As you all no doubt know, crafting games usually have to work with a limited amount of resources so that the player doesn’t get bogged down with complicated recipes and inventories. However, I have noticed a reductionist trend that has plagued these games to the point that over simplification of basic elemental combinations don’t make any sense.
The basic idea behind elemental crafting (I mean the actual periodic elements, not earth, wind and fire) is you find the elemental resource, the ore, gas or whatever natural occuring form it comes in, then you gather it, refine it into a bar or transportable type item, and then bring it forward in the production environment and create something greater. So, you get the ore, and lets stop there, for now.
The available ores, currently are Copper, Iron, Gold, Silver, and Titanium. I’m not going to mention Rift, Blink, or Dark Matter because those are fictional and don’t add to this concept. Now focusing on copper, it’s the starter element, but, yeah, it’s not super useful. It’s also not as abundant as the game makes it seem, in it’s purpose, as well as it’s natural allocation. It’s actually the third most used metal in industry, and it’s mostly used in bronze and brass. You mix copper with tin and zinc, respectively, to make so the normal recipe in boundless it’s used in -Gold Alloy- doesn’t make much sense at all. In fact, it doesn’t make much sense that we only use 5 out of the 118 known elements. And here’s my point: If there isn’t variety, then people get bored.
Some games, like fantasy or science fiction games make up stuff, just to get around the logical uncertainty that occurs when someone who isn’t a metallurgic wizard decides to arbitrarily create recipes. Maybe to make spanners we need to bathe them in the tears of orphaned wildstock, or a cuddletrunk has to squeeze it’s tentacle juice all over my slingbow. So, maybe we don’t need to have exact mixtures of materials to make alloys, or other combinations of the random space elements, but if it’s operating off of the idea of willing suspension of disbelief, then it should be acknowledged that the known realities are the basis of the fantasies. You should know that up is up, basically, and then simple extensions and ludicrous requirements of fantastical quests can come later. What I propose, to make cave diving more enjoyable, and over all resource gathering more stimulating, is adding variety in the known chemical elements.
If I lost anyone in that mini firehose of information, I can explain it in a simpler way. Cave and underground topography is kinda like a weird batch of spaghetti. There are veins of pure elements and resources, but for the most part, it’s just the sauce that has everything in it. The actual rock layers hold the ore, and has to be smelted out of the waste rock to get the pure juju, whatever it is. So crushing, sifting, and other processes need to be in place to actually yield the desired product. I don’t want to do that in a game, but it stands to reason that the nodes we have now could be made to resemble actual finds, contiguous or otherwise. The known minecraft-ian principle of exposing a block of the resource is kind of dull, mainly because it’s the staple of resource collection. Maybe adding shading, or some more visually appealing method of seeing the materials, so the menial task of finding them could be livened up. However, the biggest change could be varying water and lava heights, pockets of fluids, sand and gravel that respond to physical shifting and settling, and of course, some more interactive and cave dwelling inhabitants.
If it seems that this is a bit ramble-y, I apologize, but it comes to a point here in my suggestions. I think that we should be able to find more elements, recipes could actually add to our base knowledge, and mining needs a bit of an exciting rework, in my humble opinion. I know that we only have a slice of what this could be, but currently my OCD is forcing me to mention my concerns. As always, I love you all. Except @slyduda.
