Grinding doesn’t just mean ‘I have to collect more of this’ So having to collect less materials or have more output doesn’t take away grinding alone, if something else is added.
You get more Bricks, that’s less grinding yes. But now you also need Mud and Ash. You HAVE to go looking for new materials, which you might not know where they are, and collect them. It’s adding even more time, to go out of your way, to collect a large ammount of not just ONE material, but TWO different materials that might not even be close to each other or even on the same planet.
Lets say before it took you an hour to get the resources needed to make 100 bricks. With this new Recipe, it could take you 2-3 hours, hunting down these new resources and collecting a mass amount, just for 200.
It doubles the output, but it also doubles the time to get it. Just because the output matches the effort to get it, doesn’t change that you have to put in more effort to get said output. That’s grinding. You have to do more work, waste more time, to get the same output as before, which needed less time and less grinding.
PS, just be glad they only added in 2 extra ingrediants, and not 3 like they did with basic tools.
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!
I love communication issues.
For me grinding is repetition. The more repetition, the more grind. If I have less repetition than imho there is less grind. Variation in what I am gathering is am bit helfull in breaking monotony. That’s why for me changing the recipe by adding additional resources for twice more gain is making it less grind. Cause now I have a small additional variation to said grind for the same result.
Edit:
I’ve just realised that there is additional dimension to this. If you want only one mass craft of bricks, than yeah it is more grinding cause you need to grind more for it.
But if you need 10 mass crafts of it, it is less grindy cause you have more than one type of soil and stones to grind.
I have a hard time understanding the issue with increased recipe complexity - yeah it takes more to gather for, drives prices slightly up - but at the same time, is it such a bad thing that you might just have to go out of your way to buy it from the market ?
I’ve seen a steady decline in pretty much all my items, that I have put up for sale because most people are capable of doing everything, essentially diminishing the need to actually buy from others, and at times stagnating the economy - ofc it could just be that my shop isnt popular at all, but most of those ive spoken with has noticed the same, some not so much, but the need to buy from others will go down quite a bit more over time as more players gets more established, and thats, in my oppinion quite sad as I really like the player run economy part of things
Being able to farm growth for shimmering orbs from what you have brought with you back essentially gives you a potential unlimited amount of shimmering orbs granted you keep farming it - but at the same time, also “free” coins, sure you spend time into farming it, but something that is essentially rare and can net you a lot of coin from those buying shimmering orbs could potentially break the value of said material.
I’ve been talking about this before, and I know there’s quite a few people who disagrees with me on this, but I really do feel its a shame that parts of the economy would just be left out like this in that way because of the want to just farm everything including rarere materials without having to go out and just buy it off a store somewhere instead.
You’re failing to take into consideration that in both the bricks recipe and the decorative blocks recipe, you need to spend a lot less time grinding for coal or other fuel sources. So I don’t think it really adds to ‘double the time to get double the bricks’. Your mileage may vary, of course, but my impression is that it’s gonna take less time now to make, say, 200 bricks (to simplify by using what you get from one mass craft) than it did before (two mass crafts).
You have to spend less time waiting for clay to be compacted, and you need less time spent gathering fuel, in exchange for some extra time digging up ash and mud, but if you’ve explored at all, then you’ve seen ample flat areas where both those resources are not only plentiful, but side by side, and by virtue of being flat areas, its pretty easy to gather there.
You only need to find such an area once, and then add it to your locations list. Heck, if you’re in that much of a hurry and it’s that far from your base, you can even warp there, or make a little portal in the area, if there isn’t one nearby yet, and there you go, problem solved.
In balance I think that particular change was advantageous, and I build almost exclusively with bricks (they’re my favorite building block), so I was particularly impacted by it.
(sry offtopic)hey fuel is really really easy to get if u know how: get a shovelling alt and mine peaty soil on a placid planet. Compact it and have fun. better than soft coal and much much easier to get. U can get fuel for days in minutes. and u dont need any power for this.
i dont like bomb mining.
i dont like bug exploiting to get mats
i dont care about changes in the game through patches. Just see them as opportunities or challenges to overcome
pls never stop adding materials to craft. People dont have to be able to get all and everything in the game by themselves. This would limit the trade.
