This might be a long one, bear with me.
I started boundless about a week, week and a half ago, i’ve got maybe 80-100 hours in it.
I hit a wall after I’d gotten iron tools, and was looking into getting to the next tier, my first goal was reliable and self sustained access to the best mining tools available, so I could source materials easily to build a fancy base wherever I chose, out of whatever I choose, maybe, I dunno yet, it’s still fun for me.
Since gold and silver tools are next to useless I bit the bullet and eventually just bought a few titanium hammers, I bought about 4 hammers, which through strip mining and adequate (although not perfect) hammer skills I was able to acquire around 100 diamonds, something that took me maybe 2-3 hours.
Those diamonds gave me access to my first power coils, sufficient for me to process the titanium I’d found mining and make a bunch of hammers myself.
Taking my new hammers out I went through a few of them to come home with a haul of around 150 diamonds, combined with the leftovers from the last round I’m now awaiting my higher tier power cores.
I also required a large amount of other helpful resources, including more titanium to replace my hammers and a bunch of different coals.
All of this took me around 6-7 hours of gametime, not accounting for crafting times, This, to me, sounds about right, since I now have access to almost the highest tier of crafting, at least on my workbench, which to me is what matters right now.
Compare that to other MMO’s and, that’s actually not too bad! I mean I don’t think you could master a profession in wow in that time…
Going by some of the bomb mining figures I’ve seen, where people claim hauling in 300+ gems in half an hour of bomb mining, I can see why they removed it, because it was ludicrously imbalanced.
My next objective is to get coils for my extractor and centraforge so I can forge hammers and gear to push my collection rates up further so I can reach the final tier, also going to get myself a nice gem grapple.
So despite a bit of a stumbling cluelessly bumbling around trying to figure out how to get into the next tier, which I agree, this game does need some attention on, I feel like the rate of progression is fine.
And to those who are saying that bomb mining was an ‘inventive approach’ and ‘in the spirit of an mmo’ and ‘should be allowed in a sandbox’ and ‘is just more fun for me’: if you’re so bored by it you can’t stick a few hours branch mining, I don’t think mining is the occupation for you.
That being the case you can avoid it altogether, acquire coins and buy the diamonds yourself from people that enjoy or choose to exploit that gamestyle because hey, that’s how economies work.