[Poll] Is the grind really that hard? (for builders)

My two cents. Night before last I received an order for plain gleam doors in cool blue. So, not having enough of the gleam I headed to kada 1 to fill up. While I was there gathering gleam I came across an area that had both mud and clay in it. So I whipped out my shovel and started digging. I have plans on plans within plans :grin:
Another time on serpensarindi, I was there for thorns for a different project, while gathering the thorns I noticed they were on a bed of ash, so shovel time again. In both of these instances I gothered a cpl hundred of the mats needed to make bricks while accomplishing a separate goal. I didnā€™t go out ā€œlookingā€ to make bricks, I just know I like em and when I came across the materials needed I stopped and gathered them. Iā€™m

1 Like

Not all of us liked Creative Mode.

Personally I liked the survival aspect, getting, crafting, and making my own items.

My problems with the ā€˜Grindā€™ in this game, is that there is A, too much for so little, and B, Itā€™s too complicated and long.

Take Boundlessā€™ Rock ā†’ Stone ā†’ Refine Stone ā†’ Decoration Block.
Compared to Minecraftā€™s Cobblestone ā†’ Stone ā†’ Stone Bricks

For one thing, thereā€™s 1 less thing to craft. Special versions you had to find, and use a Silk Touch Pickaxe to get. Or Nether Brick you had to go find and mine it specifically and not craft it.

Either way, comparing. Rock to Stone, right off the bat itā€™s different. In Boundless you just need a workbench and 5 minutes. Where as Minecraft you just ā€˜Cookedā€™ the cobblestone with a little bit of heat. Namely 8 coal per stack of 64.

Then for Stone to Refine, again itā€™s different. For Boundless you need 288 Stone, just to refine 50 Refine Stones, waiting 25 minutes each time. Where as in Minecraft, you can by hand, no time limit, and need 4 stone to convert to 4 stonebricks. So 4 stacks of Stone, 256 Stone, can be turned into 4 stacks of stonebricks, 256 stone bricks.

As you can see, in Minecraft itā€™s MUCH easier to get Stone Bricks, than in Boundless where you have to grind and way much longer.

To compare again, Lets use actual numbers and calculations. Wereā€™s going to make things fair. So 1 machine to craft out of for each side to make it fair. And weā€™re going to craft the roughly same number of Stone Bricks, and Refine Stone. So 256 Stone Bricks, and 250 Refine Stone.

Lets start with Minecraft first, because spoilers, itā€™s the easiest. The first part is actually the hardest. Waiting for Stone to Cook. To get 256 Stone Bricks, we need 256 Cobblestone. Then we need to Smelt that into Stone. It takes 8 Coal, to smelt a Stack of Items, no matter the item, in Minecraft. So for 4 stacks, we need 32 pieces, or half a stack, of Coal. Now the hard part, waiting.

It takes 10 seconds to cook an item in the furnace. 10 x 256 is 2560 seconds to craft it all. Or about 43 minutes rounding up. After all the stone is cooked tho, they instantly finish, as they can craft the 256 stone right into 256 stone bricks without any machines or waiting, right from the inventory screen. The second hardest part for Minecraft other than waiting for it all to smelt, is gathering the 256 cobblestones.

But hereā€™s the kicker between Boundless and Minecraft. All Cobblestone look the same, it doesnā€™t matter where you break stone, you get cobblestone. Just by mining for anything and everything, no matter where, when, how, or why, you get cobblestone. Boundless tho, you have 3 different kinds of rock randomly placed on each planet, AND each planet has itā€™s own color. So if you want a Specific Color, for a Specific Refine Block, you have to go to the planet that has that color, and try to find that specific rock, which on some planets can be a little hard as 1 or 2 of the types of rocks might be more dominate and the one your looking for might be slightly more rare to find as the other two show up a lot more.

Anyways, onto Boundless. So in Boundless, we will be Mass Crafting, which requires a skill I might add, as itā€™s the most effective and easiest way to conserve resources per reward. So first up, to get 250 Refine Stone, we will need to mass craft stone 5 times, which needs 288 stone each. So in total we need 1440 Stone. To get that, we need to Mass Craft Rock, at 18 each, for 50 stone.

Ok, math time. 1450 divided by 50 reward, tells us we need 29 Mass Crafts. Mass Crafting needs 18 Rocks, so 18 x 29 = 522 Rocks. Now, the waiting. Remember, 1 machine each. So to Mass Craft 522 Rocks into 1450 Stone, on 1 machine, at 5 minutes wait per mass craft, takes 5 minutes, 29 times. Or 145 minutes. Or 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Thatā€™s just the Rocks to Stone done. -10 stone we donā€™t need, we take the 1440 stone we do need over to the Refiner, Boundless needing a secondary machine for the conversion. We already know the numbers, 288 stone per 50 refine stone. So we need to Mass Craft 5 times to get the 250 Refine Stone we need. However, we once again have to wait. This time 25 minutes per Mass Craft, aka 5 times. 25 x 5 is 125 minutes, or 2 hours and 5 minutes. 10 minutes less than it took to get the rocks into stone. And after the wait, itā€™s finished.

