We have a significant change to mining coming.
The aim is to make mining feel fun throughout the game. So when you start playing Boundless mining shouldn’t be a grind. But it’s extremely difficult to make mining feel fun at the beginning and make progression improve the performance during progression. This would give us a very narrow window for mining progression.
Roughly speaking the plan is to vary block strength per world. In the same way Creature difficulty increases on harder worlds, Block strength will also increase on harder worlds. This means we can balance the mining on Level 0 starter worlds for new players with the most basic tools, and also balance mining on Level 5 hard worlds for players with many skills applied.
Then the balance could target (just as an example):
- Level 1 World: 3 hits for a Wooden hammer, 2 hits for a Stone hammer, 1 hit for a Metal hammer (and above).
- Level 2 World: 4 hits for a Wooden hammer, 3 hits for a Stone hammer, 2 hits for a Metal hammer, 1 hit for an Alloy hammer (and above).
- Level 3 World: 5 Wood, 4 Stone, 3 Metal, 2 Alloy, 1 hit for a Gem hammer (and above).
- Level 4 World: 6 Wood, 5 Stone, 4 Metal, 3 Alloy, 2 Gem, 1 hit for a Special hammer.
- Level 5 World: 7 Wood, 6 Stone, 5 Metal, 4 Alloy, 3 Gem, 2 hits for a Special hammer.
Player skill progression would then improve on these base balances.
(NOTE: This is just some balance data I’ve made up to communicate the proposal.)
Now the question is: What effect will this have on how everyone plays?
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Will players always travel to Level 1 worlds to gather building resources? If so, is this bad?
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Anything else?
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Will this discourage players from living on harder worlds? Maybe not, if they’re able to easily craft the higher end tools. So it’s simply not a blocker as they mine all resources with a single hit.
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Anything else?
You may have seen the designs we have for communicating increased levels. This will be shared between player health, creature levels, and now block levels.
A block on a level 1 world versus a level 4 world.
A creature with higher level health.