ancient scales which are very rare and required for ship and fishing pole crafting. In order to craft ships, sails, and fishing poles, you will need to use a unique crafting station found near the pirate that sells the starter items. Looking at the various recipes will give you an idea of what else you need to collect in order to work toward the ship or fishing pole you want to create. Better ships will include a cannon that can be used to blast buoys and crafted fishing poles will allow you to fish in lava and chocolate. You can look here for a complete list of fish, their rarity, where they are caught, and the loot they give.

This is my green lantern power battery, constructed on my cornerstone plot. All my portals and crafting stations are underground.

Building Progression

Building in Trove also has a kind of progression to it, albeit far less linear than all the other progression options. Your choices are broad and your end goals are your own, but no matter what you choose there will be some work required. First of all, there are two areas you will be able to build in: your personal cornerstone which is limited to a very small space and in a club world which can be expanded to be quite large. Every character starts off with a cornerstone but will either have to join a club world (and be given building permission) or craft one. To craft a club world, go to a crafting bench and open up the club world drop down menu. Craft a club card and then equip it in your action bar to get started. Activating the club card will prompt you to name your club world and entering your new world is as simple as pressing “P” and selecting the correct club name. Trove allows you to be a member of up to five different Club Worlds, so there is nothing preventing you from crafting your own and joining your friends in theirs.

Once you have a space for building, you’ll need to gather the necessary materials and create a few crafting stations. For basic primary blocks you can either gather them in the open world or purchase them from the cash shop. They are so incredibly cheap that if you are really invested in building I would recommend purchasing them. 2000 blocks cost 50 credits with 750 credits sold for five dollars, so for that amount you can purchase 30,000 blocks. If your building is ambitious you will go through that many quickly (my green lantern power battery pictured above took about 4000) but for most projects that will be plenty.

Here you can see two different colors of the Movember moustache style blocks.

As for crafting stations you’ll at least want a cube converter and a workbench which will allow you to craft different colored blocks and decorations respectively. However you won’t start out with all the recipes, you’ll have to collect them. Block recipes will be found randomly while gathering ore or they can be crafted with the runecrafting bench. Some are also given out during special events, like the moustache blocks from Movember. Decoration recipes are found in recipe lairs which can be identify by the scroll hovering above the dungeon and by the miniature shadow minions and shadow knight boss. Each biome has its own recipe lairs with recipes unique to that biome and several items require multiple parts obtained through separate recipes in order to craft the whole. Thankfully, you will always receive a recipe you do not have already, duplicates cannot occur. Nevertheless, for serious builders a lot of time must be spent farming or trading for recipe scrolls.

In addition to the cube converter and the workbench you may also want to craft a wheel of seasons and a fun factory. The wheel of seasons will allow you to craft season specific decorations, the crafting materials for which can only be gathered during the seasonal event. The fun factory provides recipes for crafting movement blocks, spikes, balls, music notes, and musical instruments. Currently there is no way to spawn mobs within a club world (and I have no idea if this is in the works) but otherwise the fun factory gives you everything you need to create your own lair or dungeon. As for the music notes and instruments, check out Trove Tunes, a weekly feature here on Waiting For Rez to see what players have composed with these musical blocks.

All in all, there’s plenty to keep a player busy in Trove. Whether it’s the kind of activity you’re interested in or not is up to you, but there’s no question that Trove has plenty progression paths available for the dedicated player. And while these two articles have covered the bulk of the options for character progression, I haven’t even touched on the latest addition of challenges and dragons, nor have I discussed collecting styles, allies, emblems, flasks—there’s plenty more to this game left to be discovered once you get started. The problem with Trove is never “what do I do?” it’s always “where do I begin?” which is a good problem to have.

Trove Progression: Classes, Mastery, and Gear

Trove offers a surprisingly wide array of options for character progression, much of which may be missed at first glance. It may not be nearly as complex as what you find in the traditional MMO, but the layers are there and certainly satisfying enough to keep me playing. I’ve written on Trove’s progression a couple of times already, first addressing the issue of whether it is a shallow grind, and secondly looking at what I consider to be one of the more unique elements of Trove gameplay, movement progression. However I’ve been wanting to provide a general overview for those curious as to what Trove offers by way of long term goals and character progression. That has proven to be more than I’d like to include in a single post, so instead I will break it up over at least two articles beginning with a look at class level, mastery rank, and gear progression.

This screenshot was taken right after I reached level 20 with my first class.

Class Level

The first and most basic element of progression in Trove is leveling one of the many classes available. Trove is similar to Final Fantasy XIV in that with a single character you are able to play as all the classes, only they must be leveled separately. Max level for each class is 20 but it is possible to increase your character’s level beyond that based on gear quality. Upon reaching level 20 there is a server wide announcement (or perhaps just within your current instance) of your character’s name and class. I have only one character at max level myself and it was a bit of a grind toward the end, however gameplay isn’t all that different at 20 than it is during the 10-20 leveling process, so I was never in a hurry and didn’t feel as though I was missing out.

To get started, depending on your character level you will enter one of the portals provided by the hub world in order to defeat mobs and complete dungeons for XP. Unlike many MMOs, mobs and dungeons never “grey out” so that you can continue to earn XP in a lower level zone, albeit at a slower rate. This is helpful if you’re struggling with a particularly squishy class. If you are leveling with other players, XP is applied to everyone involved regardless of who tags the mob first. In fact, if you arrive a little late to the final boss you will still be rewarded XP just for being close.

