Welcome back to another Aarkun dev log. In Part 2 of the March update, we’re diving into three big areas of progress: the new smithing and crafting system, a proper look at open world combat including a boss encounter, and a guided tour of the starter island that anchors the early game. There’s a lot to show, so let’s get straight into it.
Crafting & Smithing — Building Toward Mini-Games
The crafting menu is now wired up with our first real recipes. You’ll see two starter bars in the smelting list right now — bronze and iron — with steel and gold still in development (the skeletal meshes and materials aren’t quite ready yet for those).
To make a bronze bar, you need tin and copper. Smelt it, and the character runs through a default skill animation — these are placeholder casts from our skill template system. If a skill doesn’t define a custom animation, the template falls back to a sensible default, which keeps iteration fast. Down the line, smelting will use proper equipment-driven animations, so the visuals will match the action much more tightly.
Once you have your bars, head over to the smithing station and pull up its recipe list. With a couple of bronze bars, you can craft a bronze footman sword — and this is where the design really starts to take shape.
The Crafting Mini-Game
Rather than a passive “click and wait” timer, smithing is being built as a short, skill-based mini-game. The current prototype works like this:
- Your station starts at 20°C
- The recipe needs the temperature held between 150° and 250°
- Click the fire button to raise the temperature (three clicks in this case)
- Hit the stop button at the right moment to lock it in and complete the craft
The aim is for each mini-game to take roughly five seconds — enough to feel engaging and skill-expressive, but not so long that it becomes a chore when you’re crafting in volume. We may keep some of the simpler crafts more streamlined depending on how timelines shake out, but the smithing version is the template we’re building around.
After a successful craft, you’ve got a sword — and that opens up new combat options. Equipping it unlocks melee skills like sword-on-fire and a maim ability that slows enemies, which is exactly the kind of weapon-gated progression we want.
Open World MMO Map — First Real Look
After dying conveniently to a bear, we hopped into the open MMO map for a tour. The character spawns near a shipwreck on the beach — a fairly classic “you’ve lost your memory, figure out what happened” opening, but it gives us a clean way to onboard players into the world.
Starter Combat — The Crabs
The beachfront is populated with crabs as the starter mob. They aggro naturally, and right now they drop standard loot at a heavily inflated rate for testing. On release, the plan is to scale that back significantly and have them drop crab meat instead — usable in cooking for status buffs, which feeds into the broader trader/crafter loop.
After clearing a few, I equipped a mix of the dropped gear (including a helm I’m pretty fond of) and the appearance updates work cleanly across the visible slots.
Boss Fight — The Giant Crab
Then came the more interesting fight: a giant crab boss. Earlier in development we showcased a bear with a similar kit, and the giant crab uses the same skill framework — maim, rupture, and a few abilities that make use of its larger mesh and longer attack range.
A few things worth noting from the encounter:
- Threat is dynamic — the boss will switch targets based on damage taken
- Range scales with the mesh — the bigger the model, the further it can reach you
- Healing and CC work mid-fight — I cycled nature healing and applied vine grab to slow it down
- Combat patterns are flexible — we can layer skills and effects per monster to create varied encounters
It’s still a relatively straightforward threat model right now. Future improvements will focus on making bosses use their area of effect more strategically rather than just locking onto the highest-threat target. The dynamic skill framework means we can keep iterating on this without rebuilding combat from scratch.
Starter Island Tour — Lore, Factions & Cities
To save time, the rest of the tour was done in the editor view of the open MMO map. Here’s what’s on the starter island.
The Shipwreck & The Village
You spawn at the wreck and are greeted by two NPCs who guide you east toward the village. Along the way you fight crabs, gather crab meat, and pass mining nodes spawned dynamically from the backend. You’ll first reach a pub where you can pick up additional quests and resupply, then continue to the main village.
The smithing station lives in one of the village buildings. Lighting in that area still needs work — and that’s a deliberate part of the design philosophy.
Lighting, Day/Night & Trading Routes
We want dark areas by design, with full day/night cycles. At night you’ll need light spells or torches to see — but using them gives away your position, which matters because bandits patrol the trading routes. That tension between visibility and stealth is going to be central to the trader/crafter experience.
The Main Village & Faction System
The main village has a marketplace, NPCs who fill in the backstory, and your first faction hubs. The setup of the world is roughly:
- Bandits have invaded the island and are using an artifact in a castle to brew storms that cause shipwrecks
- The Guardian Guild sits in the village and dispatches you to investigate bandit leaders
- Beneath the guild is a basement that ties into a faction selection system
You’ll be able to join one of three factions:
- Guardian Guild — combat-focused, story-driven
- Thieves Guild — alternative path, infiltration-focused
- Traders & Crafters — PvE-leaning, focused on mining, herbalism, woodcutting, and the production economy
Even crafter-focused players will be brought into the main story arcs — we don’t want a faction choice to lock you out of the narrative.
Bandit Camps, Ports & The Big Picture
Past the village, you cross to the other side of the island, where you’ll find:
- A cave entrance (used in our cinematic — all the cinematics so far were built in Unreal Sequencer, mixing in-game content with cinematic shots)
- Multiple bandit villages, each belonging to different bandit factions with their own banners and flags
- A bandit-controlled port for exporting stolen cargo
- A graveyard that’s both atmospheric and functional
- The wrecked ship itself, with bandits hauling cargo from it across to their port
The bandits are deliberately more fragmented than the guardians — think tribal structure rather than a unified army. On this island, two bandit groups happen to be cooperating: one runs the shipwreck operation, the other handles export logistics back to a major bandit city in the mountains.
City Design Philosophy
Both factions have major cities, and these aren’t your typical MMO safe zones. Each one is largely self-contained:
- Minor combat inside city limits — spiders, rats, and a sewer system with stronger monsters like ogres and trolls (with their own backstory)
- Crafting guilds with their own small mining nodes for basics like copper, tin, and iron — though higher-tier materials still require venturing out
- Cooking guild with access to cows, chickens, and other livestock
- Almost every basic activity available without leaving the city
The cities won’t cater to high-end progression, but they’ll give lower-level players plenty to engage with in a single hub. There’ll be a trader-focused city on the far side of the world too, but that’s not in development yet — our focus this year is finishing the starter island.
What’s Next
The goal for this year is to complete the starter island so players can properly test it, hopefully shipping by late 2026 or early 2027. The starter island is designed to introduce:
- The classless progression system
- All three factions
- Core lore and world-building
- Combat, crafting, and economy fundamentals
There’s plenty more to share — including a deeper dive into one of the dungeons — but I’ll save that for the next dev log.
Thanks for following along. If you’re enjoying the updates, the Discord community and Patreon are the best places to keep up with weekly raw screenshots, early roadmap input, and the next round of dev logs.
