Durability suggestion: Hardness

Suggestions
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In the thread about crafting, a lot of discussion and controversy has been made about item durability.

This comment in particular gave me the idea for a way to impliment durability that would prevent this type of behavior, but still make epic items vulnerable to eventual degradation. As @olliepurkiss mentioned, durability is intended to make even the best items temporary so that really epic items can be made without being game breaking.

My suggestion is the “hardness” property, and it is based on the hardness of the materials used in creating an item. Hardness scales liniarly, from wood to stone, metal, alloys, etc. Hardness is basically an items resistance to durability loss based on what it is used against. As an example, imagine a stone pickaxe. Using a stone pick to mine stone, my pick takes normal durability damage, but using it to mine sandstone, which is considerably less hard, my pick takes about (arbitrary value!) 50% durability damage. If I upgrade my pick to metal, now stone only does 50% durability damage, but sandstone does less (perhaps, 0-25%). If I upgraded to vastar pickaxe of doom, now I can mine that stone that is in my way at little to no risk to taking durability loss, but mining more materials to make new doom picks does normal durability damage. In this way, you don’t feel like you’re wasting your best materials mining common materials, but you can’t use it forever to mine higher quality things.

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That is a great idea, I don’t think anything should go down to 0% durability damage but loosing only maybe 5% or something like that seems fair if you mine the weakest materials.

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Yeah, that comment from Vastar really got us thinking, didn’t it? :slight_smile:

Here’s a response of mine from the other thread for context, as well:

I’d like to propose a somewhat counterintuitive alternative to your idea @Havok40k:

I think, say, a diamond (whatever) pickaxe should have less durability than its more common brethren. It’s an interesting gameplay choice if I have to juggle its fragility with regular use. I.e. my diamond pick is for mining rare blocks, and there’s some super-durable stone pick for regular blocks.

There’d still need to be be tiers of “durable” picks and “specialty” picks, 'cause progression.

Now that I stand back a bit, I guess I’m just lobbying for more item variation and “average” item durability to push players to consider trade offs between those item types.

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God now there is 2 amazing possible choices and they can’t be done at the same time :frowning:

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I think there is a (simple) way to accomplish both, stopping the annoyance of tool switching to save durability and keeping the ‘juggling between the right tool’ part while also preventing the necessity of constantly carrying around stacks of tools of the same type.

Simply make the mods awesome, interesting and diverse.

For example:
If there is a mod that gives you double mining speed but prevents resources from dropping.
A mod that gives you a chance for double drop but also has double durability drain.
And a mod that warns you if a monster approaches you but takes up all other mod slots.
Then you would have your ‘high-end’ strip mining pickaxe, your ‘high-end’ pickaxe for viable ores and your ‘high-end’ pickaxe for unexplored/dangerous caves.

This + the addition of Havok40ks suggestion would allow players that are annoyed by the switching to just use their preferred tool while people that like the juggling would be encouraged to do so by having several mod-tailored tools.

And since ben mentioned that he´s a big fan of perks that have positive and negative effects I think that is solution is not too unlikely to make it ingame.

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IKR? The whole incentive of having higher-tier tools is not to waste them on lower-tier stuff, but @Havok40k’s idea makes it so you wouldn’t even have to worry about lower-tier blocks, which pretty much kills the idea of permanent durability in a way.

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Sounds good to me

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I love the idea to lose less durability if my tool is of a much rarer/harder material then the mined block. And the option to alter it’s abilities with maybe an additional efect on it’s endurance/lifetime by modifications (for special purposes like mentioned before) it would be a good way to make all customers sattisfied. Think of an “megagleam pickaxe of hardness” which has a loot more durability (and may be nearly permanent durability on mining low mats) or a “megagleam pickaxe of swiftness” with a lot more speed but less hardness, or “of high gaining” with a chance to get doubled drops on mats.

I think durability will be a hot topic for many players so giving them the option to give their stuff longer duration (on the cost of other cool boni) will help to kill some frustration some ppl may feel with a “standard” durability solution.

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Another idea, portal knights has a system where there items don’t actually break when their durability is expended. Instead of our items breaking, make it so the item does significantly less damage.

For example, let’s say a wood pickaxe costs 3 wood blocks and takes 6 hits to mine a stone block, when the durability hits 50% it starts taking 7 hits, 25% is 8 hits, 0% gives you very little reason not to use your hands, but the item is sharpenable with a sharpening tool you can craft for 1 or 2 wooden blocks.

Now we apply that to vastar pickaxe of doom, it starts off where you can mine stone with 1 hit, when the item gets down to 50% durability it takes 2 hits because it is duller, 25% now takes 3 hits, and when it’s at 0% it takes 5 or 6. This way you never lose your rare pick, you just need to sharpen it with an item that costs less than the pick to get it sharp again. Also if you apply magic to the item and get a very rare enchantment you won’t lose it (a major annoyance for me in minecraft).

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That really doesn’t seem to be the thing the devs are going for, stuff needs to break so people will make new ones or buy new ones from people who make them.

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The idea behind items breaking permanently is to fuel the economy with players that constantly need new weapons/tools.
With weapons/tools that never break the demand on new weapons/tools would quickly dwindle once every player got his favorite weapon/tool. And everything left that´s worth buying would be repair kits, which would make the life of a shopkeeper/crafter quite boring.

