CANCELED: Forging Changes

Devlog
1

UPDATE
Due to the mixed opinions of this, we have decided to shelve these changes in the meantime, to go back and look at a new approach in a later update. I will leave the topic open for discussion in the meantime, but the following changes will be removed before testing goes live.
Thank you for the feedback.

Original Post:

Hey everyone. For the upcoming patch, i have been working away looking at the balance for Forging, mostly around early game forging and getting players to focus more on cheapy forging basic tools. Our goal was always to make wooden and early game tools be the focus for forgers starting out.
We also always intended for players to have to sacrifice some defects or quirks in order to get the most high end gem tool boons, but due to some oversight, the Draining boon compound was just far too powerful and had no negatives when combined with the Catalyst.
Another large QOL change, is Deconstruction resins will now give you back the original tool without and forge effects so you can go back and give it a whirl again if you ended messing up your perfect rotation!

It would be good to get some initial thoughts before we move forward with these changes, and it will be on the next round of Testing servers.

Potential changes so far:

-Flexibility can now go above 100%, meaning Wooden and Copper Tools can be easily pushed beyond the power of an iron or even silver tool for forgers starting out.
-Made it so the initial set of Forging Compounds are easier to craft for players getting into the forging system for the first time. While the first tier of compounds are not the most efficient way to forge the best gear, these changes should encourage players to play around and start crafting items.

  • Pure Boon Compound 1: Removed Spitter Eye, increased Fresh Vital Essence to 2.
  • Imperfect Boon Compound 1: Removed Adrenal Gland, increased Fresh Vital Essence to 2.
  • Unstable Boon Compound 1: Removed Wildstock Eye, increased Fresh Vital Essence to 2.
  • Increased the flexibility on Copper tools and weapons from 50 to 60.
  • Increased the flexibility on Gold tools and weapons from 30 to 40.
  • Draining Boon Compound was clearly unbalanced, meaning it was either completely ignored, or abused along side catalysts to easily create max tier forged items with no repercussions. We have some changes which should add more usability in forging while taking back the abuse factor.
    • Draining Boon Compound 1 now adds 160 Quirk Points, Vigour Drain now only lasts 3 turns instead of 5.
    • Draining Boon Compound 2 now adds 400 Quirk Points, Vigour Drain now only lasts 3 turns instead of 5.
  • Deconstruction Resins now saves the forged piece of gear (but strips it of any Boons/Quirks/Defects) along side the chance to recover forge ingredients. This should be a major improvement to all players in the forge!
  • Wooden Tools now have 600 Durability, up from 300. This is to let players experiment and try out early game forged creations using maximum Effectiveness before investing skill points and Power Coils into Forging.

:curling_stone:

24 Likes
2

Woop woop the forge police are here to reclaim the draining compound. Save up on clean epic forged hanmers now, theyre going up in price!
Solid changes here! This makes the intentions of forging much clearer especially if you didnt understand before

9 Likes
3

F̶i̶n̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶e̶m̶o̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶e̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶g̶i̶n̶g̶!̶ ̶T̶H̶A̶N̶K̶ ̶Y̶O̶U̶!̶

EDIT: Well I was excited to play this again but I guess it’s going back on the shelf. Smh getting my hopes up…

EDIT2: Looks like they are removing creature drops now, sweet!

11 Likes
4

Can you remove the need for Reactive Lamellas for the compound base? If we need to go to a T4 world to even start forging, there’s little point in trying it out on Wood/Copper tools.

23 Likes
5

Wooden tools?!

That’s an interesting choice…
I’ll have to see it happening with my eyes before i believe it though…

1 Like
6

I wonder how this will change low level forging?

Interesting for sure.

Wooden hammer with super speed!

Edit: will late game forging get more expensive?

8

Thank you for FINALLY having the time to give the forging system a pass. I think all the proposed changes would be helpful for the system and the player base as a whole.

It has long annoyed me that that quirks and defects were ignorable basically. Why even have them if it’s possible to totally negate them? I would like to see something that forces even high end gear/tools to have at least 1 defect on it if you press for more benefits to the tool itself.

