Centraforge more dissapointing than helpful?

General
1

Im just wondering if this is the feeling others get as well. With the recent changes to bombs the Centraforge will now be more important but as a new player my journey to Forging with a 10+hour a day play schedule looked something like this…

after a week of playing i was never interested in bomb mining and decided to go the hammer route so started speed grinding toward getting a centraforge.

10-12 days to get all the mats i needed to make the power required to get to a pwoered centraforge. (I was using silver hammers)

1 day to create an alt and skill it into forging.

3 days to farm MORE diamonds to make hammers

2 days hunting down all the mats that go into the forging process

That is a huge time sink that Im not sure how a human with a 9-5 job could manage and what i got out of it was VERY dissapointing.

Forging feels like a gamble one where you don’t always get the trait your working towards (even with the proper gums) and when you do it doesn’t level high enough to be worth anything.

So why do I feel like this is a big enough issue to start another negative post? (sorry devs, still love your game but i feel like this is a very signifigant balance issue)

Lets face it Boundless is probably the first “Minecraft clone” I have seen that stands on its own two legs and isnt just riding the fad wave. That being said I’m sure you can all see the comparison to Minecraft enchanting. Same concept. you put in a normal tool or weapon and a mat and you get out a buffed tool or weapon.

In Minecraft it was completely random and I for one being the perfectionist that I am threw out a good number of tools because the enchant was useless to me. This was ok on minecraft because it took 2 hours to get enough materials to make a batch of picks where i would be almost guarenteed to get 2 or 3 of what i was looking for so the throwaways felt like a necissary and non game breaking evil.

Why doesnt this concept work for boundless and the Centraforge?

2-4 hours to mine 80 of whatever gem your using

1 hour at least to farm the bark that goes into the leather for the hammer (lets face it this is a generous estimation)

2-4 hours to farm the Forging materials

5 hours to mass craft hammers 3-5 hours at least crafting Forging ingredients (most of this you can do all at the same time as it takes different machines)

You’ve got to be able to see where I am going with this and why this doesn’t seem like an ok system. This many hours of work just to end up with junk tools is insane even by my definition. I can only imagine how the casual players feel.

For this much time I feel like we should at least be guarenteed 1 trait we are aiming for but we aren’t.

To sum it up I really feel like something needs to give.

Gems more abundant? maybe

Forging mats not as grindy? maybe

Making Forging more targeted and less of a gamble? Yes please. I am willing to put in the work and the time but for the sake of your players please please dont make 10 hours of our time a 50/50 on getting a reward.

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Once the economy settles in it will be easier to find a niche and just buy the resources needed. Until then it does take a lot of work. It is worth it though!

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You’ve really hit the head on why I just opt to buy forged goods. My time is worth more. My patience is worth more. If other folks find it fun and enjoyable I’ll pay them to do it just so I don’t have to.

The forging concept is a great conceptual idea, but now it needs to have the creases ironed out and flesh the system in to a more meaningful game aspect. Increase the costs for guaranteed results or decreases the costs significantly for the random stuff we are experiencing currently.

Love the idea; really dislike the implementation.

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Agree. I’ve gone into why I dislike the Forge before so I won’t rehash old (but valid) points but overall I definitely didn’t think it was worth the effort. I wanted to get one with a decent set of coils in 1.0 to test properly (didn’t have time to soup it all up before EA wipe) and now I have… underwhelmed to say the least.

Bring back better base tools! :frowning:

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Agreed good sir. If there were more people out there supplying I think I wouldnt even bother but there arent. Why? because the time put in is just not balanced with the product taken out.

By this I mean. In a game such as this shouldn’t the time you put into creating a tool make your life easier? Shouldn’t that tool last longer and do more so the time you put into making it isnt wasted?

2 days ago I crafted 3 mass crafts of diamond hammers. with my fully powered Forge and my alt fully specced into Forging I expected to get at least 5 or so 3x3 hammers I got none. granted mistakes were made I am new to forging and i learned a lot but it was a LONG road to make that 3 mass craft of diamond hammers a VERY LONG grindy road. I would have been satisfied with 4-5 3x3 I got none. none.

I can think of many changes that would make this system OK

  1. Give all tools at least double durability. That way if you REALLY want to keep the forge such a gamble it might be viable.

