Iron is too scarce

General
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I’m a new player, started lately. The lack of tutorial/in-game information has been rough, but I’ve been working around it with forum searches mostly. The big thing is, iron is just too scarce. I mined, and mined, and mined for HOURS, using the resource distribution chart (that is not ‘game-breaking’ info to have, we have no other way to know where to look for resources) and just mining and mining…and I managed to scraped together 20 or so to make a refinery. I need more than 40 though, to build a spark plinth, and then maybe think about getting a mixer and other advanced machines–and at least one iron hammer to get all the components for that. The prospect of going through all that again is just disheartening and I don’t want to continue. There’s a seed of a fun game here, but the resources are just too scarce and mining is just too slow. I even tried walking (a long, long way) to Pixelgate but nobody was selling any there. There’s just none available.

I’m checking out for now, I’ll see if things have improved later but:

-Vastly increase iron, and really, other resources as well. Mining is tedious and slow and there isn’t much to discover.
-Get rid of fossil extract entirely. Seriously, why do we need a /second/ scarce resource for every tool we make?
-Let nails be made of copper. Why do I have to choose between a door to my house and advancing my tech base at all? Are shelves that powerful?
-Make copper tools an actual substantial improvement over stone. Right now they’re not faster and they don’t last any longer, I keep a couple copper hammers around for the silver I can find much more easily than iron, but that’s it. They’re a waste of fossil extract.
-Warp conduits…didn’t seem to work right for me. They’d appear horizontally in the air and I couldn’t enter the portal, and the coins were lost. This is extremely frustrating and expensive.

The game looks very nice, and when I went to Pixelgate the city was very beautiful, and I’d love to participate in some of that level of construction but I am completely stymied by the current resource scarcity.

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Currently iron is scarce for everyone. This is not intended and I’m sure we will see a redistribution of resources sometime soon in the future.
I think fossil extract is fine. I’ve never had any issue with having enough.
Nails out of copper is a fantastic idea and I’m all down for it. Although once iron is fixed that will likely be unnecessary.

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warps are to be placed vertically and not horizontally.

Fossils are vast, and really not hard to find.

And iron is more of a pain now than before, but I still find it manageable.

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Fossils AREN’T vast, or they wouldn’t have posted this. I’ve had a horribad time trying to find iron and fossils as well.

You’ve had an easier time – congratulations, genuinely, but telling someone they’re wrong about something they’ve just experienced is… well, not helpful. They’re not wrong; it just happened to them.

I also wanted to chime in about the idea that posting the ore distribution chart was ‘game-breaking’, which I also found fairly distressing for a dev to be suggesting. This implies that a new user experience of ‘got the game, needed X for basic advancement, couldn’t find X in 10 hours of digging’ is intended. If digging stone blocks for multiple hours with no return is what they want this game to be about… well, some rephrasing of their intentions would good for all concerned.

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I have plenty of fossil extract I could give you.

And it wasn’t really game breaking for new people, but it was definitely game breaking for all of us “veteran” players, as it really gave us hard numbers of where to look for what.

We still have to go look for it, but with the knowledge we have now, it’s a lot easier to find what we’re looking for

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I see your point but I have to agree that fossils are vast. Perhaps you’ve simply had a harder time than the average player. I find fossils literally everywhere I go no matter what I am searching for. So while it is understandable that not everyone is having the same luck with fossils, I believe that they are indeed vast.

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Yeah, that’s totally fair. My experience in finding these resources has been different from yours, but it could just be really bad luck – and, well, in any game with random generation, for every treasure trove there’s a big spot of nothing somewhere else. ; )

Getting the resource distribution right is a beast, and any games that ‘get it right’ get there over tons of tweaking, so logically, I get that I can’t stomp my feet and expect a half-cooked game to have it perfect already, but emotionally, it’s so frustrating. I keep going past people with gorgeous homes and weird glowing conduits and all these machines and I can’t even keep myself in copper tools yet.

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Sorry you’re having a hard time finding the resources you need for advancement! I assure you the intent is not to create a game where you bash your head repeatedly until an iron ingot pops out. This is barely the second pass at redistribution. Nobody panic!

In the mean time, you may have better luck farming for resources in places that are confirmed to have abundant supply, or else barter the things you have a surplus of for the things you need. Coin also goes a long way toward getting what you need, don’t be shy with it!

