Punching trees will not be possible in Boundless. We decided this to save production costs which we preferred to spend elsewhere. If you can punch a tree then you need to be able to see a hand+arm doing the punching. We don’t want to model a 1st person view for hands+arms. As we would need to do this for the different races + male/female + wearables. It would be lots of effort for, IMO, very little gain. Instead we’re proposing that the default items are the Totem, a stick and cube pair with some interesting properties to discover.
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Agreed. I think the Totem to use to collect branch & stone/gleam shards as a first tier works well. And it gets away from silly tree punching. And the more folks that concur the likelier the dev will listen…
still (and I find this very sad… pathetic even) the general newbie will when presented with the world, see a tree or rock and try to punch it. if it shows a crack they’ll think… “Ooo, all I gotta do is punch stuff to collect it…” and when it breaks and simply disappears they’ll think “Hmm, the game is still buggy, I lost my block”.
In frustration they may check the forums, or google how to play… but still they will instinctively feel that to collect one must punch…
Which reminds me… It’d be much friendlier to simply not fracture a block if the tool used isn’t sufficient, or better yet simply do the initial crack and “revert to whole on a timer” thing. That way you cannot destroy/grief/lose resources, and I think it gives a better idea of “not a sufficient tool”.
The same is true of the silly silver is a better tool than iron, and gold is even better. Then come the gems… oh, well. I hate it, but understand it. Still, why not stone, bronze, iron, steel, molybdenum alloy,…
I agree with this decision. But this just moves the problem from one unrealistic scenario to another one.
@Kalthazar It would be a really good idea to just not be able to destroy certain blocks unless you have the right tools for it. Or make it far too long so you can’t really build player traps. (Like in MC if you try to mine obsidian with your fist. Just with trees in Boundless.)
About the whole gold and silver controversy, just making them alloys as @Thorbjorn42gbf said would be enough. Doesn’t even have to be a fantasy metal^^ or not the whole thing has to be^^
And the gems could be attachements instead of a own material type. But I’d recon this will/would also mean more work for the devs.
So this might be an idea for a system overhaul after 1.0.
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Thank you for introducing bockety into my vocabulary 
(the totem and cube are pretty nifty too)
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