  2. Make gums higher resource but trait guarentee.

  3. Let us choose which of the rolled traits the boon points go into on every roll (this is the biggest issue and I cant stress this enough) cant tell you how many hammers ALMOST hit the mark in a forge and didnt because the boon points kept randomly going into the ■■■■ traits I didnt want (yeah magnetism im looking at you)

Im not saying make all these changes, any one of them would go a LONG want to aleviating a lot of the randomness involved.

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Agree, definitely disappointing.
After a bunch of trying I eventually was able to make a few ok things in EA, but I haven’t gotten there yet in release. And I got junk a lot.
I thought I had gotten what I needed to start trying now, but then they added more power required and maybe more ingredients preventing me from being able to try yet again . So even more disappointing.

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put an item in forge, but place a few special gums then use a boon compound 2. If the special selected is magnet or something you don’t want, but the boon hasn’t been added yet, immediately finish the crafting. It will take a few minutes to get the item back. If you haven’t placed a boon on the item you can reforge it. Took me awhile to figure this out

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For a solo player yes, this is overwhelmingly impossible seeming which is why it’s encouraged you join a group. Forging was supposed to be mid to late game achievement but team efforts made long grinds look like a single days project. Day 1 portals. Day 3 Forged gear. For myself it took me two days to reach alloy tool phase of gameplay so I could make a refinery. Most groups had advanced coils by the end of the first day.

Indeed. Being able to focus farming a small percentage of reagents and to join the economy by selling for example your shimmering orbs for other peoples bitter beans will be more of the norm like it was before release. I for one would focus on selling fibrous leaves and elemental shards for my income so I guess my profession was “scavenger” lol.

There is a method which you might not be following. Using the special gum about 3 times, using fate paste II and then boon paste II’s and rolling pure compound III’s still gave me aoe hammers with no problems. Is this the method you are using?

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You could use boon removal but it is one more thing to make, and reduces your precious vigor pool

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And remember everyone the game isn’t even fully out yet. End game/High Tier stuff isn’t in the game.

So everything you are experiencing right now? All this heavy grind? That’s all Mid Tier stuff. To put it into Minecraft terms, you’ve only reached Iron level, as Diamond stuff hasn’t been put into the game yet.

Just got to remember that, for when they add in world lvls 7, 8, and 9 eventually.

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Yeah one of my guild mates told me about this after the fact so I will try it but I feel that all of my points are still valid.

The point I am really trying to make here (and its a point that I feel the dev team hasnt quite gotten a hold on yet) is this, If you have good knowledge of the game and you put 4 hours of work into something that 4 hours should translate into using less time later.

Every hour you put serious work into the game should in some way give you something back and improve quality of life. The balance here in the current state of things to me seems way off. As someone who generally like playing games on hard and prefers difficult grinds that tells me there is a problem.

It seems very easy to get unlucky and 4 hours of work costing you more than it gives you back. Forging isnt the only situation in this game where i see it.

To break it down into the simplest of terms. If you make 4 diamond hammers and you take all 4 of those diamond hammers and you go diamond mining and use them ALL up and you do it properly should it be possible to come back with less than enough diamonds to replace those hammers?

IMO defanitly not.

But in the current state of this game it is very possible and this type of situation hurts game populations.

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I think you have some valid points but also some unreasonable expectations as well.

The UI for centraforging can be cleaned up to make it more userfriendly.

As for unreasonable expectations:

You’re trying to solo the entire supply chain for centraforging and that’s alot of work. Try outsourcing certain parts of it to make it less grindy.

While the game is out of EA, it definitely hasn’t matured as a product yet. As such, you stand to both benefit and succumb to the pains of the early stages of an unstabilized player economy. Once your alt has matured and you’ve nailed the supply chain down, then you’ll stand to reap the rewards.

re: randomness of centraforging

I think RNG is fine as long as you have a large sample to play with. This isn’t directed at you but I can’t stand it when players say centraforging sucks but they only have a small sample size of 2-3 forging sessions to offer. I think that if you have a large sample size for forging, then you’ll find the randomness should be in line with the skills of your alt. If it isn’t, then that should be looked at by devs. Do you have a large sample size?

The issue that probably frustrates you is the combination of both the randomness AND trying to control the entire supply chain. That’s just simply too much work for one person. You need to examine what you can outsource in order to maintain your sanity.

PS- Do you use spreadsheets or 3rd party tools?

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The definitely defeated that idea by nerfing the exp gains in a lot of cases. I disagree that every hour should reward you because every failure that wastes your time ingame experiences you as a player because chances of wasting that time again are minimal.

