It would be nice if high level hunting could be a viable alternative to mining for those of us who hate mining for gems and ore. Right now, you get a tease amount of gems and ore no matter the level of meteor so it would be nice if they balanced it out so hunting higher level meteors or higher tier world’s would give a more reasonable amount of gems. Mining is just intensely boring but also really important for advancing in the game. I don’t really want to spend time doing things I really don’t like but if I want to get further in the game the way it is, I need to mine a lot.
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Cool non explored options for gem tools might be
Sniper Gems - tools made from this gem type will have more reach\range
Armor piercing - tools made from this gem have a high probability to pierce\nullify armor - including on creatures for weapons.
Energy Consumption - tools made from this gem are so light you feel like you can swing them forever
Lucky Gems - tools made from this gem are lucky and slightly improve drop rates for some things
DoT Gems - tools made from this gem apply Damage Over Time to blocks \ creatures - enough and at a rate to actually be viable.
Augment synergy - tools made from this gem gain double of an augment’s effect (maybe more uses?)
Forging synergy - tools made from this gem require less boon to level up an effect
and whatever you get the point,
we can deal with things that aren’t the BASE stats of an item, giving each gem an entirely different Identity instead of just minor speed\power gains.
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Maybe consider less energy used per swing on silver/gold tools. Having to wait to recharge every 60 seconds or so is a pain when your new with no skill points. Would definitely make them more attractive at lower/mid levels.
But you drown in resources after going on a hunt. Trophies sell for 2-4k a pop, eyes are 100+ and even the stacks of blood will get you a few thousand. Miners don’t get any of that. The idea is to stimulate the economy, if we all got everything we needed from any activity then there’d be no need for an economy.
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Where do you find spots that buy eyes for 100+
I’d like to throw this idea in as a possible way of bringing bomb mining back in a controlled fashion:
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Loving the conversation so far guys, good points and lots of constructive comments.
Keep it coming 
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Perhaps the rewards for higher level meterorites could be improved and the lower level ones left as is.
Soloing should still be viable for players who choose to do so.
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Maybe drop more gems or trophies since I believe hopper cores and spitter eyes are now such high demand
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Fix for Bomb Mining.
Bombs don’t destroy resources, but any resource damaged by a bomb only drops 1 of that resource.
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This is due to the low quality state of combat. Being attacked by numerous mobs all using, almost completely unavoidable, homing attacks removes player skill from the game. To fight you either need the right character skills and items or need to build terrain cheese.
You can’t be good at combat you can only do the right things in combat.
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Point by point,
The problem here should be easy to identify: the tools are, at best, a side-grade from iron, while taking more resources to craft (including iron, in the case of silver alloy tools) and having lower durability.
They would need to either be cheaper, more durable, or have higher base damage in addition to the benefits of being swift / having higher critical damage. The investment part is really key here. In the case of hammers, for example, using an iron hammer results in enough iron to replace it, plus some. Using alloy tools, this is much more difficult to achieve, regardless of planetary tier.
They’re also, somewhat unexpectedly, worse in terms of forging effectiveness than iron, making iron tools better even for use in the forge.
Again the issue here is the compounding investment in making a titanium tool. You need to mine and smelt iron/copper, gold/silver and titanium, then craft precious metal alloys, then craft titanium alloy, to finally be able to craft the tool.
For gem tools, you need fewer crafting steps, and less variety of resources. You just need the gems, which are compacted, and then refined, and you’re good to go.
A compounding factor is that there are too many competing uses for alloys in Power Coil crafting, particularly Advanced ones: you need a VERY LARGE quantity of precious alloys (for machined blocks and to make titanium alloy for the furnace bases) and, of course, the titanium alloy itself, while using barely more gems per Coil than per tool.
So, in the end, gems are more plentiful, comparatively, than titanium alloy (or gold/silver alloy) for tool making, as they’re used in fewer recipes.
Edit: A possible solution would be to make furnace pieces and compacted/refined/machined blocks use bars, rather than alloys. I’m sure I’m not the only one with an over-abundance of titanium bars and not enough precious alloys to convert 'em into something useful, so they just sit there being pointless.