First I appreciate the time you took to respond to the concerns that were raised. The only place I am having an issue is using the term boring for the old recipes. The implication is that people enjoy complex recipes that require more and more resources. I am not one of those people. As someone that wants to build, all I can see this doing is adding grind. Even if it produces more of the end product, I still have to gather all the materials plus additional ones and in the case of decorative blocks, I have to craft wax which adds a crafting step to the process as well and gathering the waxy earthyams. If you want materials to have a use, either substitute them for something else in a recipe, come up with an alternative recipe (like you did with sap), or add a new item like concrete from gravel.
This kind of change does not make me want to quit, but it does make me want to not play until rented planets are available so I can bypass all the additional grind.
U dont have to gather everything. Thats why u have coins. And other people shops and gathering alts. An economy would make much less sense when everyone has access to anything any time.
" The implication is that people enjoy complex recipes that require more and more resources. I am not one of those people. As someone that wants to build, all I can see this doing is adding grind."
This point is completely valid. As a fellow builder who uses a lot of decorative blocks I share your perspective to some degree.
the border between actions with goal and purpose and just grind are very subjective. What u call grind is other peoples killing of time, experimenting, keeping hands busy while thinking or their profession and purpose in life.
i was crafting daily around 20-50k deco blocks for roads, my personal build, other players, hub. yesterday i didnt craft any, cause i had to go and farm mats to get wax… today ill craft 10% of what i was craftin thats a uge slow down. and belive me its not giving me any fun at all. i like grinding game (Disgaea, Path of exile) but i dont like to grind in a game where main fun is building…i bought master pack to have more plots so i can build more.
The achievement is in building something great not in the fact that making a brick takes x time. The achievement is in how creative people can be in using materials and texture and color to create something new. The achievement is even someone with not a lot of building skills being able to build something they can be proud of. This is why the forum has a thread with screen shots where people can post their builds and are often praised for their efforts.
No one is congratulating someone on making their first brick or power coil.
That is why imho this game need creative mod.
This kind of game play you described is great for building/creative game.
Not so much for building/survival game.
I came here for survival build game and changes being made are perfectly fine for me. Making nice build is achievement in more than just architecture skills and I have way more satisfaction than from just creating nice looking place.
You have completely opposite reaction. For you it just makes your work longer.
That would be truth if the prices of almost everything wasn’t so high. Take the advanced power coils for instance, they’re sold for over 18k! New players cannot afford that and they’ll take hours farming for the gems to get a regular coil, when i began mining for gems i took over 3 hours with and iron hammer to get a little over 80 diamonds.
And the coils aren’t the only thing overpriced, take a look around the shops in the game and you’ll find a lot of items like that. And their prices will just go up even more with the recent patch.
I think there needs to be some balance between both sides of this issue.
Taken to the extreme, one could argue that pretty much everything else in the game just gets in the way of building. “Wouldn’t it encourage building if we could just click a button and get 9999 of every material available, and another click to pick any color we want?”
I’m sure that would make amazing builds much more achievable, but on the other hand, it would also turn it from a game to a 3D modelling program of sorts.
And of course, taken to the opposite extreme, if you need to kill 500 waves of enemies to get a single block to build with, that’s a lot of gameplay involved, but it would take forever to get anything done.
Zeroing in on the proper balance between both styles will, I suppose, be an ongoing effort.
And incidentally, I usually congratulate people when they tell me they’ve made their first coil. It’s a great achievement in game, and takes a fair bit of effort. It should be recognized.
Tobe, you’re a Dev, and I don’t want to bash on you and risk getting banned, but a lot of what I just read was really stupid and ignorant, and makes me question if you actually play the game.
The issue with this, is that this is an MMO, where you’re sharing the planet with many other players. If this was a single player only game, or option like Ark and Minecraft, such a thing would work. But here it doesn’t work, because of simple numbers.
