I started a new journey from scratch the last 2 days. Played a couple hours and almost half of it is waiting crafting to be done…
We are talking about retaining new players in the game many times, i think this is one of the most important thing to look at. If i were a noob and did not play that kind of game often, i would just quit by now and never return back.
I’ve argued for the value of longer crafting times to the" economy" in the past, and I now see how absolutely wrong I was and how it comes at the cost of an enjoyable experience. Already pleanty of time invested in simply acquiring materials. Remove crafting times entirely, and make crafting about quality, not speed.
Edit: as it exists now, it is not unusual for someone to break a tool and either;
not want to spend the money for a replacement, so they acquire an inferior tool and have a poorer gameplay experience which causes them to eventually leave the game.
go to craft their own replacement, see (X) hours to completion (plus the need to forge on all the enhancements), log out and never return.
I think in some situations they wanted to drive people to trade or buy items versus craft them. In others if you think about having to actually “make” that item it certainly would take a while for 10 of them.
Overall, though, I think the balance could be adjusted some. Most of all they really do need to clarify the direction of this game - MMO, solo play, etc. This trying to be the answer to everything is not helping at all.
If the game was more for builders and less MMO/grind I think we would have more players until you look at how the plot situation and limited planets will cause problems then… There are a lot of things they need to unwind to really raise player retention and numbers.
I think craft times are a little long, but i don’t think completely removing them is the answer. I have trouble putting it into words, but something about taking so much time gives items a value… Also what is the point of single crafting if it’s not so much faster?
It may add market value, but if there is nobody to play the market, it accounts for nothing but a waste of time. What I’m saying is that while boundless is trying to rebuild its player population, it can’t afford mechanics that make the game overall less enjoyable to casuals.
Oh i didn’t mean market value, i meant value to me. A journey to make my first gold tools takes time, then crafting them takes some more time, now these have value to me, there is all this time and effort put towards getting them. Granted there is still value without the craft time, but idk it just feels like a less one to me… Like i said hard for me to put into words
Maybe single craft could be instant, mass craft take awhile, so you save materials but costs time, maybe that would be a good middle ground.
Being a ‘casual’ player here myself, I’m being forced to forage for/buy materials to expand my workshop that currently has ONE of each base machine. Meaning, any time I want to craft on a large scale, it can literally take real time DAYS to get the materials crafted. Especially if I’m starting from scratch.
Sometimes by the time I have the materials to build my vision, I’m so mentally exhausted from making sure I have plenty that I tend to leave that build barely started.
Then I get all excited about another idea, and the process starts again.
Crafting times have forced me to walk away from the game before.
It’s only because I won a sizable prize on a game stream that I was able to buy the necessary bits to enlarge my workshop so I have multiple machines to craft faster. (Thank you Host!)
I know 3 people personally that refuse to play Boundless because of the material grind and the crafting times.
I think this post is very informative and a good baseline for this discussion:
edit: I would also want the crafting times to be removed
I think you should not be deterred from playing the game and that everything should be balanced around activities in-game and not waiting.
I’ve brought this up many, many times as a primary issue with Boundless and it’s always met with “it’s never bothered me” or “just build more machines”.
The fact is, this is a huge barrier to entry for the game and a HUGE turn-off for new players. Crafting times trend toward 0 as you add coils.
I disagree that reducing crafting times to near 0 would decimate the economy in game. It still takes a great deal of time (especially for new players) to gather all the resources and then go through the various steps to make ingredients for more complex recipes. Everyone is not going to want to gather/hunt/mine for everything needed to make everything.
The only way that craft times should be a thing for fully advance-coiled machines is if automation is introduced to the game where we can automatically feed machines from storage or something like a Satisfactory or Factorio lite. Without automation, crafting times simply suck away fun from the game and serve no real purpose other than forcing veteran (read: already veteran) players out into the marketplace to spend money because they don’t want to wait hours and/or days upon days for their crafts to finish.
Imagine you need Titanium Octigrid - and lots of it. It takes Refined Titanium Alloy and Cogs. Refined Titanium Alloy take Compact Titanium Alloy which, in turn, takes Titanium Alloy which, finally, takes Titanium Bars and any precious alloy. A precious alloy is either copper + silver bars or iron + gold bars I believe but I could be wrong. Cogs are just copper bars.
Do you go and gather all of this yourself and then craft it? To gather the thousands upon thousands of copper, silver and titanium bars needed to facilitate this project would take days if not weeks to complete unless you are a very, very accomplished and fast miner who knows exactly where to go and has ample tools already at your disposal.
Or, do you do as I just did with @PrincessMaude, and drop 2.4M coin on 10SS of Titanium Octigrid because the time to gather all the materials myself, even being a very, very accomplished and fast miner with all the tools at my disposal, would be far too long.
The point here is that the crafting times are not the blocker forcing people out into the marketplace to buy things. That is not a valid argument. It’s the gathering itself which takes significantly more time and effort. The crafting times are simply an annoyance. They are arbitrary. They are pointless. They are minutes and hours and days tacked onto the end of an already long (albeit enjoyable if you like gathering) process.
I’ll say it again: crafting times should trend toward 0 with fully advance-coiled machines OR they need to introduce automation into the game where we can dump resources into storage and feed machines automatically.
If you need help, all you need do is ask. I’m one of those who will go along with you to harvest what you need. And if you need extra machines, I’ll help too.
It would be nice if you had “Improved” and “Greater” crafting tables, similar to the fuels. That yes, they’re made out of costlier materials, but afford a shorter crafting time and reduced material cost.