2 Likes
9

Any chance we can also get more ingredients on our forge racks? maybe 12 slots instead of 8?

9 Likes
10

This makes a lot of sense. If the changes are in the vein of making it easier to get in to for newer players or lower tier players, then a recipe mat pass should definitely be done at the same time.

Edit:

Suggestion: make single effects more powerful. As you add more effects both/all effects reduce in value.

You could take out defects entirely and have the defect be the reduced power for each effect as more effects are stacked on to a piece of gear. Not going in to the negatives, just a straight % reduction. I’m not a fan of a system that chews through materials where we seem to have an economy problem but that’s a different discussion all together.

3 Likes
11

While I welcome any balance changes that ease early game forging, because it currently doesn’t really happen until late game, I am hesitant with the way current defects and quirks to force end game crafting to have any of them.

As a suggestion for forging, make the quirks more of a genuine quirk and less of a defect. And maybe even adjust the defects down in severity. Having played around with a bit of forging, around 100 or so forged items, (its a small sample but it’s all I could afford on live since I’m silly and didn’t test on test server) I noticed that getting quirks often killed the tool for my purposes, and getting a defect often directly hurt the boon I was aiming for. Often directly weakening damage or durability while I’m aiming for these exact things.
For example, the quirk that you can only use during the day effectively kills any hammer I get it on. Since I can’t tell while mining deep within a mountain what time it is. You could change this quirk to costs less energy during the day and more at night instead. That would be more of a “quirk” and less of a defect. Most of the quirks I have seen acted more like defects for me. Losing health while using a hammer? That was painful for my rather squishy mining build. Jumping randomly… Actually funny albeit very disorienting and distracting. Getting hungry faster, that was far more punishing once I got energy and was ok early game tbh.
I could talk More about them, but you get the general idea. Quirks should fall into the funny and /or give and take. It shouldn’t have just a downside. As it is, boons are good. Quirks are mostly bad, defects are bad. I feel you should look at them to balance quirks to be neither good nor bad. And due to how harsh 3 levels of RNG are combined together, you may want to look at lessening one of those or giving players a bit more input on them.
For example. If I want to find x item, say gems. I only have one RNG to worry about, where the gems are placed within the chunk. The rest of it I can combat with atlas and knowledge tab. Same with things like shimmering orbs, and leaves, etc. Most of boundless you deal with the one level or RNG. Then in forging you get the RNG that determines which boons you will get, then the RNG to determine how much of you boon bar will go into a boon, then another RNG to determine which boon that bar will go in to. This can make for some incredibly frustrating moments (more than once I have had to walk away after watching an incredibly unlucky forge roll)
Now you have in the game the gums to increase the chances of a certain type of boon being applied. Except that the categories have more than one boon per. So it’s still a gamble that you will get the “effect” boon you actually want, or the “special” boon you actually want etc.
So the system already feels pretty punishing at times and then you add two separate items, quirks and defects, that makes everything at times feel pretty bad.

And draining compound was the only way I found forging to be cost effective for my own personal use. I can see why you want to change that from being the main use one, but addressing why people aim for perfect forges instead of running the risk of getting any quirks or defects on a tool may be a better use of the time on this one.

As another note. If any of this is meant to be used on wooden items you have a few barriers to that. Since I started with wooden items and made several downright useless broken things that were not worth the resources. This first barrier is the reactive lamellas, the only place I have found these are t4+ so that definitely pushes it from “early game accessible” to “mid game content” the second is that some of the boons and defects etc work on a static number and a percent number. So they in combination can kill stats on an item. I made several aoe shovels that actually had 0 damage, they became surprisingly good lawn mowers… But were functionally useless (especially considering if you break the block under grass you get block and seed) things like this make some forging just plain wastes.

As it is, I like that you are looking at this seriously, and the changes will shake things up alot. But if you Want more people to forge you need to adjust the rng and the just confusing lack of info on forging in game.
If you want people to not aim for boon only forges you have to adjust the quirks and defects, not by a ton, don’t make them pointless just find on the dial where having some of them isn’t that bad.

