they just need to lower the amount the essence needed for the new blocks yes they are to be end game but they do not need to be game breaking clear out your storage end game
I would say switch the fresh and ancient around, but if they don’t change it I won’t be mad, I’ve already made around 500 paste.
Or the new blocks too low. I think they’re too low personally, and gleam too high.
A few minor tweaks to just a couple blocks, and removing the penalty on natural blocks (or, gasp!, even setting them to a whole 1 point! So OP.) would go a long way towards fixing the situation without any big, swooping changes.
And hey, the people that were using gleam instead of iron can take the opportunity to make the switch. Who knows, maybe this time they’ll even be considerate enough to bury their ugly vaults.
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My main home and hub is nothing but machined ores. i love the sound when walking/running on them. i have recently been building with brick though.
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Clarifying my position for the sake of future clarity in the discussion, here’s where I’m coming from: I’m not against prestige vaults and prestige wars (tho I don’t engage in them personally so I’m entirely indifferent to them). I would also have a personal preference that people were encouraged by peer pressure to bury their vaults instead of making 'em all the way to build limit height, but I don’t think this is something that the devs should be concerned about.
The issue is that some things are way too easy/fast to process/common for the prestige that they give.
Others (brick and the new blocks come to mind, doors too in general) give too little prestige for the amount of materials and crafting steps involved, so either they need a prestige bump (arguably easier) or a reduction in effort required to craft (arguably harder since I’m guessing they’re still basing the new recipes off of how much of X material people have hoarded and not used).
Now, onto the values of metals, I think they’re mostly fine. Perhaps a bump on the alloys and titanium to take into account that you could be making X prestige worth of iron/silver/whatever with the materials used in the recipe, but the base metals I think are about right in the effort/reward ratio. We need some standardizing measuring stick to base all other prestige values and I think the base metals are a good starting point.
Then we’d just have to compare “Is this easier than machined iron? Less prestige. Is it harder? More prestige.”
Another option would be to automate the entire thing with some equation that gives each material used in the recipe (like iron ore, fossils, etc) a base value based off relative rarity in terms of universal spawn/drop rate, and then calculate the final prestige based on how much ‘base value’ is consumed in the recipe, the total unmodified crafting time, number of non-instantaneous crafting steps, and spark/furnace fuel consumed, with a small multiplier added for each 100 power required in the entire crafting chain (like * 0.01 or something).
Things that you can place without processing in any way get just the base value.
But that seems more complicated than just arbitrarily changing the numbers whenever they get out of balance.
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As much as I agree that I want more reasons to play right now, what is the use of adding things to something that a majority of us are saying is broken, only to have more to tweak later? I feel like it makes more sense to fix things before adding more things, especially when it comes to writing code. If I know something isn’t working correctly, that’s what I want to do first because it will impact everything else I do.
It punishes players because say I want a small park in my build, now I’m losing prestige because I put grass down. This creative thing I decided to do gives me a negative value. It doesn’t reinforce creativity, it reinforces grinding out the most prestigious blocks for the sake of competition.
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And in a more directly game related sense, if you’re building with natural blocks then you’re being punished by getting less footfall (or in extreme cases, none) for your effort of building creatively.
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I used soil to top a build I did this week.
-1 prestige to my build per block.
NEGATIVE 1.
For an offworld block no less.
I’ve covered nearly 32 plots in soil and grass. Off world soil, and half of them are already done in type changed grass. The only way it makes sense for this to happen is if a freshly plotted beacon came with the negative prestige of every natural block in it.
Generally I’m ok with the prestige system, I’m just a couple months into this as my first building game. I’m not sure why my work actually generates negative prestige, though.
Balance issues are tricky.
Because clearing a natural block = +1, replacing the +1 air prestige you just cleared with a block worth 0 = net 0 prestige. The blocks aren’t actually worth -1 prestige
Interesting.
Herre’s a fully in-ground beacon, fresh as a daisy:
Matching air beacon:
Ground beacon, fully emptied of natural blocks:
Air beacon, fully filled with natural (silty soil) blocks:
So, due to some configuration of multipliers, partial prestige points, modifiers, or something - at 300k prestige I’m receiving what amounts to a style penalty for adding natural touches to my build.
I’d say that there are things to consider here. Maybe not high priority but still.
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For additional reference i added a single refined rock to each plot:
Now this list tells me that refined rock has a base prestige of 6:
It’s hard to guess what’s exactly happening here without the formula. It’s not as simple as +/- 1 for a natural block.
Maybe random but FYI I was able to add some couple thousand prestige to my main build again with 16 empty plots. Again, based on forum derived info and implications I’m into the “built space” modifier for a penalty on too many blocks in my main build anyways.