For the most part there is no real advantage to leveling one or multiple classes, it’s up to you which approach you prefer. However, if you want to participate in the hourly challenges with the highest level of efficiency, you will want all of them at max level and well geared in order to get the multipliers applied to specific classes each challenge as well as those for completing challenges in Uber 5 and 6 worlds. If you’re taking a more casual approach, I would recommend getting them all at least to level 10 which will be enough to access Uber 1 worlds and complete the challenges with at least the class multiplier. The cost of a new class is 1050 credits, about $7, however if you are patient and complete the Star Bar every day you can earn one new class every 8-10 days using the in game currency of Cubits. Stars are earned by completing lair and dungeon bosses and the Star Bar is filled after completing about a dozen.

At master rank 20, you receive a set of wings as a reward.

Mastery Rank

Whereas levels are unique to whichever class you happen to be playing, your mastery rank gauges your overall investment in the game. Each tier require one hundred points and points can be earned by doing just about everything in Trove. They are earned by gaining levels, advancing your professions, and collecting recipes, skins, mounts, costumes, allies, flasks—basically if you can collect it, you’ll get mastery for it. Because several of these collectibles can be purchased from the cash shop, it is possible to increase your mastery level by spending money, however many of those cash shop purchases can be made with Cubits which are earned in game.

Each rank of mastery provides a different reward, anything from a permanent percentage increase to a stat, Cubits for the cash shop, crafting materials, mounts, wings, ships, and even Credits which can otherwise only be purchased with real money. For a complete list of the Mastery rank rewards by tier, open up the character panel in the UI by pressing “C” and click the icon of a ribbon in the upper right corner. You will receive a reward for every rank up to 100; after that rewards are received every 10 levels. At first, leveling classes was my primary focus but now that I’ve become more familiar with the mastery system and its rewards, I think I’m more excited about a new mastery rank than I am about gaining a level with a class.

If you work on gear in Trove, not only will your stats progress, but you can look as good as I do as well.

Gear Progression

Obtaining the best gear in Trove requires a little luck, a little crafting, and a whole lot of grinding for materials. Currently there are eight tiers of gear: common, rare, epic, legendary, relic, resplendent, shadow, and the newest addition, radiant. The first four tiers drop within the zone portal of the same color but once you work your way up to the Uber zones gear drops could be anything from legendary to shadow with the chance to drop decreasing as the rarity increases. However the higher the Uber zone you enter, the greater the chance for shadow gear. As you level you won’t really need to worry about gear, it rains down like candy from the lairs and dungeons you’ll be completing and by level 9 or 10 you should at least have a complete set of legendary (orange colored) gear.

Gearing gets much more interesting (and complicated) once you start collecting shadow gear. Shadow pieces start at shadow level 1 and can be upgraded to shadow level 5. Within each shadow level there are also five tiers of upgrading which can be identified by the stars on the item’s tool tip. The number of stars that are full (yellow) will tell you how much the shadow gear has been upgraded. With a shadow level 1 piece it will cost you 15 flux and 10 Eyes of Q’bthulhu for each tier and then 50 Eyes and 100 flux to increase the gear to shadow level 2.

At this point things get grindy. Once you’ve upgraded a shadow level 2 piece five times (all the stars are full), you’ll need to deconstruct two other pieces of shadow level 2 gear to obtain the materials necessary to advance the piece to level 3. This pattern persists all the way up to Radiant which requires three penta-forged souls (three deconstructed shadow level 5 pieces of gear) to craft. In addition to leveling your gear in this way, you can also add additional stats and re-roll the third and fourth stat on every piece. And as mentioned earlier, as your gear improves so does your character level. As a level 20 Dracolyte with fully upgraded shadow level 2 gear, my overall level with the gear is 26. Needless to say, there’s quite a bit of progression and customization involved with crafting the best gear in Trove.

One aspect of this progression that I really appreciate is that while it may take you much longer, even by playing in the lower level Uber zones you will be able to make some progress toward gearing your character, if you like that sort of progression without the challenging combat encounters of Uber 5 and 6. You are also able to buy some of the crafting mats from the cash shop (the Eyes of Q’bthulhu) but the shadow gear itself must be earned in game. With the dragon caches rewarded during challenges there is no reason to ever buy the Eyes unless you are in a real hurry as both flux and Eyes of Q’bthulhu are rewarded in large quantities. For example, in only a few nights I’ve pushed my gear through all the level 1 and level 2 shadow tiers (five stars each) and I am now working on the pieces needed to create the forged souls for shadow level 3.

Believe it or not, there’s actually more that I could mention regarding classes, mastery, and especially gear progression, but this should serve as a solid primer for anyone getting started in Trove or curious about what kind of progression the game offers. Next I’ll be taking a look at leveling professions, fishing and ship crafting, and building a Cornerstone and Club World in Trove.

Trove Tunes: Skyrim Theme

It’s time for another edition of Trove Tunes! This week’s feature was created by Major Tom. Major Tom is the premier Trovian composer and the player behind the Trovian Maestros Club World. No one is as prolific or as talented as he is at this point in the game’s history. Personally, I hope to see more people take up the challenge of composing music in Trove to give Tom a run for his money, but for now most of what you’re going to see featured on Trove Tunes will be made by him.

Today’s feature is a remake of the theme from Skyrim. This theme is not something I’m familiar with from the source material as I have never played the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series. However what drew me to this song over so many others made by Tom was the variety of sounds and the way he uses space (or the lack thereof) to create different levels of intensity throughout the music. The introduction is quiet, with widely spaced bass-like sounds. Then the piano is introduced, building momentum and developing the melody. It’s when the synth-voice comes in that the song really starts to go somewhere. And that dog bark. Classic.