But most games have something like this? Most mmorpgs have a gear refinement system which is based purely on the grind to refine and how random that chance is only to be forced to rinse and repeat. This game has very little randomness that leaves you unrewarded.

+1

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Its funny because as we have had this conversation a friend from another game just decided to buy the game so we will see if that changes the fact but i stand by my opinion that if your making a tool that tool should allow you to gather MORE resources than went into making said tool. otherwise how do we progress?

I agree that someone very knowledged in the game will likely never or very rarely come back with less than they put in but i still feel that the balance is off.

I will be sure to report later on the difference between going it solo and as a duo =D

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Without bugs it’s actually amazing. With it’s horrible.

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Im soloing, got my shop going decently though so i sell what i make during my main gameplay of mining, which has afforded me enough coin to buy the resources from other people, helping me make it easier. Also the boons are specific to categories and you can mass craft 100 of each gum you need to target them, when you only need usually at most 4 gums for 1 item. I started forging about a week and a half ago and still have about 1/4 - 1/2 of each of my mass crafted gums. Ive only done 1 mass craft each for effect gum, special gum, glow gum, and longevity gum. I use longevity the most for durability and still have around 30. The hardest thing now for fresh forgers is making boon compound 2 to be minimally effective which takes 80 sapphires to make the coils for the 500power you need, but youll have enough to get 10 coils at that point which is halfway to making compound 3. The lamella is easy to get now and glass is easy to get as well, just cost time. Hardest materials for me to get is shimmering orb and bitter beans but shimmering orbs needs 18 for a mass craft in any boon ingredient that requires them i believe.

To put this into persepctive ive forged easily 30 different tools and grapples collectively which has kept me progressing little by little. The only thing i wasted materials and coin on was a silver 1x9 aoe hammer and persitence pies. But even still i repurposed that hammer for gleam mining instead of gem mining and its paid for itself. Forged items sell for a lot more than their base counterparts too so if you dont like what you made someone else probably will and youll have 10-20k spare coin to spend on more mats

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Actually, from my experience, you should completely omit basic power coils and jump to advanced. Because sapphires are in area were tech components are prevalent I was able to jump from 0 power straight to 2100 with way less gems. It scales extremely well between standard coil one craft and even bulk craft of advanced coils. What i calculated as minimum for 500 power with only small amount of additional grind gave me 2k+ power.

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What boons are you getting that is causing your gem hammers to be useless?

I do a lot of forging (only up to iron as i just got wb coils last night). I have yet to get any tool that was useless after forging. While i might not get the coveted supper effective combo of boons in the end it is still more effective than the base hammer prior to forging. I find any level of aoe to be a benefit. I get many tools with aoe 2 and 3 and use all of them.

Heck, an unforged gem tool is pretty great in my book.

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Im sure you’re correct however im the impatient type and like my progress consistent instead of a lot at once. I now have 700 power on my mixer, 1500 on my bench, 2k on extractor and compactor and 600 on my centraforge. Which has all been enough to keep me going without having to do a lot of one task. Oh i also hate doing the same thing over and over and over again so its afforded me variety to keep my sanity which is important to me. I like mining and i like bomb mining but if thats what i had to do daily for 7+ days in a row i would hate mining and dislike this game as my gems per hr are nuetered after bomb mining. With the 4m aoe titanium bombs i had id get 100 gems /hr which is still far less than anyones getting with hammers post patch. I had one lucky bomb session right after nerf that gave me 70/hr but Now i get 20 or 30 an hr

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I cant speak on the forge because i have one but havent used it. I’m just starting to craft silver, gold, and titanium tools. But as far as someone making the point that you should outsource what you can’t do… i think that is a very valid point.
I currently have 8 refineries, 4 mixers, 4 extractors, 4 compactors, 6 workbenches. I bought 90% of them and had them way before i was able to craft past iron for alloy.
I also have 5 power coils and 2 advanced coils for my workbench but only crafted the 5 regulars. Bought the other 2.
It is only me and my friend but we are progressing very well because we fill our gaps with the economy. I mass craft thousands of refined stone a week and sell them (for cheap! On ceph merika NE of chisel king!!) and use that money to plug holes in our progress.
Again I claim to know nothing about forging I just wanted to make the point that this game is so appealing BECAUSE you can’t reliably solo everything. You NEED the community and I feel like that is why I haven’t run into any horrible trolling players yet.
It sounds like you are just trying to take on too much.

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