Everyone is going to hate this idea but what if 3x3 was a quirk instead of a boon? In addition to adding the AoE effect it also increases the swing energy and decreases the action speed.
It could still work out in the player’s favor (8x the energy for 9x the blocks at 2x the speed of 9 normal swings) but it provides a ton of mathematical levers for devs to delicately tune AoE to their liking.
Reducing the power of 3x3 means the effect can be more common in the game. It could be much cheaper to produce on all tools from copper to gems. There could even be grades of it where some 3x3 effects are better than others.
And in the more general sense, what if the forge rework was such that boons are always utilities (emit light, more attract range, etc); quirks were always stat tradeoffs in the player’s favor like AoE (more speed but less power, more power but less durability) and defects were… still shitty rebuffs?
That makes balancing the system with small buffs and nerfs more palatable to players
Quirks is the part of the spectrum with the most room for balance because you can always use tradeoffs to steal some of the thunder from bonuses that would otherwise be too strong.
Boons and defects, by virtue of always needing to be good or bad, offer very little control when trying to balance them. So we use the boons part of the spectrum to hand out quality of life improvements like light sources or hunger reduction. And we use the defects part of the spectrum to be the booby prize in the centraforge minigame, as well as tantalize players with the sorts of effects forged tools are capable of.
For example, a high level player may see that random adjacent AoE as not good enough. But a newer player still hitting 1 block at a time would love to buy those. That newer player is now introduced to the benefits of forging and one day can hope to become strong enough to get access or afford the more predictable AoE effects.
If the ever want quirks and defects a thing, they need to make it so that points for them are generated every turn.
Otherwise most ppl would just pick forge ingredients that dont generate these points.
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