Grind is doing mindless tasks over and over for no apparent reason. Usually these are tasks that could be easily automated and don’t really require any thought.
- Go gather 1,000 Adrenal Glands for example.
There is no specific purpose for this task other than an NPC has requested it (this is just an example not something that actually exists in boundless).
A much more appropriate approach would be to make the task more difficult and require thought and planning, but maybe only require one or two adrenal glands for the same reward which is difficult and challenging and may take multiple attempts to figure out the correct approach, but is not a mindless task that requires killing a thousand defenseless bunnies (or roadrunner in this case).
That is a prime example of a pointless grind.
In boundless there are only a few areas I can think of right off hand that are particularly grindy feeling.
- Creating Coils for your machines.
- Harvesting Emeralds and Amethyst
- Repairing Machines (with coils)
Coils just require a mass amount of resources and are really required to enjoy the crafting aspect of the game. However, the payoff makes the grind worth doing. Certainly this mechanic could be improved but as far as grinds go this isn’t particularly horrible since the payoff makes it worthwhile.
Emeralds are just so painful to farm that I simply don’t bother anymore. I can go down and spend hours farming for emeralds only to end up with 30-40 in the end due to the insane amounts of lava to try and work around and no really good farming spots. Its actually easier to farm on planets with significantly lower emerald drop rates just because they have less lava making them a horrible gem to farm and one that many people simply don’t bother with anymore due to the horrible grind to get them. I’m all for making things challenging and difficult, but if we’re going to do that then the crafting recipes need to also reflect that. If you want to leave emeralds the way they are I would recommend adjusting the crafting recipes to significantly reduce the amount of emeralds/amethyst required in order to properly represent the difficulty in obtaining them over other gems. Alternately you could make the payoff better making them at least worth the pain to gather by improving the quality of the items made using emeralds (this creates a different balance issue though so probably not the best approach).
Repairing each individual coil really bothers me and really limits many of the build options since you MUST have access to every single coil in order to repair it. I would recommend linking all of the coils to the primary machine they are tied to similar to what you do with the spark generators. Repair the primary machine and it repairs all linked coils (increasing the overall hitpoints of the machine similar to what is done with spark generators is perfectly acceptable).