You will need a photographic memory to remember where to farm to pick up any goodies you may need to bind with; what if you can’t be bothered? No problem, just build a town. Georama is White Knight Chronicles’ town editing tool and rather clever it is, too. A town can contain buildings, work areas (“job parts”) and shops among other things. There are various job parts, such as farms and restaurants, which each produce three different types of resources. The housing comes in various capacities and with various stat bonuses, and houses your residents who work on the job parts. These residents come from the rest of the game world. You can walk around the towns from the story and check out the production stats, level and recruitment requirements of certain town folk. You may see a pattern developing if I tell you that your town is associated with your guild rank and that you’ll need to grind your rank up before you can recruit the higher level producers. Some residents may also demand certain items in exchange before they will allow you to recruit them.
Your town has 18 stats showing the various production levels – ranging from flowers to wood to ores – and needless to say can be upgraded over and over, moved to another location, made larger and so on at enormous cost, all in the name of leveling it up. The editing tool is well-designed complete with tutorial, and provides a top-down view which allows you to position everything as you’d like it. Periodically your town’s general store will be re-populated with whatever resources have been produced recently, allowing you to visit your own town and buy them.
Where does one procure the buildings, job parts, scenery and foundations to put in one’s town? These come from a number of Papitaur Workshops dotted around the map. To produce a building or other item you’ll need to bring the items needed to build it and some money. Note this is not the same as item binding; there are separate workshops for building parts for your town and no minimum ranking requirements: you just need the items and the money.
While your town will function perfectly well as is, there’s no need to stop there. White Knight Chronicles’ online component – GeoNet – allows you to upload your town so your friends – and indeed total strangers – can visit it. This is good for you, because someone somewhere will have uploaded a much more advanced town and you can go and buy materials you might need from them.
All the towns on GeoNet are instanced, so your town may have several instances running at once with different players in. There is a limit of 12 players per instance and your town has a homepage which shows the currently running instances. GeoNet actually has several functions: it lets you interact with other WKC players in a variety of ways, including a built-in message board (forum), writing adventure logs (blogs) and reading other people’s including your friends’, private messaging and visiting each other’s towns. You have a little homepage which you can customise slightly (change colour, slogan, town photo etc.) as well.
All of which sounds great, but we’ll have to see how it turns out. Right now there are a large stack of towns online at starter level – almost all the same therefore – and most of them are unvisited. However, I can imagine that in a few months there will be some truly epic designs online from the most ardent fans who will create impressive resource production hubs of their own from long-term play.