Throughout your adventure in Aeternum, you will get your hands on a wide variety of items. You will collect consumables such as food, drinks, potions, weapon coatings and tinctures as well as armor and weapons. You can also find special crafting resources while slaying creatures or searching through abandoned Settlements, Temples, and Corrupted Camps. Let’s have a look at each of those items.
Consumables
Food and Drinks
Food and Drink items play an important role in your ability to take on the dangers of Aeternum. Eating and drinking provides slow health regeneration over an extended period of time. If you want to make the most of your short burst of health recovery, we advise you to wait until you are in a safe place before consuming food and drinks. Furthermore, while raw foods and fresh water can be used in a pinch, the way to ensure you are getting the most out of the food in your possession is to cook it at a camp or at a kitchen in a Settlement.
There is a wide variety of cooked food and brewed drinks. When consumed, prepared food and drinks will not only initially heal you, but also provide a longer state of slower health recovery. This recovery is constant, whether you are in or out of combat. Prepared foods provide additional points of Constitution, the attribute that governs your base Health. Additionally, many prepared food and drink items also offer buffs that can increase your defense against certain enemies, enhance your stamina recovery, or even temporarily hone a crafting skill. No matter what you are doing, it is important to have the right food for the task at hand.
Potions and Tinctures
Potions and Tinctures are both small vials of a drinkable substance that grant specific bonuses. For instance, Potions provide a general magical effect that lasts for several minutes. You might drink a Potion to increase the Carry Weight of your inventory or enhance your defense against a particular elemental damage type, such as Lightning.
Conversely, Tinctures take effect instantly and in the majority of cases do not linger in their effect. Health and Mana Tinctures are common examples of this: if you want to quickly recover Health or Mana while in combat, they are the way to go. Tinctures are also used to rid yourself of dangerous poisons or stop yourself from bleeding.
Weapon Coatings
Weapon Coatings are the key to gaining an advantage in combat against the various creatures of Aeternum. They can be crafted at any camp once you reach the required level. You may also find them as loot on your adventures. Weapon Coatings apply to a weapon and grant it a categorical damage bonus against a particular family of creatures. For instance, applying a Corruption Coating to your weapon will enhance your damage against Corrupted enemies.
Equipment
Weapons and Armor
While exploring and fighting creatures, you can find and acquire Equipment items that can be immediately used, provided you are at a certain level to be able to equip them. Each equipment item has a few features in common that determine how powerful the item is. The first feature is the item’s Gear Score.
Items with higher Gear Scores are more powerful: the higher the Gear Score is, the more damage the weapon will deal and the more protective the armor will be.
The second is the item’s Perks. An item can drop with up to 3 perks on it. The Perks an item can drop with are pulled from a pool of potential Perks. The same kind of item can function differently depending on which Perks it drops with. Generally, items with higher Gear Scores have the potential to drop with more Perks and/or more powerful versions of those Perks. Items with more perks are rarer than items without, so our rarity definition is based on the number of perks an item has.
- No Perks: Common
- 1 Perk: Uncommon
- 2 Perks: Rare
- 3 Perks: Epic
The third feature to look for is the item’s Gem Slot. Occasionally, items can drop with an empty Gem Slot. Anyone can socket a gem into an item, but the gemstone must first be cut by a skilled Jewel Crafter. Socketed gemstones cannot be removed, but in the majority of cases they can be replaced. Gemstones enhance one or more of the Character’s core attributes.
Weapons, Armors and other equipment items can have different Perks. Weapon Perks can improve a weapon’s stats and even add additional elemental damage to them, while Armor Perks can increase defense against different kinds of damage or add extra pockets to allow you to carry more weight in your inventory.
Armor Weight and Equip Load
Each piece of armor that you wear contributes to your overall Equip Load, which in turn affects your mobility when evading. There are 3 states of Equip Load: Light, Normal, and Heavy. In parallel, there are 3 weight categories of armor: Light, Medium, and Heavy. Wearing all Light armor will keep you in the “Fast” movement state, wearing all Medium armor will place you squarely in the Normal movement state and wearing all Heavy armor moves you into the Heavy movement state.
Lighter armor trends towards more evasive play styles and protection against elemental damage types, while Heavier armors trend towards more stalwart play styles and protection against physical damage types. There is a wide variety of weight variance within a particular weight category.
You can mix and match different armors to get the most effective protection for the movement state you want to stay in, the total weight of the armor is what matters, not the individual pieces. There are even Item Perks that affect an armor’s weight!
Named and Legendary Items
During your adventures in Aerternum, you will find a variety of Named and Legendary items. Unlike regular items, Named and Legendary items have curated Perks and fixed Gear Scores. Some of them even come with pre-socketed gems! While the most reliable way to acquire Named or Legendary items is by engaging with the most dangerous and challenging foes Aeternum has to offer, there are Legendary-level items to be found for players of any level.
Trinkets and Bags
Trinkets provide passive bonuses to the Character’s core attributes. Trinkets can grant additional attribute points to one or more attribute. All trinkets come with a pre-socketed Gem that cannot be replaced. Like weapons and armor, Trinkets have their own subset of Perks that offer benefits unique to Trinkets. Bags increase the amount of weight you can carry in your inventory and have their own set of perks as well!
Crafting Resources
In Aeternum, you will often find a mixture of raw and refined resources while exploring. While the bulk of these resources can also be found naturally occurring in the world, such as wood from trees or ore from veins, some of them can only be obtained in the various supply caches and coffers found throughout the dilapidated settlements and crumbling ruins that are rife with danger around every turn. The containers you search through may also yield rare and powerful crafting resources, which we’ll go over in an upcoming article dedicated to Crafting.
To be a successful adventurer, you will need to make wise choices and master all the resources available throughout Aeternum. Be sure to familiarize yourself with Items that come into your possession during your exploration, and be prepared to modify your inventory based on the way you want to play New World.