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Good point, didn’t think of it that way. I guess I’m thinking single player games, I normally don’t delve into multiplayer. :slight_smile:

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This makes so much sense. Minecraft did this and it works for them, maybe not to the degree ur talking but it works.

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Minecraft did what?

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The concept is good, but I hate to have to say the execution is slightly flawed. “Hardness” isn’t what you think it is. Diamonds have “hardness” up the wazoo–but you can break one with a hammer, because things that are “hard” in the way you’re thinking are also brittle. Ceramic knives keep an edge longer than carbon-steel knives because they’re “harder,” but you can break a ceramic knife by dropping it. Ceramic, which is hard and holds an edge, isn’t durable. Steel, which is flexible but can lose an edge, is very durable.

I have a tungsten (Mohs 7.5) wedding ring, and it will shatter if it falls too far and lands the wrong way. A gold (Mohs 2.5) ring wouldn’t do that–it would just flex and bounce. That tennis ball that shatters after it’s been dipped in liquid nitrogen and dropped to the floor? It doesn’t shatter because it’s cold–it shatters because it’s hard. (Apparently one can’t write about a tennis ball in the plural in this thing–the word “balls” gets blocked out, just like that <==.)

(I apologize for boring you–it’s just that the programmer [accuracy in expression] and half-a-physicist [accuracy in concept] in me wants to make sure we use the words and concepts correctly. What happens in the world [in any world] when two objects collide isn’t poetry–it’s physics. [Okay, that’s weird: trying to tag something as italicized inside square brackets doesn’t work.] Hey, I’m still gritting my teeth because the sun comes up in the north. North/south are polar/longitudinal designations, east/west are equatorial designations. Yeah, I’m that guy.)

So, if you want to have a property called “hardness,” it would work the opposite to the way you’re thinking: hitting a hard object with another hard object increases the possibility that one or both will break due to the impact. (Think about it–glass is harder than [ordinary] steel, but when you go to the hardware store, how many glass hammers do you see?) At the very least, the quality of the weapon or tool would decrease until it finally broke–which is what we want to see. Steel ax versus wood = minute loss of quality; steel ax versus iron lamp post = greater loss of quality. And it gives an opportunity for some tools to be useless in particular situations: a wooden hammer versus granite, for example. Flail at it all day–nothing happens.

The durability aspect is cool, though, no matter how it’s expressed in adjectives. And it adds another dimension of measurement to the quality of a weapon or tool.

Q: What’s better than Vastar’s Pickaxe of Doom?

A: Vastar’s Enduring Pickaxe of Doom!

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That was a very long (though beautifully writen) post to make a point on why the term hardness is the wrong one to use :smile:

I agree though hardness as a name for the stat would be the wrong term.

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I think @Havok40k named it correctly(ish).
The primary intention of naming in games is not to be physically correct but to give the average user (who usually doesn´t have material science knowledge) a good idea of what´s going on.
And by calling it hardness @Havok40k did just that. I assume that if the average player sees a tool with high hardness he intuitively knows that this probably means that it isn´t worn out by “not as hard” materials as fast. Whereas durability is often perceived as some sort of usability “buffer” in games.

On a pure physical consideration you are absolutely right though.

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Be that as it may, average users/readers tend to follow the notion that when something is in print (whether it’s on Facebook, in a game, or in a newspaper) that it must necessarily reflect some reality or be otherwise correct. So every time someone confuses “they’re/there/their” or writes “noone” for “no one,” it cements the idea that the misuse might possibly be correct. (Consider the colloquial meaning of “theory” versus the correct usage. Or the modestly egregious “alright” for “all right.”)

If the average user wouldn’t know the right term from the wrong term, and a certain percentage of the player base would know the right term, why not use the right term? The average user might accidentally learn something–in most societies, science education is sorely lacking. As a scientist and engineer, that well and truly ticks me off. I figure if we can sneak it in edgewise, who knows, we all might end up better off.

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Because sometimes it´s better to use a wrong term that intuitively guides players into the right direction than to be physically accurate.

For example Minecraft:
Would a diamond pickaxe be a good tool to mine stone and ore? Certainly not. But everyone playing Minecraft intuitively knew that diamonds make good tools/armors, simply because of the naming.

We are talking about games after all, so better throw all logic overboard:

But let´s stop arguing about semantics.

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In a game that is taking the extra effort of “realism” to avoid concepts like magic, it’s important to design phrases in such a way that players understand exactly what is meant. Semantically, Durability is the right word to describe what we are talking about here but in video games it has a very different meaning like @vaster said. But, when I did some research to see what the proper phrase for the concept I am trying to communicate, the word that comes up is… durability.

Personally, I’m not satisfied with “durability” to describe the rating I’m going for here. Does “Endurance rating” suit the definition well enough? I know typically “endurance” describes how long something lasts, like how long an athlete can sprint or how many uses a hammer can get before failure (aka freakin’ DURABILITY).

Actually… it would seem the proper thing to do is to refer to the amount of uses an item has left as endurance, and the chance to take endurance penalty as durability. This thread should be titled “Endurance suggestion: Durability” :laughing:

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