Hello devs, you all doing good work I think but after 74 hours of playing I start to get a little frustrated about the current farming converting system.
It is almost impossible to build even a small 8x8 house of bricks i think
you have to give ways to much effort of farming for a 50 brick stack.
You gather rocks, convert them into stones. on this process you lose 22 rocks.
then you need a large amount of clay compacted and mix it with 4 stones for 1 brick mixture.
then you need to put it in the furnage to make bricks finally.
The time spend and the result you get are just in no relation to each other. If i want lets say a brickhouse of 50 Bricks
i need to farm 260 Clay, 200 Stones, and 190 soft coal. So you gather 650 Blocks to get 50… This is a 13:1 relation in blocks which is ways to high I think.
This game is really awesome but i will stay on raw materials or materials which are ways more time efficient and still look good like stones because i dont want to play 200 hours just for 1 castle which i could build with nearly the same look in about 10 hours.
Just to show the relation again. If you want to build an 8x8 house with 2 levels
I would like a foundation which needs 64 blocks. and I need 28 for every row of the wall 28*4 = 112
another 64 for the 2nd level and another 28*4 = 112 for the 2nd level wall.
Now we are at 352 Bricks
Now lets say we have a 4 Block door in the front on level 1 and 2 blocks window on 3 sides per level.(2*3)*2+4= 16 Blocks i dont need.
352-16=336 Bricks
1 Brick is in a 1:13 Relation to the materials needed. 1 Brick needs 13 other materials.
So 336 * 13 = 4368 Blocks of farming for this little small house which is only a space of 1 plot/beacon.
This game is already really awesome but I would really appreciate it if you reconsider the time we need to spend for many things in the game and what small result we have on some things in the game. This is really frustrating at some point.
Friend of mine said, most devs dont play their own game (only in a creative mod) where some issues like this dont come up.
As mentioned in the updates, recipes are not final, and devs do play and have their own homes. Mods usually go around and watch progress too.
Glass and bricks need some balancing, apart from that, bricks can’t be chiseled, which sucks.
It sure has tons of materials available, but farming and crafting really takes time and thinking into it. Dragon statue was made of refined rock, and it took a lot of time to craft and gather.
I know, we also did a lot with refined rocks but refined is an “easy” accessable resource vs the bricks.
The Refined only need 72 Stones for a 50 stack of refined. and stones lose 22 Rocks each 50 stack. The time effort spent for this is not even 1/5 of the time spending on bricks
I mean for refining i dont need clay, i dont need to heat it in the furnage + i dont need 9000 Spark for 1 stack, so yes recipes are not final, but if it stays like this a longer time now, they wont see if the changes they maybe make are “good enough” or “too good”
Ah yes and let us be honest, It is like NO effort to change the recipe (lower the costs) this is a 10 minutes of programmers work at most while you drink some coffe and spill it over the keyboard and getting a new one.
It’s not about changing the recipe just like that also.
Someone’s getting a little impatient too.
When skills and engines are implemented into the game, things will change too. If we are balancing the game in the current state, when new features are implemented, things will be unbalanced again.
Balancing things is important, but not as important as working on features that will make the final game. Balancing will be always in the game. Features are what pull people in.
I have issues with a lot of the crafting recipes and timers in the game currently. However, I am holding my judgement until the skill system is implemented. I think the skills will speed up gathering and crafting. Once skills are in play I will judge on how bad the grind is(it is really bad right now). I’m really hoping the skill system comes soon because the grind is starting to make me a little crazy.
As far as recipe balancing…I don’t see it happening. I have taken part in dozens of alphas/betas over the last two decades(I’m old) and one thing I’ve learned is when developers say things need balancing, it rarely happens. Things are designed the way they are for a reason, but saying it needs tweaking keeps the players at bay. I hope I’m wrong and they actually do balance some of these crazy recipes.
Well it doesn’t matter if the skill system let us craft these blocks faster or not. In relation to the other blocks bricks will always take too long if the recipe stays this way. But lets not think about the skills. I would also like to see that the brick recipe just got a little tweaked that at the end you got more bricks from the materials you gatherd.
On the same note. I think decorative blocks could be made a littler harder to craft. The idea is that these really should be some sort off fine craftmansship that takes time and effort which not everyone would want to take and rather buys them from someone else who did. I mean these are decorative blocks you don’t use them in extreme high amount these are for the details and could be a nice way to kinda have a “job” in the game. Collecting all kinds of stones in all kinds of colors and crafting the decoratives out of it so other people can bring all kinds of detail and style to their homes.
But for now i think they are way to easy to make yet. You just mine rocks probaly anyway and their you go. You make stones of it refine them and the last step is the workbench, sure they take time and some spark but you’re not activly involved beyond gathering the rocks and when im mining for ressources i got more than enough rocks already.
PS: A total different idea is to keep the decoratives this way but add more decoratives that also need “power” like the gem decorative blocks, but since this is a matter of taste and some would like the easier to craft decoratives more then the others i think this is a bad choice
Thanks for the feedback, this kind of specific info is always valuable. There is still a lot of balancing to do, and it will get done, but as @Xandon highlights there are other systems (e.g. skills) that will have a massive impact on recipes so it’s better to wait until those systems exist before doing more work.
I have to agree with olliepurkiss here, I understand that we all want balancing done now because some stuff is expensive and time consuming. But you are forgetting the game isn’t finished yet. One of the biggest factors to the entire game is yet to be implemented (skills) and we have no idea how they are going to affect anything. For all you know the crafting skill will make crafting brick just as easy as crafting refined stone. As was mentioned, doing balancing now where aspects are missing, just means that later the same balancing will have to be done again because added aspects have greatly altered the recipe.
Also someone mentioned that decorative blocks should probably be harder to craft than most other blocks, bricks are a decorative block… So you already got what you wanted there.
Thanks for tall the answers and discussions. The Skill system so is more than just plot and coins gathering in the future. Didn’t even know it’s planned like that. Yeah I get a little inpatient as we all do I think! I just hope my statement wasnt too harsh and more constructive or useful
Is there a list of features in work so next time I’ll be a bit more informed?
The weekly updates generally have quite a bit on what they are doing. The skill system is just something that has been mentioned a lot. But never really any specifics.
Just agreeing in general with the time-suckage making the game dull. I find myself not playing and going to build in other games. I’m looking forward to seeing improvements. I really think the exploration, adventuring, and mob systems are the things that will make this game stand out among its fellow Minecraft-likes. The crafting, mining, and building will be an enjoyable backdrop or “end-game” for me.
I know the recipes aren’t final but I do agree the decorative blocks should take much more time than a normal brick.
I’ve got 10 hours to wait before I can go back out mining for anything decent and not being one for building there’s not much I can do to fill the time gap except outside of the game.