Either way keep up the great job guys!

11 Likes
12

I second this. One of the reasons people were turning to things like draining boon compounds was not having enough space to counteract quirks/defects using other methods. Having more slots would allow each of us to develop our own unique crafting methodology to make the best tools we can.

I would be fine with quirk/defects becoming a more routine part of late game if they weren’t so crippling. That would then allow each craft to be unique and at the same time allow buyers to be forgiving of using items with said items depending on the severity and types of defects/quirks on said item.

Right now typically if you have a defect on a high end AoE tool you might as well just toss it into a pit of lava for the chances of unloading it with even the smallest issues.

2 Likes
13

Amazing!!!

Too bad about draining though but I understand. There was no reason to ever get quirks.

14

Very exciting update! :grin: Can’t wait for it :grinning:

I never crafted any forged ones, looks to complex for me and I’ve watched YouTube videos on it , luckily it worked out for others like Larky, I’ve easily bought 1.5mil in forged hammers​:joy:, for me this update is great! I look forward to completing my first forged item soon ! :grinning:

1 Like
15

I like that flexibility is much higher for these tools!

However, hmm, I think the challenge here may be that you end up having to use way more ingredients for those tools than other tools - and you’re still largely constrained by vigor, I think?

Suggestion: Increase the effect of compounds on lower tier tools by some multiplier, so that players can achieve the same effects for cheaper (on, say, wooden tools).

Goal: Have forge ingredient cost scale with tool tier

2 Likes
16

Is there going to be a market for wood/copper forged tools? If not, then low level forgers are still wasting materials. If so, then it’s a good change.

1 Like
17

There is definitely a market of low-tier items…not sure about as low as wood/copper but if they can be made relatively inexpensively it could really help the newer players get situated.

18

The only question I have, is why the focus on Wooden tools? Wooden tools are useless, no one uses wooden tools, cause Iron Tools are so cheap and easy to buy, and just flat better. Iron is the standard tool used by everyone, new or old, beginner or expert, low tier and high tier. So why ignore Iron, and boost Wooden Tools?

It feels like every other nerf you’ve devs ever made, that you looked at a piece of paper, it says Wooden Tools aren’t being made or used. So you force it to have a purpose.

You even admit in your post:

that is not a good thing. Wooden and copper tools should NEVER be better than Iron, and especially not Silver tools. That isn’t balanced!

5 Likes
19

There has always been one. Even if it were my family alone, they’re cheap tools kids can run through on low tier worlds. 40 tools a week is about what they go through on average.

20

Wooden tools have had high flexibility since the very beginning of forging.

They’re a good place to learn about forging, and play around with combinations.

That said, people’s natural tendency will be to forge their best tools. The system (and tutorial, probably) need to fight that somehow

1 Like
21

This will make high-tier forging an unweildy, RNG-fillded mess. There aren’t enough ingredient slots to get the boons you want and have items to counteract quirks and defects. What will happen is that now instead of everyone using draining compound, everyone will use Pure Boon compound because quirks and defects are just too punishing. Deconstruction Resin change is irrelevant because there’s no way forgers can spare an ingredient slot for a reset button. You aren’t addressing the real problem: quirks and defects are unbalanced and people will do whatever it takes to avoid having to deal with them. This is the second forging nerf in a row targeting the compounds that don’t grand quirk/defect points, but you have done nothing to help players deal with quirks and defects or to lessen their effects. Time to forge as much as I can and start hoarding spitter eyes.

Please remember that a nerf to forging is a nerf to the entire economy of the game. It means all high-end mined resources get more rare and more expensive.

EDIT: felt this post was too negative and not constructive enough. So here’s a suggestion: Try giving players 16 slots instead of 8 in the forge. Make it so vigour compound only gives back vigour for buffs, leave Draining Compound unchanged. I bet you would see playing with defects and quirks.

6 Likes