Before we get into the jobs system itself, it's worth explaining the thinking behind why skills work the way they do on Icebound.

UO-Roleplay gameplay conventionally falls into a few core gameplay loops: crafting, combat, and gathering. We feel there's a soft power versus hard power problem we often see lacking, where world influence ends up depending on out-of-character relationships, staff events, guilds and faction activity, or just good-faith buy-in, all of which work to a point, but risk becoming frustrating to rely on as they’re nebulous and inconsistent. So we've broken out and expanded upon skills geared more toward tools for roleplay’s a character’s identity, and as a means to open up more emergent roleplay between characters, rather than bespoke roleplay that has to be manufactured by staff.

Some of these skills will lean more into the conventional gameplay loops than others, where we can make it make sense, and we'd argue some can be used quite creatively to overpower a warrior without ever picking up a combat skill yourself. But ultimately you'll find many skills on Icebound that aren't very "useful" in the conventional sandbox loops of crafting, gathering, and fighting. We're open to finding ways for them to matter mechanically as things progress, but otherwise many skills exist for the roleplayer to have ways to interact with the world the way they should be reasonably and uniquely able to do so.

Now with all that said, we also can't in good conscience set up skills this way and then leave them out of the game loop entirely. They need to contribute and have a means to support themselves.

So lets now go back to the topic of Jobs:

For beta playtesting, we scaled jobs back to encourage people to go out into the wasteland and test the non-job content, since we didn't get much testing of those core gameplay loops during alpha, when jobs were available. We had learn from alpha that once someone had access to raise a skill via a job, they tended to do nothing else, and we needed players engaging with the wasteland to test the conventional gameplay loops. We put this into the narrative: steady jobs were hard to justify in a shipwrecked camp. But as we've expanded the camp, we've seen the same pattern repeat: once a job is set up, people log in only to do their daily and don't stick around to initiate roleplay.

Given that the mechanics will be wiped but the narrative of beta will not be, we assumed roleplayers would prioritize telling a story with their characters, treating this as a shorter beta to test systems before wrapping up with a narrative pushed by players to solve the mounting problems in whatever direction they chose. Some players are doing exactly that, but the broader playerbase lean more toward mechanical progress than we expected. We'll dig into how to better promote emergent roleplay more in another topic, but we're also keeping these behaviors in mind as we build out the main game's sce.

And we recognize part of the problem is on us. How we've scaled progress between crafting and jobs is lopsided, and it doesn't promote grinding in the right spots. It skips the startup phase that builds investment, where you'd actually want to engage with the skill itself, and that engagement mostly disappears once you're just waiting for the next day to tick over.

So, we’re going to break down what jobs are, why they exist, and how we want to change them going forward:

Jobs are modular quest for staff to modify and set up on the fly to serve several functions:
  1. Something to log in and do casually while staying in character, in the form of your character working a job in the world. Wandering around to perform them encourages organic run-ins with other players and opens the door to emergent roleplay.
  2. A safe, but slower, means to gain skill and/or resources outside the combat, gathering, and grinding loops.
  3. Economy. Jobs are one of the only things that produce money (Scrip) outside of selling on the market or through a storefront, which incentivizes gathering and combat players to sell their gear to skilled labor players in order to purchase crafted goods, and later to rent apartments, buy train tickets, and so on.
  4. A narrative tool for staff to introduce hurdles the community has to overcome together, such as gathering coal to keep a boiler lit or building civic projects.
  5. Opportunities at points of interest that reward exploration, such as wandering NPCs or train destinations offering limited-time access to certain communities or NPCs who'll exchange work for rewards.

Who gets jobs?

Expect a job for skills that require resources to get started, or otherwise don't have an an easy way to raise through gameplay progression within the combat/gathering/macro practicing loops.  Some skills can also be easily macro’d (Stealth, or Forensics, for example) without any help from a job.
  • Music Theory will get a daily, so no one's forced to narratively know how to play/access piano just to raise it. Other musical skills are easily practiced with using the instrument or in using abilities in combat and wont be getting a daily.
  • Combat is unlikely to get anything, though we'll consider it depending on how the narrative goes and what the community chooses to build (an arena pit fight, a firing range, etc.).

Jobs System Changes

  • Daily Jobs: Changing the Accelerated Skill Gains scale so you earn more slowly at the onset. This gets you in the habit of learning your way around the menus, and encourages you to grind out the easier crafted components early on to raise skill instead, which are generally useful across many skills. This doesn't actually change how long it takes to go from 0-100 in a skill than it was before, we just redistributed the numbers. 
  • Work Shifts: A new want to gain skill and money at a consistently slower rate, but jobs will have a shorter cooldown, making it easier to fit them into a play session once you factor in fatigue and shift changes.

Two Types of Jobs

Dailies
  • Construction Jobs: Same as what you’re used to,  for no fatigue cost, resetting every 18 hours using Accelerated Skill Gains
  • Jobs that require time gating for world progress and communal efforts, such as gathering jobs for the civic resources
  • Potential labor jobs for no skill for later in the development of a city for unskilled labor or new players, such a cleaning or deliveries
Work Shifts
  • Cost fatigue [TBD], shorter cooldown [TBD], pay either resources or money. We'll use patch notes to begin the cost/cooldown discussion.
  • Skill check on completion allowing gains weighed against your skill, as if you interacted with the skill with a difficulty check in line with your current, as if you crafted an item, as an example.
  • Monetary rewards are based on skill floors (25/50/75), meant for real practitioners
  • Better jobs unlock as you upgrade the places that provide these services (e.g., Med Tent > Infirmary Building > Hospital)
The Wiki's Jobs System Article will have the most update information on the system. We recommend you read this article and test things in game before providing feedback.


We'll be implementing these changes soon, we're currently mapping out the required skills to make sure everyone has a fixed daily in place, but once you get those changes, we'd love to hear how it feels afterward regarding timing, fatigue cost, and so on. 


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Edited 4 times by Archin 2026-09-14 18:50:16 UTC