nice
Iāve been thinking about this, and the crafting times themselves are not exactly what bothers me. What bothers me is that there is nothing you can actively do about them. In every other area of the game, if you need something or want to do something, there is an active activity you can do to take care of that. With crafting, you are just stuck. Bottlenecked out of the game, and often blocked from whatever other activity that you had planned for your play session.
I run into this most often with building. Some people use art programs or creative servers or whatever to plan out their builds and figure out ahead of time how many blocks they need of which type in which colors. I donāt do that. I get an idea, and I just want to make whatever I thought of before I lose interest and forget about it. So what? Just go buy it! Well, a lot of the time, I canāt. Not because Iām unwilling to buy it, but because no one is selling what I need. I use a lot of colors that come from chisel changing blocks or jumping through a multi-hoop step process like smashing up rocks into gravel because the game doesnāt have that particular color of gravel. People do not like to make large quantities of those colors to sell. So I cannot fast track the process by buying it. This is fine for all the other steps for me, because I am actively doing something to get towards my goal. I can charge out and harvest whatever I need to make what I want, I can mine up the color in whatever block it is actually available in, I can prepare ahead of time by keeping on hand combustion particles and kindling shreds to make my own stuff, I can buy the super enriched bonding agentā¦but then you hit the crafting timers. Boom. Brick wall. You have to wait for the rocks to crush, then you have to wait for the mosaic to craft, and now its 3 days later and you have forgotten why you wanted 6 smart stacks of bright orange mosaic in the first place and no longer care and its just super demotivating. The inspiration has died. And sure, you can have bazillions of machines and drop stuff into 20 of them at a time and thenā¦stand around waiting for each one to slowly, slowly pump out whatever you need to stick it into another 20 crafting machines for an even longer wait, butā¦that isnāt fun. Its actually just torture.
If there were something I could actively do to feel like I was working towards whatever goal I have, it would be fine. I donāt care if I have to run around frantically micromanaging a bunch of things, oiling machines and repairing coils that wear out 50 times faster than normal. As long as there is a thing I can do to get where I am trying to go, that is fine. It is the brick wall in your face over and over again that sucks.
Some people like the passive nature of the machines, and that is fine. If you want to load up 3 thousand work benches with rock refining into stone or whatever just so you can collect the XP the next day, knock yourself out. I would prefer an active activity I could do to make the crafting go faster in the cases where I just really need something now and have no other way to obtain it. Standing in my workshop waiting for 3 hour timers to tick so I can do whatever it is Iām trying to do just sucks.
I can agree with this. Iāve always said that we donāt necessarily have to remove crafting times altogether. They just need reduced dramatically. How they get reduced, Iām completely open and I think a system where progression of your character leads to reduced crafting times could be good.
For example. consider a system wherein as you craft a specific thing, you gain proficiency with crafting that item and the craft times reduce down to a minimum threshold. Compact Hard Coal may start out at 3 hours 7 minutes per mass craft but the more of these you craft, it continually reduces all the way down to, say, 5 minutes or something.
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I see what you did there lol. Very clever very very clever.
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Everyone has the right to participate in the discussion. 
Sure. And if you choose to participate unproductively, that is your right as well. When the game gets shut down because it cannot generate a profit, donāt be surprised. 
Sometimes I wonder if that is not peopleās goals.
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The game wonāt shut down over crafting times but putting that asideā¦
If you need rock, gravel, sand or concrete I can probably get you any color you need. I usually have every color of concrete give or take a select few.
The rest is a bit harder to find as I am still organizing my color storage.
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True. Also, not what I said. If it shuts down, it will be because it cannot turn a profit. Which is why I think it is a bad idea to chase players out of the game who might be spending moneyā¦
The stuff I am generally trying to obtain is marble, concrete, and mosaic in various shades of sepia. I keep wiping out the shops that sell those. Most shops donāt sell them at all.
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All you have to do is ask and Iāll fill my stands super full 
Mass amounts of sepia colors of concrete incoming
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All the bright, stale, pale, hot sepia are empty now. 
