When I am strip mining, I’m also watching stuff on second monitor, and often stop mining for longer periods to engage in the second monitor activity. Guess might as well just turn the game off 
No don’t misunderstand me, people should and will play however they want I was just thinking it’s not a very compelling experience if you only want some of your attention on it. But I take Simoyd’s point about choosing this kind of game for exactly that reason, I hadn’t considered from that angle.
I have music on while I game but it’s passive. Same deal though, just different approaches. I don’t multitask very well probably hence my thinking it’s a design failure.
Honestly, I can live with the current balance because I use the economic outlet to gather/sell to earn coin for coils. I’m in the same boat as you Merln; I have a good hunch that the two techniques are not more equal across the board post-patch. The devs have implied that people are still bomb mining post-199 or have at least encouraged players to continue, meaning that they will also continue to run the analytics needed to bring them back into balance… maybe.
They may decide to take a stance and kill bomb mining forever, which would make me happy that they took a stance, forcing me to live with it rather than anticipating a fix. Maybe they could increase forge ingredient yields at that point and bless us all.
Same! I do not find mining gems itself to be intrinsically rewarding. The gems were the payoff, and if there is less reward I do not feel the need to engage in the same behavior.
I like my job, but if my pay were cut by half, I’d find a different job.
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Tried mining for gems repeatedly after the patch. It made me want to eat a gun. So I gave up on even using gem tools. Titanium or forged titanium is where it is at now.
I have seen people use gems tools in hot spots and literally burn up a gem tool and not get enough gems to replace it.
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As someone who mines with a hammer (bombs were never my style), I can agree that it needs work. I mined for about 3 hours the other day with titanium hammers and I got exactly 6 gems out of it. That being said, I still would prefer to wait and see what the devs say once they can go over their data. I’m having a tough time finding gems myself, but instead of beating the issue to death and arguing back and forth about what “should have been”, I much prefer to wait and see what the future holds.
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You might want to check you’re mining in the right area, I mean bad luck strikes all eventually but 6 gems in 3 hours is a bit of a misnomer.
Depends on the gem I’ve found aswell, diamonds seem to have been the easiest to get, topaz the hardest by far.
Trust me on this one. I was in the right area. Part of the problem is that I don’t have access to an AoE hammer yet. I’ll make a couple when I get materials. I was using a method called branch mining. It exposes the maximum amount of surface area with a minimum amount of hammer hits. The problem is not that I’m not in the right area, the problem is that after mining out a huge area, there were very low amounts of gem even in a large “hotspot” on the atlas. But that’s not the point. The point is even though everyone agrees it’s broken in some way, at the end of the day, it’s not us that has the final say. It would be amazing if we could get some type of feedback or roadmap of where the devs are headed. Even though I know they probably won’t say. They most likely don’t want to promise one thing and then be unable to deliver it. It’s standard development psychology.
This might be the heatmap not updating properly, I’ve heard that it only updates once a day.
I mean I’ve only very recently gotten access to AOE hammers, but with 3-4 titanium hammers and no food buffs I was able to walk away with 100~ diamonds.
I think we have more people like this then we realize. When every post is a complaint a lot of people don’t really want to add to the uselessness. I made a couple comments in the beginning and just stopped mining for now until i hear the direction the game will go as far as mining goes.
Honestly this.
Same the game pretty much is already forcing you to have alts to do the different jobs. Gathering, Crafting, and so on. Why don’t they actually take the next step?
Instead of treating it like Minecraft, treat it like an MMO it wants to be. MAKE CLASSES.
Have a Gatherer Class, with 3 tries. Spec’d into Mining with Hammers, Mining with Bombs, and Using Axes and Shovels. Do away with the Forge system all together, and have the Extra damage, AOE effects, and other forge effects be skills you can unlock. And to balance it, make it so each character can only pick ONE tree to Spec in.
For Hunter Class, you can make them Spec into Fists, Slingshot, or Bombs. Again having all the Forge Effects as skills in each tree, only with Hunter Class, make the Bombs unable to Mine, only damage Mobs.
Crafter can spec into Tools/Weapons/Tech, or Brew/Food, or Building/Decorations. Simple.
And even have a Shop Owner class, that has Skills to decrease Tax on Shop Stands, then another for Tax on Request Stands, Skills to even Place and USE Request Stands, Limit the number of Shop Stands and Request Stands based on Level, or have skills to increase the numbers with max skills making it unlimited. Have skills for each Shop Stand holding only 1 kinda of item, such as only Copper Ore, and increasing it lets you put in more items into the Shop Stand, such as Copper and Iron ore now.
^ That would have the game more in my opinion, cause it would give people direction, it would give the game depth, and it’s pretty much already designed for that system, but not wanting to fully embrace it. I say it should.
Bomb mining was completely broken. It should never return anywhere near the state it was in pre-nerf.
Either bring back mini-radius bombmining or simply up the respawn of ressources. (Titanium/gems.)
The real irony here is certain players lack of ability to only post about bombs in the 7-8 already established threads about bombmining.
It’s getting old real fast.
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I really don’t mind if bombs had a 3m radius max. Bring it pre nerf but with radius constraint. Hell make it 2m max if you want, i’ll be satisfied 
I did not see a reason for them to nerf exp on bomb mining and no… It was mostly loud people like my boyfriend… I REALLY wanted the level 5 AoE on hammer to just remove damage penalty then you bring the hammer to bomb levels and all is well (sorry if I seemed a little mad I was freezing and like a quarter awake but was woken up by telemarketers calling me)
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Was it just a lot of nothing (stone, sand) or was it resources but no gems (coal, iron)?
I mentioned this twice elsewhere but I’m finding huge areas with nothing in em, noticeably different from resource-populated areas and I’m curious if that’s normal or if I’m just going crazy.
Edit: another note re all ppl talking about gem rates, Cardass topaz is notably more abundant than Serp/Alcyon diamonds so talking about gem rate when comparing the two may be misleading.
There were resources, but few and far between.
I was looking forward to bomb mining. I play several hours a day since early release but only have 1 lvl 37 and 1 lvl 34. I’m not really looking forward to continuing playing this game once Red Dead and Fallout 76 come out now. Sure, 10 or 100 will replace me, but all these nerfs are just so heartbreaking to watch 
honeymoon’s over.
Why did you look forward to it?
Look. 2 out of 43 people regularly use gems. Of course the sample size is inconclusive, but it says a lot about how precious gems are.
WHAT?! You can mine that fast with that kinda hammer?! Sign me up! Screw bomb mining, I’ve always hated it. It has terrible precision, a timer on it, and it takes more than one bomb to destroy a block. Waste of time whenever you can mine that fast with a hammer and keep all resources. OG Shaft/Tunnel Miner yo. Unless they came out with dynamite then I’d be all for it.