Kingsmarch Going Core Thoughts

After 3.25, Phrecia, and private events we have had a chance to go through building up Kingsmarch multiple times from scratch and see how it affects the game. While we don't know what the next league will bring, here are some of my thoughts on how this could be streamlined for future leagues. 100% opinion & fun post.

1) Remove mining & completely. The actual ores are worthless once you get the town built up. Ships typically only send crops for currency and the stash of ores just pile up unnecessarily.
2) Keep enchanting. Great use of old crappy uniques and props up some value around many of the poor, but high tier uniques.
3) Keep recombinators. Tied to #2. Even if you change how recombs work, the station holds value moving forward.
4) Dump runes & enchanting. Makes room for new mechanics to step up or alternative crafting.
5) Keep mapping & farming. These are the gold sinks that force someone looking to use this mechanic always looking for optimal ways to sustain gold.

If I were going to tone down 1 of these, it would be shipping. It's very easy & passive and the rewards are great. Probably too great.

Mapping is IMO the most balanced of the places you dump gold for Kingsmarch. It has a high floor to get started. I wouldn't even consider using it without T9 & T10 mappers. A team of these is roughly 400-800k to get started on a portal and they die more than 1% regardless of what the label says. They are expensive to actually run portals and they consume maps. So you are making investments to get something out of it and the stakes are HIGH should you fail a bandit mission as it takes a ton of gold to put another team together.

6) I'm ok with this being a focused mechanic similar to delve or blight and would love to see a scarab, atlas nodes, or something that increases the amount of gold you get when running maps. Even if that means the cost of doing all of the above goes up to an amount a non-focused gold farmer couldn't get easily by other mechanics. It could also become a doubloon or other currency similar to rogue markers that only works with Kingsmarch if we want to keep gold universal.

Curious to hear others thoughts. I'd love to see it stay in the game and become another possible avenue to focus on. It's probably too big to stay as is, so what would you chop?

Nulled.

The only aspects of Settlers I see staying are Faustus and recombination.

Personally, I would love to see some of the Rune Enchants to go core, particularly Soul Gain Prevention and Haunted...but I understand why they will be removed.

Fun league, one of the best, and it lasted almost a year, but.... I'm not for it going to core.

I doubt anything Faustus (currency market + black market) stays since PoE2 has those features but maybe the Bismuth effect on monsters gets reused for something else. I can't imagine recombs being added to the base game unless they nerf it quite a lot.

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jddc78#1131 wrote:

1) Remove mining & completely. The actual ores are worthless once you get the town built up. Ships typically only send crops for currency and the stash of ores

Totally disagree with this.

Sending out metals has consistently been one of the best early-league methods for target-farming crafting bases, fetching well-rolled starter gear, or just printing a wide range of uniques to trade, use, or disenchant for dust.

It’s also a surprisingly decent source of scarabs, catalysts, oils, and fossils—super useful in the early to mid-game when resources are still limited, or if you just can’t be bothered to run specific league mechanics for them.

Sure, it’s not as flashy or profitable as crops in the very late game, but it still fills a valuable niche. Ores only feel worthless if you’re ignoring their potential.

Removing mining would cut one of the few deterministic ways players can target farm desired items without engaging with the corresponding league mechanic or relying on trade. It’s a genuinely helpful system, especially for SSF players.

Honestly, it's one of the more underappreciated gimmicks that quietly shines for what it is. But let’s be real Settlers probably isn’t going core anyway, so this debate feels pretty useless, just throwing ideas around to “revolutionize” something that’s already working perfectly fine.

Personally I was sick of whole "town managment" after like 2-3 weeks of settles. I completly ignored all mechanics, ships included, from it and just used Faustus.
I sure hope it doesnt go core.

I only want Faustus.

Every league GGG should experiment with completely new ideas. Obviously Faustus is extremely popular, so any league / expansion will likely have him for the currency exchange. Everything else from kingsmarch should be removed so we have room for new content.

I want faustus to have a 100 % anonymized buy it now trade house. Stop the bots from abusing this by rachetting up the gold cost if you buy or sell at to high a frequency