When I hit a block, it does variable amounts of damage. In some cases, when I hit coal, it does 40% damage and then a second later, the block heals so I only end up doing 30% damage on the hit. Is this by design? My gold hammer is effectively worthless unless it does something special I don’t know about.
and, it’s durability is garbage. I’ve hit all of 10 blocks and I’ve already used up 20%. Not a great bargain for how much effort and resources go into making it.
It’s the lowest tier of hammer that can mine absolutely everything so far.
As for why it does varying amounts of damage, the Gold hammer has something like a 50% chance to crit for double damage (at least before this last update, it may be more complex now). The innate high crit chance is its own unique quirk, kind of like how copper hammers swing really fast but don’t even hit as hard as stone ones.
ok. Seems like a bug that it shows crit damage but then the block updates a second later to show actual which is likely normal damage.
That being said, Silver hammers can mine everything but gems, and probably have a higher durability. People didn’t use them much before the update because iron was as rare or rarer than gold or titanium (depending on the planet) while copper (used for gold alloy) was very common.
It updating with different amounts of damage is due to network latency. The server basically “forces” whatever it decides on your computer… but only when it catches up, which is often a fraction of a second or more late if you have noticeable latency.
Ok. That’s great to know. Thanks. I’ll save my gold hammer for when I come across some gems.
The game is acting flaky but I wasn’t experiencing lag at the time. I just got dropped from the server so who knows… you’re prolly right.
Wait until you have what I call a “Schroedinger’s block”. It’s a block your computer says is destroyed and the network says isn’t. Your computer rolled for one or more crits than the networks did. It flickers in and out of existence making rapid crunching (block breaking) noises for a few seconds. Eventually the server wins (always) and the block comes back with one more hit remaining. If a block starts flicker-crunching, just swing at the space where it ought to be one more time, and usually that will resolve the problem.
I’ve seen some of that on occasion. This gold hammer issue is not that. Consistently, the first strike results in a lot of damage and a second later it recovers a part of it back. The remaining hits do what you expect.
I believe it’s just a bug about the crits, I don’t have crit skill yet and the exact same thing happens to me but with any hammer when hitting anything but stone, coal takes me 6 hits to brake and the first hit seems to deal a lot of dmg but then it goes back up, sometimes it even breaks on the fifth hit but then reappears with one hit to break, I just always keep hitting until I count 6 hits and it always drops normally 
Everything’s has a base chance for crits. Gold is extremely high. That’s its thing.
Currently there just isn’t really a notification of the fact it’s a crit. Damage to mobs is pretty obvious cuz people are used to that
There are two things colliding with the Gold tools at the moment which result in very odd behaviour.
Gold tools are designed to be the “wild card” of the bunch with very high critical chance and critical effect making them unpredictable. However, as @OctavioNG correctly points out there is also a bug in the damage system which means the client and server disagree about the damage done, and that’s when you see the damage bars going down and then back up again as the server “corrects” the client’s view of the world.
We think we’ve fixed the bug, and hopefully that will be out in the next release. Then the Gold tools will still be a bit erratic, but not so much that the block health goes up and down!
Just as a note to this - the up and down bar happens to all my hammers (copper, iron, amethyst) when resources are mined - it works just fine on pure rock. Only stone tools dont have that glitch.