The league has been out for a little more than a day now. There have been some stuff I've loved and other stuff I'm still not quite sure about. It will at least be an interesting league.

In some leagues, I've rushed towards maps, and in others, I've put a little more focus on the main features of that league. This is one of those leagues the first thing I did after making it into the first town was talk with the main character Johan to get set into the new settlement of Kingsmarch.

My main reasoning behind this was I felt the time was going to have a bigger impact than on past leagues. Since it’s going to take time for my settlers to mine, farm, smelt, and ship goods out. I wanted to get an early start.

One of the first things I wanted to make sure of is that I had a couple of ranks in the mining area upgraded as quickly as possible. I wanted to have a few miners out and about. As without already having ores most of everything else was not going to be going down in the settlement.

The cool thing is you can even check in on how much ore is left to be farmed. Along with how much of that ore the workers you have selected for that type can mine per hour.

If I wanted to micromanage my workers, I could even move them around to the different types of ore if one was falling behind. That was something I did for the first few hours when I only had a couple of workers. This also helped keep my gold hourly costs down.

Over time, however, I started to fill them up with more than enough workers I no longer think much about it. The biggest factor then was just how much ore I could have marked.

To do that I needed to find the deposits while out playing. Clear out the site. Then if there were workers free, they would show up right away. If not, the site would get marked and those workers would come by when some became available.

While it did slow down my leveling a little bit. In every zone, I went after whatever ore I could find. Usually, I'd find the lowest-tier crimson iron. Once I started the event all I had to do was go around and destroy the corrupted growth that was around the node. Then my works would come in and do the rest.

I am quite thrilled that you have to interact with each of the ore nodes to get the event to start. This makes it easy to skip them if you are just not feeling like it. This would also make it something great if they ended up adding this to the core game.

What I was not the biggest fan of however was the loot. Just about all the loot feels like it comes in shipments making it safely to their destination and your loot coming back.

Clearing ore nodes' biggest reward is just the ores. There might be some random drops from the creatures you fought. Along with a little bit of gold. That is however it. This is one of those leagues where you do not see the efforts of your work till much further down the production line.

I was kind of hoping I'd pick up some early leveling items and make up for the time I was investing hitting up every node I was. Those rewards would end up being a bit more delayed than I was expecting.

Over time I unlocked the shipyard and went to send out my first ship. That is when I realized there was a bonus for including a certain number of crops. So next I put my efforts into setting up a farm and acquiring both wheat and corn.

Every time I went on an upgrade or unlocked a new part of the town, I'd go from having enough gold to cover wages for 12 hours down to an hour or even in some instances even less than that. Causing me to rush out and go back to leveling up and gathering gold along the way. Mostly by killing rare and harder creatures as they were dropping a decent amount more than anything else.

I have felt that the amount of gold I've needed to keep up with everything and the level I'm at is decently balanced. More times than not my bottleneck to upgrading my town has been having enough ore, crops, or ores. More than not having enough gold.

So, I then entered into this cycle of trying to get enough ores to keep up with my smelting needs. I even upgraded my smelting production a couple of times. As you can see some ores, I have hours' worth for them to go through. While others I'm deleted on.

At later stages of the game, I could see myself skipping over ores that spawn that my settlers smelting have a giant stockpile of. While stopping to do any sites for ores they are lacking on.

I can also replace lower-tier settlers with higher-tier ones. As I slowly upgrade the settlement. I’ve unlocked the opportunity to higher better workers at a much higher cost.

This early on I've just been hiring to fill empty slots. I am however getting close to the point of replacing my tier one workers if I can start getting tier IV and up. That is however going to cost some gold to re-roll the recruitment page and just cherry picking out the workers I want the most.

I’ve also struggled a little bit to try and work out when I want to spend the resources my settlement has created on shipment. After all the rewards are in the shipments. I did decide at the very least to test sending different amounts.

I then would hold off on spending any resources on shipments till I noticed I needed item upgrades. As it turns out quite a few of the rewards you tend to bring back are items with a decent number of linked sockets. Which is for someone leveling up to maps not having a lot of currency. Those can be some powerful upgrades. Even more so since a lot of the stats have been decent on items as well.

I ended up delaying sending my first shipment of items out for the first couple of hours of the league. I wanted to focus on upgrading buildings and getting workers. There came a point when it was time for the first one.

Just sending most of what I had as leftovers after my latest round of upgrades. Along with making sure I had enough of the resources requested that granted a bonus. As I was trying to work out what was best to send.

Not shocking to me it seemed just sending request resources along with bars of different ores was the best bet. There was quite a heavy weight in rewards vs risk when including just a couple of bars over just ores and crops.

I then had to wait less than an hour before I could check in on how the shipment went. If it even made it there. If I lost everything.

The first shipment reward was such a disappointment. Outside of getting some sun runes, I ended up putting fire damage on my axe for higher DPS. I was rather expecting more since other elements were not giving me much in return for my efforts.

This also made me a bit glad I was not trying to send out a shipment every hour. It seemed I'd need to horde resources a bit and take a bit of a risk.

I’d end up just going out and farming clearing out more ore nodes for my settlers to come in mine. Such as this tree for amber that you have to protect. The more damage it takes the less you are left with by the time the event ends.

The next shipment of goods I sent out I decided to take a bit of a risk. I put enough resources into my ship that put me just under the 50% chance of something bad going on. After all, I wanted to know what happened when such things occurred.

The nice thing is you get a little popup message when a shipment has returned. You however have not learned the fate of it till you go into your town to check on it. Turns out I was a bit unlucky.

I was informed they ran into an armed vessel that took half the ore onboard. Which was quite devastating news. I wish there was some way I could have gone out and attempted to defend my ship. I did however make sure to hire more crew members after that occurred.

Outside of getting a chaos orb the loot was again a bit disappointing. Granted I did have a bad event happen that nerfed my reward quite hard.

I sent out a couple more shipments with the risk level being around 40% and again I must just be having bad luck. The ship would get attacked or I'd get a tax placed on it by the king of the kingdom I was shipping stuff over time.

For all the effort and time waiting around for the rewards. I’ve found running other events to be so far a lot more rewarding. At least I have gotten a couple of four linked items that were upgraded for me. This is also why I'm not sending them out unless I am struggling with needing gear with the right sockets.

Final Thoughts

I’m hoping the rewards end up scaling a lot better at the higher levels. It seems for now my settlement resources would have been better off focusing on upgrading buildings.

I might even just get rid of my current crew for the ship since I'll only want to be sending much higher workers with how many settlement resources and time spent going after Ores ends up going into a single shipment. Just to try and get some useable rewards.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Path Of Exile.