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got to have some fun 'round here after all
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Hey! This is the forums! No fun allowed! 
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If there was to be some announcement of a renewed development effort beyond ātying things offā then clarifying a more specific direction for the game would be good.
The cheapest, easiest, etcā¦ way to go at it would possibly be to just finally admit (officially) itās RPG and hire a lore guy. Person, sorry.
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Sorry for the multi-posting but thereās a bit of actual input to catch up on here. Actual stuff.
The other game I sometimes hint at, that was pretty much the only game I was playing from 2009 'til 2018 is Entropia Universe. Itās not going to be attractive to many boundless players Iām not recommending it. But if people want to look into such a system itās worth mentioning as really even trying to describe the fullness of it would be a flood here.
The game has over 200 āskillsā that combine into a very large number of āprofessionsā. Pretty much any time you do or touch anything outside of your own inventory, you may skill up in one or more skills. And depending on your skill levels, you may advance in various professions.
Itās intense. This game has no crafting timers. What it does have is a currently (I believe) 13-level crafting system with multiple sub-professions and specialties - and a crafting machine with an RNG chance of success on each craft.
Literally insane. For people who donāt look deeply into it, their crafting system is basically considered as just being a slot machine. It doesnāt help that it has one of the most aggressive (and long-term) āreal cash economiesā on line and so people actually have cash on the line. And this thing will eat you up.
Imagine that you have money that you could actually just withdraw and put back in your wallet. You have a limited blueprint with a few clicks on it. And you have, hmmm, a 75% chance of success because you are in fact an expert in this craft 
click
Nah you lost your stuff. Try again?
Even the forge is a pleasure in comparison, TBH.
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Thereās clearly a middle ground between 3 IRL days to mass craft a bunch of coal and instantaneous slot machine crafting. I think reducing the crafting times dramatically over the course of some progression system would be sufficient.
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I think the progression is already there with the coils, just increase the amount of bonus each coil gives.
Iām sure youāre right, overall. Wouldnāt want to do anything drastic 
However it seems like that way (adding another layer of progression) is definitely a matter of increasing the RPG layers that seem to frustrate so many new players interested in the building and other systems. This would provide some relief for the current end-game players who donāt like to keep crafting as the major focus of their gameplay. I think thatās maybe a little counter productive for the actual growth of the game, though.
I suppose someone could try a sort of ātherapeuticā method.
- Remove all of your coils (down to three I think)
- Mass craft a full queue of compressed hard coal, or maybe large fossil extractions.
- Add a coil, just one
- Full queue again
- Repeat cycle
Mid 2024 or so, when you achieve full coils again, those fully coiled machines are going to seem pretty fast
So honestly I feel like Iāve been pretty clear on the actual topic here. It seems kind of futile but at this time I think (obviously) that messing around in this area is probably actually a good idea. Iād hate to see crafting gutted from the game at one level - but it really could be instrumental in changing the way causal and creative types interact with the larger game, as well as really opening the door wider for people that want to participate, but consider themselves first and foremost to be builders, and are currently really thwarted here.
Or relegated to creative, which is fine if itās someone purely building for themselves, I guess. But honestly, that doesnāt seem to have really been an answer.
OFC just managing peopleās expectations a little more directly from the beginning would be enough to solve a lot of friction 
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Coils could just be percentage based. Raise the percentage of bonus by 50% maybe or something. Shouldnāt be super hard and fixes it across the board.
Thatās a link to another thread with a bunch off rambling, but theyāll have to consider a rebalance in some depth to do that effectively.
If it still requires a large space, a ton of end-game gear, and a mass number of machines in a repeating load-queue-wait-unload cycle it will be a ton of dev work for very little actual result.
Obviously (I think) thereās a ton of nuance here. Definitely not to belittle anyoneās thoughts but IMO ātimersā are not actually a very isolated issue. In a game where character progression is tied very tightly to your ability to influence (plot) the worlds itās non-trivial.
IDK how much value there is in spending a ton of time trying to outline a proper solution though
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