When I was still new after the free weekend in february I tried out the forge to get some better tools.
Gathered some ingredients to make lvl 1 boon compounds and forged a silver hammer with my 900 vigour/stability. Got something like 400 dura, 15 speed and some crit effect.
Then respecced for better effectivity, vigour and stability. Got like 600 dura, some damage and glow and another one which hits 2 blocks with energy save and something else. Speed was nice to work a bit faster and damage reduced mining by 1 hit, glow was worse than a torch. Real improvement was the 2 hitter for tunnel digging.
So wanted to make more of those but just got some other things like critical. In the end I gave up forging because it took more time than just making more tools and directly go mining.
Returned to forging when I got coils and titanium gear which was then followed shortly by gem and high end forging.
To summarize my experience:
Low level forging was not really worth it due to the material cost combined with random outcome which is also a result of not knowing about gums back then. There is no tutorial in the game which I can take when I open up the forge the first to learn all that stuff. The forge learning curve is quite steep and requires research from player side to master.
It’s even worse. You use the exact same amount of the exact same centraforge items to forge a 3x3 iron hammer or a 3x3 diamond hammer. But the diamond hammer has about twice the durability of a iron hammer! Which means you get twice the worth out of all your expansive centraforge ingredients.
This is something that I think is pretty important to implement, it’s currently the only thing that I think gives a significant imbalance between PC and PS4 and this would go a long way to resolve this!
I agree forging low tier tools is a complete waste of time/materials. My suggestion to fix this is changing how forge materials are consumed. Instead of a stack of 100, change it to a stack of 100=1000 charges.
For example, using boon compound on gem hammers would consume the normal amount, 10 charges in this case. Going down to say 8 charges for titanium, 6 for alloy, 4 for iron, 2 for stone, 1 for wood.
This would make them viable, but it’s another layer of complexity and would make forging even more daunting for a new player
What if they made effectiveness lower on all tools so that only lower ones would get to 200. Or maybe even modify the cap so BPC1 and BPC2 are viable on lower tools. Then to make things as effective as now, reduce the amount of boon points needed for the boons? Idk how that’d play out in practise, just thinking aloud.
I also liked this suggestion to make the UI more user friendly when starting out. The other balance things in there are also worth noting imo.
Good improvements in that post. I must’ve missed that thread. The UI could definitely be improved. Saying what gums do what would be a good start. I’m not sure lowering effectiveness of gem tools is a good idea though. The first nerf was enough in that department lol
A practice forge in live would also help people new to forging get into it. I wouldnt mind trying some new techniques myself without wasting mats. But forging is honestly not hard once you get a feel for it
Then to make things as effective as now, reduce the amount of boon points needed for the boons?
It could be balanced with the boon point requirements to not change the current gem forging, like you’d have for example 80% effectiveness on them (instead of the current 200), but to get lvl8 damage boon you’d require 40% of the boon points you currently do.
Side effects I can see from that, getting lvl 4 aoe boon could become more difficult if you manage to hit a full boon point bar since a full bar would now level a boon a lot more than previously.
I saw it, but when you said or and added on the part about BPC1 and 2 i thought they were 2 seperate ideas. It’s all good. It was also suggested by OP though so I just wanted to put that out there lol.
But that would also be an opportunity for them to change the rank 5 random hit to rank 2 and increase the others. (All around aoe would be the new rank 5)
According to James back in July 2018, new players should be able to choose between progressing to metal tools or forging stone.
(Couldn’t get the quote to work but these are the words copied and pasted)
"The Forge isn’t a long way in. The Forge is designed to run perpendicular to material progression, ie.
1. Have Stone tools. 2. Pick between progressing to Metal or Forging Stone."
It would be nice if this was possible but after trying myself with a new character it was much easier just to make ordinary metal tools and not even bother looking at the forge until you were a high level character. As the forge stands in its current state the requirements and resources needed to make anything worthwhile, even just an enhanced low level tool far outweigh the time, effort and materials required.
That would explain why they have the one quest to forge a wooden tool… but that’s just such a waste of expensive materials. To be effective at forging you need a lot of points just to start doing things too, so it’s definitely not beginner friendly.
That being said, I do kind of love the forge and the challenge of making good items!
