The basic gist of these posts is to understand core mechanics of this game and how they could impact a potential player. My previous posts touch on several progressive issues that could build into “Game Breaking” issues if left unchecked. It allows for the exploration of those little things that could eventually snowball into something out of control, leading to people to quit, or just give up, on something that could be a great experience. All things in this post are meant to be constructive critiques and do not contain any spite or ill will. Now that this disclaimer is out of the way, I’ll begin.
Our crafting system is kind of busted. Now, if something is made from the same constituent ingredients, it stands to reason that the resultant can be re-purposed or salvaged in some way. So we have glue, or in Boundless, we have four different kinds of glue. The standard horse bone and sap kind makes sense, I guess. I mean, the simplest concept of animal glues follows the basic recipe in the game, but then we get to the more advanced glues. The bonding agent. Now, here’s where I get lost in the idea, if my bonding agent includes glue, that’s cool. It refines it into bonding agent, and bam, a stronger adhesive. But, then we have enriched bonding agent. We say “to hell with that previous bonding agent, it’s not sticky enough! Bring me more glue!” and then create the same basic solution but with shimmering orbs. Why don’t we refine out the previously tack-tastic bonding agent and add to the chemical compound? Instead we use the same ingredients that were already proven to be ineffective in holding our tools together and upright and try the same thing, same process, but we add salt to the mix. It doesn’t make much sense in my opinion. Now, in other games, crafting levels up in tiers. For example, you have starter mats, dropping off lower level enemies, that go into a set bracket of crafts until your skill surpasses it. Once that occurs, it makes those materials somewhat irrelevant, and you work on the next step of progression. But in this game, we have a unique issue where everything is a starter material. Almost everything, anyway. Because for some reason we have to regress ourselves to acquire higher tier items, at a loss. We will get into that in a second. But, for now, we’re going to talk about how a starter mat is somehow being used at every tier of the recipe. The previous example of how our bonding agent doesn’t carry over is one thing, but adding to that, we somehow take sackcloth and render it into cotton cloth? That just doesn’t make much sense at all. Cotton comes an entirely different part of the plant than a leaf. And I understand the leaps for simplicity’s sake, but then why do we have this drastic departure in our downtrodden bonding agent?
Now, starting mats, the way that materials are tiered you start at a staple planet, then move to a level 2 than 3… etc. Well, topaz drops only on Epsilo. That’s a T2 planet. It spawns in the same amount and rarity of other T3 planets, but with one key exception: the drops are severely nerfed. Copper, Iron, Coal, and more critically, Topaz are dropped at a noticablely minimized rate. So, we are mining at a lower quantity, trying to get our gems to power our machine, which is endgame content, on a lower tiered planet with a huge offset towards the net gain of materials. So, now, as an endgame player, we have to set our sights lower to achieve the higher level of goal. This ties into my previous comment about how going back to farm lower level trees is almost out of the question because of the inclusion of bark drops. In one way I am forced to go forward, then in the second scenario I am pulled backwards. If I am going to always progress towards something, than I feel like I shouldn’t have to limit myself to certain planets. I think that a potential solution to this problem is maybe making all block health pools uniform, and setting drops based on level, or luck. This makes it so every planet is relevant, and can provide a equal and uniform yield.
That’s all for now!