If someone picks up say a corruption block to get the rare drop, they have to place and break it a lot. Lets say, they have to do it 300 times just to get the rare drop. You’re ‘solution’ that removed that option, now forces them to go to where Corruption blocks are in the way, and harvest 300 blocks, and get 1 drop.
Where as before, they had just 1 block that vanishes when turned into the drop, now they have 299 blocks, and 1 drop. Whats more, they had to go out into the wild, with creatures spawning to kill them, and players doing the same thing.
And that’s just ground based materials. Foilage and Trees are much worse to farm. Unless you can fly, farming trees is just flat out worse, and much more time consuming, than harvesting any other natural resource in the game. Even with the grappling hook, it’s pretty bad getting every last bit of a tree.
The change to not being able to get resoucres from player placed blocks is a massive one, that makes grinding go through the roof, and forces people to go out and destroy the surface blocks of planets even more.
There was a thread once complaining about people destroying trees or blocks around another player’s plots. You pretty much forced everyone to do just that now.
This one. This one doesn’t even make sense to me.
“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.”
But the Market Value, and Usefulness is based on player to player. Some people use bricks, some people don’t. Some people use bombs, some people don’t, some people make shops, some people don’t. Any item is worth as much as Player A is willing to sell it as, and Player B is willing to buy it is. And an item’s usefulness, again depends on the player. Some people want to build out of expencive Decoration 2 blocks, while others rather just use wood and stone, or just refine cause it’s not as grindy as Decoration blocks.
PLAYERS choose who useful or the value of something is. It shouldn’t be up to the Devs to make things harder, just because they want to. All it will do is ■■■■ off the people that do want to use those items, and ward away those that were thinking about it and now it’s too much of a hassle. You’re restricting an item, because YOU believe it should be more harder to make. Not because the players feel it should be harder to make.
This right here, is the worse thing I’ve read about this post. Of course there are a lot of Common items sitting in storage. Taking Minecraft for example, lets look at the progression of Tools, namely the Pickaxe.
You start with Wood, dig down to get stone, then make a stone pickaxe. Then you dig up all kinds of stone, replacing the Pickaxe when it breaks, till you get some Iron. Then you make an Iron Pickaxe, and stone becomes useless. You break and collect a lot of stone along the way to getting more iron to replace your Pickaxe till you find Diamonds. Then you make a Diamon Pickaxe, and not Stone and Iron are never used again, only using Diamonds, and small number of wood for sticks.
It’s the same in every other Survival game, and Sandbox game. When you jump from ‘Tier 1’ to ‘Tier 2’ items, the ‘Tier 2’ items very rarely require any of the old ‘Tier 1’ Materials. You use the Highest Tier 1 items, to collect the basic Tier 2 Materials to crafted the first Tier 2 items, then with Tier 2 items, you only use and harvest Teir 2 Materials.
Forcing people to use lower tier item ‘common’ materials they don’t need any more, just forces them to have to go grinding for those materials. It’s forcing grinding, just because you believe they should use all the materials and have none be useless at higher tiers.
But here’s the big kicker. You’re looking at End Game people with all those useless items that they don’t use anymore, not at new or mid level players.
You forcing higher tier players to use up all the extra materials they grinded out to get to the higher tier does nothing for them. They already have the Materials. But new players and Mid Tier players suddenly have the grind doubled and tripled even for no reason. They are forced to explore more, collect more, and waste more time, just because YOU feel they should use every single block, for every single Tier.
It’s horrible excuse to force people to grind, just because you believe some materials aren’t being used as much as you think they should be.
Since Bombs are now useless, and no one is going to use or create them anymore, are you suddenly going to force Bombs to be a requirement to make some items now?
Maybe the reason people have so many unused blocks, is because they started out as a Gatherer, then desided to become a hunter, having a lot of left over blocks. Or went on to higher tier crafting. Or was a Crafting and Gatherer, before becoming a specialized shop owner, and didn’t need to use the extra materials now in storage.
There are many, MANY excuses and reasons for why a lot of blocks stopped being used by the majority of players. And focing people to use those blocks now isn’t a good solution, it just pisses off the people that are using those blocks, as now they have to work even harder, and grind for longer.