The issue here (in my opinion) is more of an initial lack of definition for what role bombs were supposed to have. Are they for combat? For buffing? For mining? For clearing out terrain?
Personally, it always made sense to me that they should be used as terrain destruction/removal, rather than as Seam Detectors, in mining, and as an Area of Effect buff/debuff delivery system in combat, rather than for damage.
However, too much time passed with them being allowed to be used as Seam/Ore Detectors, without any indication by the develpment team that this was not their intended use, so they came to be expected to fill that role, and when they were properly defined without warning as a terrain removal tool, which makes sense for bombs, it came as a bit of a shock to the people that believed (and still believe) that their intended use should be as ore revealing tools. Better communication, and a better job in defining the role that items are expected to fill, would go a long way towards making the balance discussion more productive. Particularly in the case of bombs, that still sit somewhat undefined in players minds despite the 199 patch seemingly clarifying their role as a terrain destruction tool rather than an ore revealing tool.
This point was fairly well argued on other posts in this thread, so I’ll just add that a significant part of the issue comes from diamond being found in a particularly desirable resource band (together with gold, titanium, hard coal and medium coal, as a rule) while various other gems are found in comparatively poorer areas in terms of highly desirable resources.
I believe the issue lies more in the rewards than in the risk and time investment. The effort-reward ratio is skewed towards the easier meteors, and I believe that to bring the higher level ones in line the solution would be to increase the rewards rather than change the effort part of the equation.
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I think forging quirks might also be something worth taking a look at.
Today, all quirks are negative effects (just generally milder and weirder than defects). This means that players are actively optimizing to avoid both quirks and defects—encouraging us to skip over tiers & progression.
Suggestion: make some quirks desirable (but maybe situationally) Examples:
- Bomb cube: bombs now explode in a cube, reduces radius by N%
- Power hungry: increases damage by N%, but each attack/swing deals M% damage to the player
- Power of the sun: increases damage by N% during the day, reduces damage by N% at night
- Bonus damage while jumping
- Etc
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We could also add tool augments, but don’t let them start until you hit alloy. Make the t1 augments incredibly easy to make to increase the viability of gold and silver tools.
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Gem tools and weapons used to have different traits before in EA. Ruby slingbow was sniper, emerald was poisoning, topaz was rapid I think … then the forge came along and all that was thrown out the window in favour of RNG.
I agree, 1 or 2 desirable quirks would increase the desire to try forging early on. But keep the benefit to a small amount or % so quirks still aren’t something you would actively seek while forging
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I’ll link a thread I made a month ago below where I said you had to improve the food UI and buff Gold damage. And you guys did both. There are some further slight tweaks I think you can still make. Specifically;
- Improve the flexibility of Silver and Gold so they are more forge friendly
I have a gold mining build where I can one shot T5 rocks vs the same Titanium hammer which would take 2 shots for a rock. But I don’t know if people would still want to use a gold hammer when the Titanium is more durable.If you improve the flexibility of both Gold and Silver then they’ll be used more often because there are certain forged Gold tools that can be used with great effectiveness. But I’d be careful not to make it as good as Titanium.
I’m only using hammers in this case but I think the same concepts can be applied to Axes and Shovels
Another possible quirk: A hammer randomly ‘eats’ some stone instead of dropping it, but fills the hunger bar (but still uses energy as normal) a little bit when that happens. At the highest level for the quirk, it would eat all the stone and always fill the hunger bar instead of draining it.
That way people that dislike having infinite XP via stone crafting would have something to be happy about, and it would provide an alternative for carrying a million prime steaks in exchange for the loss of the potential stone crafting xp.
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I would actually only allow augments for gold and silver, nothing too crazy ofcourse.
interesting idea… what if healed the durability of the tool instead? (but only enough to slow it down from breaking)
Edit:
oh wait, with persisting foods that would next to impossible to balance… unless the persisting food also decreased the quirk effectiveness 
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