That may in fact be why the blocks placed above show different values. That in air plot is nearly 100% ‘built’.
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o0o nice tests! I was wrong, I guess clearing isn’t exactly +1 in this case. Definitely a shame about placed natural not being a +1
- Placed a new beacon. 0 prestige
- placed 3 mach gold. +525 pres
- placed 3 LED. +225 pres, 750 total
- Dug out 21 soil blocks. 0 change.
- Placed 21 soil blocks. -20 pres. 730 total.
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@nightstar @majorvex If you guys are all on the PS4 I can take a look at those test beacons with the debug mode activated and it might help narrowing down what’s happening, just send me a PM and we’ll meet there. 
Edit:
It’s super easy to figure out base prestige on PC: just activate the debug mode (F1 by default) then click on ‘debug information’, scroll down and expand ‘selection’, then same for ‘beacon’ under selection and it shows the base prestige (as well as % for modifiers).
So, just take note of the base prestige number, plop down a block that you want to know the value, and see how much base prestige changes.
The values are for the entire beacon that the block the crosshairs are currently pointing at belongs to.
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PC player. Looks like it’s all good to me 
That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t know if your ~25 blocks triggered the anti-spam penalty for over building (lol) but there’s not a time when placing a block should carry it’s own negative value.
Maybe later, if they add something that carries extreme usability or value added, there could be blocks with a straight prestige penalty, a trade off.
BTW, I got a couple of feats on this newish avatar for both gathering and placing soil during this test.
The game is incentivizing (going green) the addition of the negative prestige at this time.
Very confusing.
Beacons and campfires for example end up with a negative prestige value, even tho they’re technically 0 prestige. In all probability they’re doing some minimal change to the modifier %s that doesn’t end up being displayed due to rounding, but is enough to decrease the final prestige of the build. 
I don’t know why tho I could probably make like 500 beacons and spam 'em into a test room until the offending percentage actually changes, I just never bothered.
Lot of curious info in this thread.
Soil filled air plot with a beacon and a refined rock:
Placed campfire:
There’s plenty of missing info here. The only visible change from adding a single campfire is an increase to my total bonus.
Again these items are ‘advertised’ for use as decorative props. At worst they should be zero impact. In any case, what’s happening is not exactly what people seem to expect.
Lol i wasn’t really that curious until today.
Why do I have 250% of my base prestige with a 100% bonus? Is that the ‘variation’ percentage listed?
I hope that’s not the ‘variety’ bonus I’ve seen mentioned because except for this 6 block tunnel this entire plot is 100% silty soil.
Lol I’m not exactly looking for answers - just noting that yes, the layers added to this system over time have led to some, perhaps unexpected, behaviors.
Sometimes a refactor of an evolved system is very helpful, both at streamlining and reducing processing as well as eliminating unexpected or mystery effects.
As the topic of the thread, my opinion is it’s probably time.
I’m not really doing anything at the moment so if you want to come play with these plots the coordinates are in the images there I’m on raxxa and happy to permission you.
EDIT: just noticed this is a really old thread heh.
Yeah, that’s the variation bonus listed.
Keep in mind that both built ratio and variation are… super weird.
Add say 10 more plots worth of anything (tho I didn’t test with air) and see the variation get slashed for no discernible reason.
(My best guess is that they’re using it as a sort of ‘equalizer’ for people that want small beacons, to compensate somewhat for the lessened block space to fill with prestige, but that’s just a hunch)
I wasn’t tracking at this level of detail but yesterday I did add 16 plots of empty air to my build for a total of a couple thousand (didn’t write it down but I think it was over 2000) prestige.
I’m almost ready to start actually playing for today but I don’t think I’m going to spend my time testing this heh.
I think that I’ll start paying more attention though.It seems some bonus factors work up and some work down. And I’m actually killing myself on these highly thematic builds.
Here I’ve managed to maintain 100% bonus moving points. Note the total is actually 200%ish as opposed to the soil filled plot displaying 100% and giving roughly 150%:
I think this screenshot might lead to some judging, heh.
You should come see that in person it’s my favorite thing I’ve done in game. Got that bonus worked down to 88%.
Here we go now, this build is 90 plus percent nothing but machined copper and warp conduit:
I’m adding gleam but man my chiseler is headed that way some time in the future.
I can also see that I’m headed toward some more optimized building. People seem to place a lot of moral weight on these things, and I think a lot of long time voxel builders feel it cheapens their art.
I’m learning to do this in boundless and while my desire to achieve a visual far overrides my desire for prestige or footfall - I can’t see anything wrong with optimizing your time invested as a factor.
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