This right here, this is what I hate the most. Because what you said is flat out wrong. If you already in an area with a few hundred blocks of Clay, then having to harvest 200, instead of 100, isn’t that much extra time. It’s still extra time, but you’re already here, already harvesting this material. But when you add in another materials, which could be on 2 other whole planets, the ‘Time to Harvest it All’, aka the Grinding, Skyrockets. What could have taking 10-20 minutes to just harvest 200 clay blocks, now becomes 2-3 HOURS searching through portals for the right world, and searching those worlds for the extra materials you need, harvesting those materials, then running back to home. And then REPEATING that trip each time you run out of materials.
Adding in new materials is NEVER a good thing. This is why me, and so many others, complain and hate on Copper and Iron tools now needing Sackcloth and Glue. Because now Copper and Iron went from Tier 1 tools that even a new player can make, to Tier 3, that only an mid level player that explores and gathers on multiple planets can use.
You should be adjusting how much resources is needed, not adding in new requirements. All that does is just ■■■■ off the people dedicated to mass producing it for use or selling. Cause imagine if you took a week out of your time to harvest a large amount of the resources needed to make Bricks. Then just before you can craft it all, this update happens, and now you’re forced to go to two different planets to find and spend another week harvesting Mud and Ash blocks.
^ That right there is what is pissing everyone off about this update. They don’t care if it’s easier (Which it isn’t, it takes even longer, even if on paper there is less resources involved, you still have to go FIND those other resources, making it a much more complicated mess.). Because you fucked up with their build, you fucked up how they played the game. You fucked up all the grinding they already did and made it pointless. You took away the fun they had.
This tho, is almost just as bad as the last quote. Specifically “I would say that each progression of base wood (timber->refined->decorative) is a little boring, you just need time and some fuel”
Having spent days, trying to collect enough wood, and rock to be able to barely make a small house made out of those materials, this pisses me off to no end. Because even if it’s ‘Boring’, it’s still many days of grinding to get a large number of those materials. And each level requires more and more of the materials from the level before, and gives less and less for it.
The grind just for THOSE items is bad enough, and it’s just collecting rocks and trees and processing it. It’s just the insane number of resources you have to grind out daily, and getting very little of it in return.
It’s not boring, it’s SIMPLE, which is how crafting SHOULD be. Crafting SHOULD NOT be a complicated mess, where you need a spread sheet, and a shopping list when you go out resource collecting. Especially when it doesn’t make logical sense.
You’re making things harder, just because YOU believe that crafting is boring, and should be more complicated and even more harder to grind for than it already is.
You aren’t balancing the game, you aren’t changing things because they need to be changed, you aren’t making things easier. You are changing things because YOU believe they need to be, YOU make the game harder and more frustrating, YOU are only thinking about what materials are used or not, not WHY they aren’t being used, or HOW it will effect the players or the game, other than that it will make it HARDER for players.
With this kind of thinking from the Devs, the game is just going to be turning into a grind fest, basic stuff is just going to get even more harder, new players are going to be forced to either grind right from the start, or stop playing. There’s going to be no one left to play but the most dedicated players, and those that love to grind just for the sake of grinding.
Boundless-Grindfest isn’t the game I bought, I bought a game where I could play in any ways I what, How I want, and have fun doing it. Grinding isn’t fun for 99% of people in the world. And being forced to grind is even worse.
To be fair, powercoils takes a LOT of resources to craft, and expensive ones at that too - its not actually meant to be something you get that early on as it is.
Obviously there’s a lot of power blockers on different things, like titanium tools requiring power, which in turn requires gems is a bit… odd at at best I think.
I haven’t really check this feature since a year ago, and I’m at work so I can’t verify this right now. But as I understand it, we still have the option to change which version we will playing in steam (release and testing). But there is a disencouraging factor keeping many away from this and that is the abscence of proper testing tools for players, meaning that they have to play the game near double the amount they already do if they want to test anything but the bare basics.
