Happy New Year! It’s me, floursifter, once again. Class is back in session, and today is WalkScape 102. If you are relatively unfamiliar with the game - please read my WalkScape 101 post first before continuing here!

We’d love to hear if you have set any stepping goals for 2024! It’s been a joy to watch folks post their progress and encourage each other throughout 2023, and I hope this is an aspect of the community we can keep around for many years into the future.

Work and Action Math

Before we dive into item attributes, we need to take a brief detour to discuss how the game handles actions and the steps required to complete them. There were major changes made a few months ago that make this system much easier to communicate! Text wall incoming.

Behind the scenes, your steps are worth an in-game currency called Work. With each step you take, work accumulates until you reach the amount required to complete your current action. Surpassing this threshold completes the current action and your accumulated work is reset back to 0. Finally, your work automatically starts to build again towards the next action completion. Unused work does not carry over during this process.

For an in-game example, the “Cut Birch Trees” activity requires 30 work to complete an action, which can be thought of as “Cutting A Birch Tree”. If your character was naked, this action would require 30 steps to produce 30 work. On the step that you are equal to or surpass the 30 work threshold you gain an amount of experience, and rolls on various loot tables. These loot tables produce a guaranteed birch log, a tiny chance at a bird’s nest, and another tiny chance at a woodcutting chest.

There are mechanisms in game that change the amount of work you do with each step through an attribute called “Work Efficiency”. Imagine that you were able to improve the work that each of your steps produced by 20%, producing 1.2 work per step. This could lead to some serious step savings - only requiring 25 steps to produce the 30 work required to cut the birch tree once.

Work Efficiency is capped on activities through the implementation of a step floor. For “Cut Birch Trees”, you can not reduce the activity under 19 steps per action, regardless of how much work efficiency you have equipped. The amount of Work Efficiency that you are allowed to apply towards an activity generally increases as the level required for the activity goes up.

Additionally, because unused work does not carry over to the next action, it’s best to think about your gear critically if you want the maximum benefit from your stats as a whole. Maybe it’s worth swapping one of your work efficiency for something else if it won’t change the number of steps that your current activity will take!

Work Efficiency From Levels

In addition to gear, your character also gains work efficiency from the difference between your skill level and the required skill level of your current activity. This amount is equal to 1.25% work efficiency per level differential, capped at 25%.

Back to our birch trees activity example, which has a requirement of level 1 woodcutting. At level 21 woodcutting, we will get the maximum benefit of 25% free work efficiency from level differential, as ((21-1)*1.25)%= 25%. This will bring each action from requiring 30 steps down to 24 steps to produce the 30 work required for completion, as 30/1.25 steps = 24 steps. This can be lowered even further by equipping gear and tools that provide additional work efficiency until we reach the 19 step floor for the activity. We hope that players enjoy their feeling of character naturally getting better at activities over time!

Item Attributes

However, Work Efficiency isn’t the only way to increase the rewards from your valuable steps. Tools and gear in WalkScape come with all sorts of attributes that provide boosts for different parts of the action reward system. Here’s a list of the most common attributes you will see in game:

• Work Efficiency - Changes the value of work that your steps produce. Positive work efficiency decreases the amount of steps required to complete an action, while negative work efficiency increases the amount of steps required to complete an action.
• Experience - Changes the experience rewarded on action completion.
• Chest Find - Changes the chance to find chests on action completion.
• Fine Material Find - Changes the chance to find fine materials on action completion.
• Double Result - On completion, changes the chance for an action to give whatever loot you rolled twice instead of once.
• Double Action - On completion, changes the chance for an action to give full rewards (experience and loot table rolls) twice. If this triggers when traveling - jump two nodes instead of one!
• Crafting Outcome - Changes the probabilities of getting higher quality tools (we will have an entire deep dive on this system and attribute).

I’ll leave the rest for you to discover in game, but over the course of the CBT you will likely see experimentation with all sorts of item attributes that provide unique abilities! At the moment, the easiest way to see what attributes are on an item is to try equipping it in it’s appropriate place on the Gear or Tool tab, discussed below.

Inventory

The in-game inventory has a soft-cap at 28 inventory slots. Items can stack in the same inventory slot if they are the exact same item. Like all materials, coal ore can stack 25 high within each slot. However, fine coal ore will not stack in the same slot as a normal coal ore, as they are not the same item. If you have 13 coal ore in your inventory and receive a fine coal ore while mining, it will occupy a new inventory slot. Crafted items, tools, and consumables can stack 10 high within each slot. The amount of inventory slots you are currently occupying can be found in the bottom left corner of the UI.