My general advise for miners is if your mine does not turn a profit (more than the cost of the hammers you are using, excluding stone) in just 5 minutes, go 200 blocks in any direction and try again. Thus is not minecraft with its deliberately even resource distribution. You won’t have top tier tools on day one. Not even day 5.

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It’s also important to consider that many of these beautiful builds popped up before the current redistribution and people were able to find tons and tons of stuff that is now much harder to find. I joined just after this happened and know all to well the frustration of seeing beautifully done builds and not having the materials to compete with them. Even now after roughly 100 hours I don’t have anything super flashy built.

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Sorry if my reply was taken the wrong way. It wasn’t intended too. I’ve seen many people give up hope and just get frustrated. And i was just stating the facts. The tables show how abundant fossils are.

I’ll give this example. Before I had to go fossil hunt every week to keep with my tools making. Now i haven’t gone fossil hunting as I have over 1k fossil extract after the redistribution, where I came out of a cave with 96 large fossils. Previously i came out with 2 if lucky.

I understand your frustration. I had that happen with me previously with gold. Believe me, it was worse with gold.

And iron is still there. You’ll just have to try luck one place. Look for 30 minutes and then change until it works.

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No worries at all – if my own frustrations made me come off a bit too crisp, my apologies!

To try to rephrase part of what I was trying to get at:

Let’s say that ‘established beginner’ is iron tools. (Just arbitrarily picking a point on my part.) To get to / maintain this point, you need stone, wood, copper, iron, fossils and tech fragments.

Once you get to this point, you want to keep advancing, obviously, but more importantly, you don’t want to backslide, or spend the whole time scrambling just to maintain it, because that leaves you little time to try to advance further. (A sort of ‘if I can’t even noob properly, how will I ever be awesome?’ sentiment.)

If you can’t consistently find the materials needed to maintain this point, then you start the backward slide, enter frustration and disappointment and etc.

To maintain this point, you need to know where to find these things. Being able to find this stuff out – the stuff required for an ‘established beginner’ – isn’t ‘game-breaking’, it’s game-ENABLING. So, the idea that you’d start the game, have problems finding the basic stuff, and the answer given is ‘you’re doing it wrong’ or ‘we don’t intend on giving you any info for finding basic materials’ – well, for me, this would be hugely off-putting.

I understand the desire for obfuscating high-tier/end-game/prestige items, but I guess I’m saying if we start in a random location, then every random location needs the basic crafting materials at some reasonable level, or some players’ starting experience will literally be ‘SUCKS TO BE YOU, DUDE.’

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Well. There’s certainly no game breaking aspect for you, more like a source of help. Which is to everyone. But “veteran” players can take advantage of that, with their higher tier weapons and clear an area of iron. Certainly we don’t have the player base to account this to a game breaking aspect. But if people started going to a planet like solum and for the sake of not going far, carving whole mountains and terrains close to pixel gate for the sake of iron. Regen would still not take place, as pixel gate is a very active place. Ending up with mountains full of holes, which before the information. Never occurred to some.

Don’t shy away from stone tools or copper. I spent my first week or two using just stone. Amassing a supply of iron and copper to help me in the future. I made the jump to iron and copper then. Remember this is not a race

And you don’t need expensive materials to build cool things. My builds with the more love I’ve ever received use refined rocks, ice, glass, brick, wood, decorative rocks. Simple things to get, really.

And from what I know, asking why “veteran” for help, was never left unattended. People here, are for the most part, willing to help a new player experience. To cover for the not so fun and intuitive parts of the game. After all, tutorials shouldn’t be placed before important features, and we have players making up for it

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I’ve been using stone tools since fossil extract has been a problem for me to find–I’ve found about as much of it as I have ancient tech fragments, but those you only need a couple of to build a machine once whereas you always need fossil to make tools, and in steadily increasing amounts. Right now I don’t have enough iron to even get to the point of refining rocks and I am not willing to spend “weeks” to reach that point–I don’t think that’s reasonable to ask at all. I can’t even make refined rocks at the moment because of a lack of, you guessed it, iron.

I get that the game is still developing which is why I’m just going to take a break from it for a while. If there’s a wipe, well, I won’t lose too much. I just built a basic stone house to put my machines in while I figured out if I wanted to stay in that spot permanently and what else I would need. I think the game is neat in a lot of ways and I want to see it grow, but right now for me it is not in a playable place, not when I launched into the world and hit a wall. I mean, I wandered around quite a lot to try mining in different places, with very little to show.

I also still don’t get the warp conduit thing. It’s a cube. How does one place it ‘vertically’ when all the sides are identical?