I think of the centraforge like a CCG minigame. You build a deck, you start the game, and then based on deckbuilding and performance you get a reward. There’s a bit of progression inside the system itself - three tiers of each ingredient, and investments that boost your output quality. But this progression is completely separate from the game’s tool material progression. That’s the main takeaway I have from this thread.
The forge could probably be simplified if the UI ran even further with the CCG analogy. Let the machine store all my ingredients in an inventory screen that facilitates deckbuilding. Let me save decks to deck slots. This would feel a lot more like a F2P CCG like Clash Royale.
CCGs have random packs to acquire cards and only employ randomness in-game (through things like starting hands) to even the playing field between two humans. Since the forge is a solitaire game its randomness acts as the opponent. Players don’t really enjoy that aspect of it and probably never will.
If we had a time machine it might be better to make the randomness instead come from opening packs of forge materials. The packs would still be crafted from drops, and that would give players limited control over which ingredients they accumulate based on the type of pack they crafted. If players forfeit some control over how the ingredients enter the economy it both creates a marketplace for the more sought-after ingredients and moves the randomness out of the minigame itself. Gums could just give you the boon you wanted because the devs control the supply of the gum instead of the players.
If AoE is game breaking from the devs’ view they can adjust drop rates to compensate. As it is now, players put all their forge resources into mass producing nothing but AoE ingredients. And the only lever the devs have to control it is making the gums random. It would take a serious rework to address this.
Which brings me to my final point. As nice as a better integrated forge system would be, the system is a huge time sink of dev resources. Balancing a CCG inside an MMO would be at least one designer’s full time job. And we’re talking about a game system that neither appeals to new players nor generates revenue. The two things Boundless needs the most. So I think the centraforge we have is here to stay and additional investment at this time is unwise.
It was something I instantly thought of when I first started. I wasn’t able to progress to metal worlds just yet, but still wanted to be able to have a 2x1 or 3x1 aoe tool to continue with. A 3x1 shovel at the time is what I had been hunting, for peaty soil to get my spark generating. This was before compacting of course.
People/vets continue to ignore the new player experience. The forging system or the recipes list needs to be redone to allow new characters a more defined progression instead of how it is currently where we just see this massive spike to high end.
We should be able to forge low end iron hammers axes and shovels that don’t use the same mats as high end forges do. The clear option in my mind is too just add another lower tier layer of recipes aimed strictly at those low forges. Gums booms and pastes that just simply wouldn’t be exploitable for high end tools or create restrictions on the mats so they can only be used for low tier forges while the high tier forges could be used universally.
I agree with this. Maybe like “half/boon” compounds that only use the meat and bones as ingredients. Works well since lower end tools have higher flexibility anyways to compensate.
I did think about this as an option number 3 when making my original post. While I was exploring the idea though I realised that it would add a lot of extra items and additional confusion for the very people I’m hoping can benefit from this discussion the most: the newer people.
Additionally, if you make a separate tier of forge ingredients, I think what we’d see is instead of 1 distinct band of ‘It’s only viable to forge gem, because everything below uses the same ingredients’, we’d move to 2 distinct bands (probably gem and iron) that are the most efficient use of the available resources brackets, and nothing else still gets crafted.
It would probably be better, but maybe too limited in scope.
Well, the forge is a scary place for most beginners. Making a small set (like only 5 new “half” recipes) might be good. These low end materials would have pretty low boon points and have a vigor cost still so it wouldn’t be useful for any of the high end forges because there just wouldn’t be enough boon points to go around.
I agree most of the time and because of this I started selling:
A: My mistakes at a steep discount, mostly when hard-hitter gets stuck on there repeatedly instead of +DMG.
B: Forging a few Gold, and Titanium ones and selling them under 3k each. They’re not maxed out but they are AOE and +DMG. I also sell Iron 3x3 under 1k, without +DMG
C: Sell some STR Brews alongside them.
I know most people want to maximize profit, understandably, I just wanted to find a niche and it funds itself ok so I’m not really worried about it.
WHAT IF. (I’m sorry, I’ve started these and I’ll carry on!)
What if the gums etc. were created for different types of material, rather than different levels of the same thing?
So you’d have Wooden Tool Special Gum, a Metal Tool, an Alloy Tool, Titanium Tool, Gem Tool and the new… Whatever Tool Gums?
This way the crafting recipes for each could be suited to the tier world you’d ‘expect’ to be using/finding them on?
AAAAAAND the forge could be set up appropriately for the combinations of material and player skill.
