Hey Wolfpack
I wanted to respond to some of your points and give you some more information as to why we made some of these changes.
First Point: (Bomb Mining) - I wont address because I had no hand in it.
Second Point: (Block Drops) - Your concern here is that obtaining resources will be more grindy. I would argue that going out to get resources is more interesting and fun than placing and breaking blocks for most players, that is if going out and getting the resource is not frustrating because it is too rare. In the case of wood and foliage I feel there is enough naturally for player not to need to use the place and break method. For growth and corruption which are rarer it might be beneficial to use the place and break method. My understanding is that people only used this method because they can not find the surface resources that drop the item. This was probably due to regeneration bugs. Hopefully if the regen works as intended there will be hardly any need to grind for the rare block item drops. Hopefully this means there will be less grind to obtain things such as shimmering orbs. I haven’t answered the question: “Why can’t blocks always have a chance of dropping items whether you place them or not?” but hopefully this explains why we believe there will be less grind.
Third Point: (Attributes) - This is a display bug. The internal numbers have not actually changed. The displayed number now rounds down instead of up. We will change this back to round up.
Fouth Point: (Recipes) - The main goal here was to try and even out the usefulness and market value of items to be more in line with their rarity. No way have we achieved perfect balance but hopefully this was a step in the right direction. There is a lot more to do to ensure each resource has equal love but we didn’t want to go overboard with changes. You are correct, we do need to add more recipes to the game to use up additional resources.
Your main concern again is that recipes have become more grindy. In some cases I will not deny that this is true. Higher level furnaces requiring more flint is just a flat increase in resources needed. Most (if not all) of these recipes have only seen an increase in their “common” ingredients. Looking at some of the numbers in our data it become clear that there were a lot of common items were sitting in storage without being used.
Some recipes have received additional ingredients e.i. bricks and decorative blocks. In the case of bricks it is my thinking that they should now be easier to craft in general. “Easy” can be interpreted in many different ways but the raw resources need to create bricks should be less. The counter to this is that you need more varied resources which means you need to travel to find them. All in all I hope these two factor balance out so that bricks have a similar “difficulty” level to the pre-patch recipe. In my defence of decorative blocks I would say that each progression of base wood (timber->refined->decorative) is a little boring, you just need time and some fuel (what you need for pretty much any recipe). The aim was to make them a little more interesting in a thematic way without overly increasing their cost. We also wanted to give the waxy earthyams some value. Hopefully there is a healthy demand for them now.
Fifth Point: (Testing) - You are right to suggest we need more testing. We will be updating the testing branch from now on to get more rigorousness testing.
I hope this is helpful in some way. We are listening to all the feedback good and bad. Keep it up guys and thanks for supporting us!