Going above the soft-cap of 28 inventory slots will enforce global work efficiency penalties on your character. At 29/28 inventory slots this penalty is not severe, but it quickly slows your character down as you get into the low 30s. You will never slow to 0% progress, but you will eventually reach -99% work efficiency at 33/28 inventory slots occupied. It’s best to keep your inventory under the soft-cap limit.

Materials stack 25 high in each inventory slot, while other items typically stack 10 high.

In the bottom right of your inventory, a button to access your treasury can be located. The treasury holds any chests that you find on your journeys. These chests do not occupy inventory space until you open them and receive the items that they contain. It’s easiest to open these at a bank so you can immediately bank the items gained, but it’s also possible to open these out and about, just be careful of going over the inventory soft-cap!

The Treasury. Click the back button in the bottom right or long swipe to get back to the Inventory.

Players can drop items from their inventory at any time by selecting a stack and using the UI that appears at the bottom of the screen.

Dropping items - use the slider or buttons to get to your desired quantity and click DROP!

For maximum power-leveling efficiency, you can also multi-select items in your inventory to drop, select, or bank them (that last one only if you are in a location with a bank). Long-press a single item to open up the multi-select UI, and continue tapping stacks to add them to the current selection. The multi-select UI from the inventory. I can drop all items in all 3 selected inventory slots quickly with this method.

NPC Shops + Banking Preview

Instead of dropping your items, it’s usually a good idea to bank or sell them instead! NPC shops exist in most urban locations across the game. Prices for these items are generally low at these shops, but transforming your items into final products can generally give you better returns.

NPC shops have three windows. The first tab is “Buy items”, and by swiping to the left you can access “Sell items” and “Preview trade”. On each of the tabs, a plus and minus icon surround an entry field. Here’s what these buttons do:

• Plus sign: Tap to increase the value in the entry field by 1. Long press to change the value to it’s maximum.
• Minus sign: Tap to decrease the value in the entry field by 1. Long press to change the value to it’s minimum (0).
• Entry field: Tap to type a custom number.

The “trade” button will switch from grey to green whenever you have a valid trade. Selling items to NPCs is always valid, but you must have the gold to buy the items you have selected to confirm a trade. It’s optional to preview a trade for those that want to buy your items and get right back to other things but it’s usually a good idea to give it a peek, especially if the store sells something that is also in your inventory.

The "Buy items" menu.

The "Sell items" menu.

The "Preview trade" menu. I can't confirm this trade because I do not have enough money.

A very limited number of towns across the map have a bank in them. At banks, you can deposit and withdraw items with ease. As of right now, banking looks very similar to the NPC shop interface with a “Withdraw” and “Deposit” tab. This is a fairly recent feature that may go through some UI and system changes before the CBT release - so I’ll leave this to a future post.

Gear and Tools

On the gear tab, players can equip 12 items to their character. Some of these slots, such as the primary and arrow slots, are reserved for combat boosting gear once the combat system is added. To equip an item, first have it in your inventory, go to the gear tab, click on the slot it goes, and select it from the UI that appears.

Some items of different rarities equipped in the Gear tab.

By clicking on a slot, you can see a list of gear in your inventory that can be equipped in it.

Scrolling down on the Gear tab also displays your total combat and skill modifiers.

A collection of attributes provided by some simple tools and a piece of gear.

The Tools tab contains your toolbelt - on which you can equip several tools. The amount of slots on this toolbelt currently increase as you gain character levels, unlocking your fourth slot at character level 20. On the toolbelt, it’s important to point out that you can only equip one type of each tool, so you cannot equip two items that are considered hatchets. You can equip tools that are considered different - as seen with the fishing lure and net equipped in the picture below.

The toolbelt. You have access to 3 slots at character level 1, 4 at character level 20, 5 at character level 50, and 6 at character level 80 in the current balancing.

Closing

That’s all for today! Next week, I plan to post the mechanics of the crafting outcome system. By itself, this is a massive component of the closed beta and something we want lots of feedback on. Crafted tools provide a lot of power within the game, so I’ll provide an explanation that can help you chase the best qualities of tools!