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You need at least two warp conduits to travel. When i meant placing it vertically. Is place one on top of each other. Instead of placing two side to side.

Giving a vertical rectangle instead of an horizontal rectangle.

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I have as hard of a time looking for iron myself, as a relatively new comer myself. Fossil, has been very much easier to find than iron. I find that fossil is plentiful around desert biome, especially in caves and cliffsides. Tech Frags, depends on which planet you are on I guess. If you are on Solum, its like Tech Frag heaven over there. Walk up a desert cliff side face and you are bound to spot at least 1, but usually if you look carefully enough you can spot more than one. I had a hard time finding Tech Frags on Vena V, and Tech Components (supposedly there is supposed to be 3 on Vena V, and assuming that has not change did they seriously only expect like only 1 new player on the entire Vena V to need a Spark Generator? Not to mention the thought of combing the entire planet for those 3 Tech Component was just super daunting to me.)

But, ranting aside, you can try to get off the planet you are on by using one of the gateways other players have put up to look for the resources you need. This game is not like the usual MMOs some of us are used to playing where you can complete quests real fast to level up. The game here is all about building, finding things like treasure hunting, to level up. Levels in here don’t mean much besides being able to build bigger and more things because you get more plots, and some more coins.

As far as iron goes from my perspective, I have not felt a need to use iron tools, I think Gold Tools are far more easier to make because it is slight easier to come by than Iron, and uses Copper to make it. I think it is possible to skip Iron tools entirely. It has been my experience that I find Gold more often when out looking for Iron. Having said that, Gold is still kinda rare; I still live off stone tools. They are cheap, easy and fast to make, and can mine most of the stuff. I keep a few Copper hammer on me for the Silver, and Coal seams, and a gold hammer whenever I can make one for when I see other higher level stuff.

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they may eventually change the way to get warp location picker upgrades, or tech components. cuz right now it takes spark to go to a different planet to get your tech components.

this is pre-alpha, and when it’s released, i mean that’d be Alpha stage, right??? things are subject to change. including resource distribution.

seeing as how often this has been said, they’ll likely bundle this up into the next Live update

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I believe the game-breaking parts were aimed more at the distribution numbers, but also the height maps. Now veteran players know exactly which planets to mine what, and beeline straight for those locations.

It’s one thing having players pool their resources together and figure this stuff out, but another thing entirely when a developer out and out posts the raw data.

I agree with you on iron. I’m the same as @Dzchan94; I’ve not had any problems myself, though it is one of the harder resources to gather in bulk, opposed to things such as gold, silver, copper or even rubies.

I think something that’s required for beginner progression should be easily attainable - at the very least on the starter worlds. And seeing as these iron topics keep cropping up, there’s clearly an issue.

Edit; I just hope the developers don’t let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. The numbers on iron seem sound, it’s perhaps just a height or placement issue?

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That’s sort of my point. How is it game-breaking for people to know where to go, to get what they want?

This implies that they want players to spend time both unable to do what they’d like to do, and unable to find the information to let them do it. If players will eventually collate this information, and post it online – which obviously they will – withholding it does exactly zero except give them a chance to steeple their fingers and look temporarily mysterious.

Nobody HAS to look at the information if it’s out there. You can use self-restraint and give yourself the apparently grand adventure of smashing a million rocks, hoping the next one is the one you really really want. For the rest of us, frustrated at a lack of progression, the information lets us know what we’re doing wrong.

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Yeah, I totally understand you. You have a point.

Personally, I like the idea of the community figuring this stuff out - and even if or when we do, it’ll never be as accurate as the height maps @james posted. The data we had beforehand was a lot of general information, like ‘between 90-100’ or ‘under a mountain biome’. The height maps and distribution numbers showed you every last piece of each individual ore, on every single planet.

I doubt the players will ever have information that thorough - which in my opinion is a good thing, as a lot of the game seems to be based around player trading (and there’s little point in trading if you can just as easily mine it yourself)

That all said, iron should definitely be easier to find - we’re in complete agreement there!

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Yeah. I get your point as well. Some people really really dig on figuring out the perfectly optimal location for their favourite/most coveted block, and having the info out there robs them of the ability to appear and say LO I HAVE DUG ALL THE ROCKS AND BRING INFO – but then how to put /just enough/ info out there so people who are flailing get a hint so they don’t give up? Whoever figures out this juggling act and writes a book on it will be swimming in money the rest of their life. ; )

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