It’s been just under a month since Pax Dei hit Founders Access with its 1.0 release, and despite an Europa Universalis V-shaped hole in my playtime, I’ve made someprogress in my journey in Innis Galia.
Slow progress, but progress nonetheless.
Throughout the last few weeks, I’ve knocked down more trees than I can count, mined Gneiss and Limestone mindlessly, and finally started to make bricks and wrought iron ingots (despite not having the skills to actually use them yet). Throughout it all, the honeymoon period has seemingly come crashing down before my eyes, as I’ve started to feel somewhat overwhelmed by everything still ahead of me to get a wrangle on Pax Dei’s endgame truly - or what there is of it.

A Grinding Grind
Let’s not mince words: Pax Dei is a grind. It might be the grindiest MMORPG I’ve played in a long while, and I’m someone who enjoys EVE Online’s slow grind. While the core loop keeping players like me occupied has to do with its myriad crafting professions, combat skills are also a massive grind to level - especially as a largely solo player.
My friends have all but abandoned me to Arc Raiders, so I’m left either joining a massive guild in Ardennes (which there aren’t many), or going it solo (as I have been for the most part). While I’ve been able to level my Carpentry up to around 20 in the time since my last Review-In-Progress, not many other skills have had similar success.
The biggest issue for me is the sheer volume of materials I need in order to progress, which takes time to harvest. Pax Dei’s recipes might, individually, call for a few ingredients to craft, but each of those ingredients requires its own subset of ingredients, which adds up.
Take an Iron Bar, required to craft items like an Iron Knife Blade, used to make a Jewelcrafting station. That Iron Bar requires five Iron Ingots, which require 40 Impure Iron Ore and 80 Charcoal (the charcoal requiring at least 100 sapwood on its own to create). And then there’s the chance you will fail in your attempt at crafting if you aren’t on level with the recipe, which then wastes all the time and resources you just gathered and crafted in the hopes of getting this one crafting piece.