An easy way to fix the mining issues would be:
Decentralize gem concentration.
–example: Diamonds are at X-Y depth. EVERYWHERE. not in small clumps around the planet. See minecraft for an example of resource distribution done well
Increase durability. Titanium hammers should last MUCH longer than they currently do
Insta regen of areas not visited for an hour or two.
The result will be more gems for everyone, and lower demand.
Some things are meant to be highly sought after and hard to obtain.
why is this bad? they are still harder to get as they are on higher tier planets? What is the difference between more planets and all the gems being spread across all the higher tier planets?
the regen is broke as hell. find a diamond area that doesnt have mass amounts of tunnels… ive spent hours and found no pristine areas.
That’s cause you’re too slow. People are watching, counting, timing the regen, or probably have an Addon/hack/plugin/mod to check for Regen timers, and getting there seconds after it regens to mine it all up. Usually with a portal directly to the area from their base.
I disagree with all of this. I think the way to “fix” gem mining would be to add more gem planets. Maybe even planets with just one gem. If we add planets, we aren’t making gems any harder to find than the devs wanted. The difficulty no longer lies in “am I wasting my time in this area, and has someone already cleaned out all the gems here?” Scarcity is incredibly frustrating @Pseudonym84. There is no reason to make something insanely hard to find, just for the sake of it. Of course they want a progression that keeps the player engaged AND takes awhile, but a lot of people are just outright quitting after realizing how tedious it is to mine gems AND because of the price spike (1200c per rough gem, seriously?) this makes no alternative. If you want to progress past titanium, you have to learn how to use the forge very well and make your own titanium tools, or be incredibly rich and buy forged tools or gems outright. I don’t think the devs want that. They want specialization. They want players who are only traders and outsource all of their resources because they only sell one specialized good. For the most part that works until we bring gems into the equation.
Some like it, others don’t. It’s a subjective design choice that’s ultimately down to the developers.
You can’t please everyone.
I think the cost to run the planets is why they have not spawned more. That is why I think maybe they have to do something with the planets they have. I do agree with your sentiments on the subject.
edit: and with the player base down. . I am not sure when they will be launching more?
It I’m not mistaken, regen begins after 4 hours. It than takes longer depending on how much has been remove from a chunk. Resources do not regen until all blocks have regenerated and then the chunk is populated with resources. This is why it takes so long. Everytime someone is in that area, the regen pauses until they leave, but does not start over.
That’s my understanding of it anyway.
Or has been plotted
Actually this is a quote from James in the discord
In the past regen kicked in quite aggressively, and rapidly recovered the chunk and added resources at the end.(edited)
A balance change was made to slow down regen, so that things gradually recovered.
This was considered a good change.
But then players starting making much larger changes to the worlds via extensive bombs and high powered hammers.
The regen is currently not recovering the world quick enough to keep up with the changes.
So we need to balance the regen in response to how the worlds are changing.
At least thay are looking at addressing it
I think player base down has to do a lot with this topic. I agree with your first post. I also think adding small quantities of gems to lower tier planets will help spread population and bring some players back.
I can understand not wanting gems as common as iron, but I do think they should not be as rare as they are now.
Maybe a trickle of gems on some of the other planets would help.
This is how I understood it also
Another interesting quote from james in the boundless discord about regeneration
James-DevToday at 2:59 PM
At the moment some of the worlds are over 5 million blocks behind.
Wow! That’s like 80 chunks from top to bottom 
My form of ‘Balance’ would be to streamline the progression.
You need Stone to mine Copper, you need Copper to mine Iron, you need Iron to mine Silver and so on.
Then For each planet level, populate with only ONE resource. So all lvl 1 worlds have copper, and no other resources. Then Lvl 2 worlds have just Iron, lvl 3 just Silver, lvl 4 just Gold, lvl 5 Titaniam and lvl 6 all the gems.
This alone would make progression actually meaningful, even more so if you LOCK the requirements. As in Iron ONLY mines more iron or Silver. It can’t go Higher to Gold, NOR can it go lower to Copper. This would make all the tools useful, and not like Minecraft were the last tier Tools can mine everything and makes the other tools obsolete.
Then on the Special Worlds, you can have special resources. Such as Coal Worlds ONLY having Coal, no other resource. And Metal Worlds can be renamed to say Fossil Worlds and have ONLY the Fossils spawn there. Small at the top layer, mid in the middle, and large at the lowest depths.
Can even add it another world type of ‘Ruins’ worlds, which has all the Ancient Tech resources. More than that, you can even make it a dungeon worlds. With actual broken down ruin buildings from the old civilization, make building and destroying disabled, and instead people have to do dungeons and looting chests and secrets in caves to get the loot, or killing the enemies on the world.
^ There, some ideas. Go wild.
I appreciate your train of thought. I agree. Some aspects of games aren’t for everyone. We can’t just shove a square peg into a round hole because some people find it too “hard” or too “boring”. I find MOBAs too boring, so instead of trying to complain about it all and make the devs change things, I just don’t play them, and find games I enjoy… like “Boundless”.
The same folks strip mining the current gem areas will just warp there and do the same, it will just take them less effort.
Player feedback is useful, but I don’t personally think game development should be a democracy among the playerbase, and developers shouldn’t get blown around by the whims and feelings of players initial reactions (which are usually opposed to any change)
They’ve made a design choice, and now they’re collecting data to see where to go from here.
Still, absolutely nothing wrong with topics like this. Discussion around current features helps them improve the game; so long as it doesn’t devolve into bad natured ranting.
The best solution is just to ad another gem planet when players get to dense. As of now you just got to be smart about where you mine.