/rant ON
So I managed to SCRAPE enough Saltpetre fragments and volatile blood together to finally make a batch of iron bombs; only to find out what a tremendous waste of time it was. From the videos, I was thinking wow… cool I could go try and make a hole in the ground and see how deep I could go, imagine my “amazement”, or lack there of. A piddly 79 dmg to all surrounding blocks. Took about 8 bombs to make a hole. I was like. what happened to the bomb damage? It didn’t looked that way in the video! All that farming for the saltpetre fragment and volatile blood for a whole bag of dissappointment. Just for reference, it took about 3-4 iron bombs to kill a starter planet spitter (without missing). Whats wrong with this picture here??
/rant OFF
I had similar experiences with many of the new recipes. The amount of time it took to gather all the ingredients was ridiculously high and the effect from the crafted item was extremely disappointing.
Bomb damage to blocks got nerfed since the Jiivita video, because they are considered to be weapons and not mining tools. In terms of the low damage to creatures, maybe that should get a buff
When you say starter planet spitter, do you mean the lowest tier? or stout?
No stout spitters on starter planets, Sir!
He is right. The time and effort versus damage output makes this item currently worthless. The only use case for these weapon as is in the current balance is some ballers like throwing them it pits, emphasis on ballers because it is not worth it.
I found iron bombs fairly disappointing as well.
A nice surprise was the amount of bombs in a bag.
Doesn’t matter how many there are, its still pointless and useless atm.
fair point 
it only takes me two iron bombs, though
Ten gold bombs will destroy surrounding blocks and leave the resources inside intact a lot of the time, I assume depending on Luck. (on ring worlds.) It’s possible this isn’t intended.
I’ve been testing using them to mine through mountains on Munteen in search of Amethysts, and I can’t say whether my technique is slightly more efficient than just conventional mining, since I haven’t tested it thoroughly, but it’s certainly not as strong as might be hoped given the amount of resources it takes. (It is quite fun though.) As long as they have the ability to damage blocks, they will always be a valuable “mining” tool since excavating underground areas is A LOT easier if you use them – if not for mining then at the very least building underground structures. My preference or suggestion would be for there to be a type of bomb that is much more expensive and difficult to craft that allows us to harvest blocks and resources with them.
iron bombs have no use in the game atm other than to get a hit on each mob in a pit by a meteor to try to get some xp. Most of the time you can’t kill wildstocks with them , because of the obvious running.
All damage bombs are very very hard to use hunting, and used best hanging from a tree while lobbing them at all the wildstocks in an aggro pile beneath.
Emerald bombs are 2 hit on starter and 3 hit on high tier planets and about a 3 meter radius. Diamond are 3 on starter and 4ish on high tier and a 4 radius. These are significantly more OP in terms of damage to mobs and making holes.
I may be off by a meter on both of the measurements, but they are much better than the measly 1.5 of the iron bomb.
I haven’t been really paying attention and I only have a few, but is saltpetre really uncommon? I know i barely see any hoppers or volatile blood drop, but when you say you scraped up enough saltpetre, makes me think its rare.
You can find it by breaking Stalagmites in caves. 
Bombs are in a pretty weird place right now since their mining potential has been effectively killed unless you can craft gem bombs in a reliable and economical mass quantity. Before the nerf, Iron Bombs were the most economical bomb to craft since it didn’t require spark or power or a ton of extra expensive materials.
Why they didn’t see that we were going to use them for mining is oddly strange. Gamers always use the most effective way of doing something in games like these so it should have came to no surprise to the devs that those that mine would use the best bomb for that task: which were Iron Bombs. They should have just given us a mining bomb from the start when they gave us all the other bombs.
I still would like to see some sort of solution to where bombs are right now. It’s okay to have creature killing bombs, healing bombs, energy recover bombs but to not have a simple way to compliment hammers for mining is a little silly. Axes and shovels should have the same tool compliment as well.
Still have hope that we’re going to have different methods to gather materials in mining, wood chopping, digging, and hunting than we do right now. I want mining bombs. I would love to have a method that lets me blow up a tree with an axe cause its super powered with some sort of Oortian tech (like 20-50 swings and the whole tree blows up), or some sort of digging method that makes it fun.
As it stands right now, bombs in general are either to useless on the lower tier end or too expensive on the higher tier end to buy or to make to make it worth using. Even if you could blow up blocks with bombs, you still needed a hammer to kill blocks if you wanted anything from them, including resource materials.
Those are just some of my thoughts on bombs in general. Extremely disappointed with the design approach and decisions on them. They wouldn’t have made hammers worthless, grieving is a bad excuse to nerf them, and having holes all over the place is handled with world regen (which shouldn’t be changed anyways).
When they first announced the bombs I thought fantastic this is going to make mining so much fun … then not long after they were introduced and before I’d had a chance to see what was needed to make them I heard they had been nerfed because of the huge craters that were created on community hunts and the problems that caused. Then I discovered the rolling roadblocks in certain resources just to make basic things so in the end I’ve never even bothered to look at them let alone try any.