Both games now have 256/250 of the exact same items. So how they compare? Do you really need to ask?

Minecraft needed half the ā€˜Rocks/Cobblestoneā€™ to make, (Can even skip the whole smelting step if they have a Silk touch pickaxe) Boundless needed nearly twice as much Rock, all of the same type and color. So unlike Minecraft where you can do whatever and passively collect Cobblestone to cook, Boundless you have to specifically go out of your way, to find the color you want, what planet itā€™s on, and mine twice of much needed of the specific type of rock, which depending on how dominate it or the other two types are, could take a while.

After getting the Rocks/Cobblestone, Minecraft just needs to wait 43 Minutes, then itā€™s done, over, and can go building.

Boundless however, has to wait 2 hours and 15 minutes for it all to craft, then bring it to another machine to refine it all, which takes another 2 hours and 5 minutes. 4 hours and 20 minutes, and much more rock collecting, for the exact same number of equal valued blocks.

So no Piraten, it isnā€™t less grinding. Even other blocks, take Glass for example, is even easier in Minecraft.

1 sand = 1 glass by smelting it. So to get 50, you just need 50 Sand and wait 500 seconds, which is 8 and a half minutes.

Where as in Boundless, itā€™s 100 sand, AND 100 silty Soil, and takes much more longer, tho I donā€™t know exactly as no one ever writes that info down, nor how much Coal it would take.

Either way, Minecraft is INFINITELY much simpler and less grindy compared to Boundless, in every single way.

Iā€™ll even challenge you, to find something that is in both Minecraft and Boundless, or equal value, like Stone Brick and Refine Stone, where when you compare the grinding and waiting and resources needed, that Minecraft has it worse than Boundless.

Spoilers, youā€™re not going to be able to.

I follow your point, but going to Minecraft might be a touch of an over-simplification. Isnā€™t the target audience for base minecraft like 8-15 year olds? A few of my friends have kids on the younger side of that bracket that play minecraft (in fact one wanted a minecraft themed birthday party when she turned 8, great kid), but Iā€™m pretty sure would be overwhelmed by this system, but this system seems to be targeting 18+ (due to intended complexity, not Oortianā€™s gone wild, though we donā€™t wear any clothesā€¦). Given that, some amount of higher complexity is fine. How much is too much is the real question, and the devs donā€™t seem to know the answer to that yet, either.

3 Likes

I donā€™t know the official stance on it, but I do know the Forums and such for the game state they are for 7+ years old.

This game, from the looks of it, is meant to basically be Minecraft Multiplayer with their own spin on it. They, and the older players, just took the title Sandbox ā€œMMOā€ too far, making the game very complicated and grindy, like an mmo"RPG" is grindy to level up.

The Devs are basically trying to take WoWā€™s grinding, and stuff it into Minecraft. To the people that like or donā€™t care about grinding, it doesnā€™t matter to them. Those here for the Sandbox, Minecraft like Freedom Elements tho, get punished for it.

Thereā€™s a reason why in another thread, I suggested the idea of going full RPG mode, and having Classes to do the different jobs, and taking away the freedom to switch or blend classes. Cause just doing that, would remove a lot of confusion and balance issues in the game.

2 Likes

Honestly I find the grind to be on par with minecraft, the only difference I see is crafting times, which Iā€™m fine with aswell.

3 Likes

The numberous Youtube videos Iā€™ve seen would suggest that. Or itā€™s a bunch of 30 year old guys speaking in high pitched voices to appease the younger viewers :wink:

Iā€™m the same way. I never come back home from a trip empty handed. Thiers always something Iā€™ll need where ever Iā€™m going!

1 Like

wish builders could get plots faster then miners :nerd_face:
for me its real hard since i spend lots off time helping and setting up things(social work) instead off grinding the other time i spend on building
so all this helping and organizing and building is slowing my leveling a lot
but the other side is that lots off people help me so i got the access to building blocks
my issue is slow leveling due to non exp game play if that make sense
did not vote cause i might be in a weird position to judge :nerd_face:

1 Like

Feeding builders blocks definitely appears to be part of the current design. Which on the one hand does accomplish the games goal of being group oriented. But other the other hand we still lose people because of it. I believe @Nyuudles as offered the same kind of deal but he declined.

1 Like

I honestly think the only way to fix this is to lower the grind like a tad 20% across the board and Iā€™ll be fine with that. I know this game is intended to make us all work for it, but its excessive. Itā€™s driven too many players away. Game wonā€™t grow if people cant make progress within 4 hours in a day, after coming home from work.

While some things in the machines take forever to refine or craft. Youā€™re sitting there doing nothing when all your stuff you farmed for 4 days is all being craftedā€¦ I hope they figure out some statistics on building/crafting grind.

The grind is fine for me, but due to the nature of my work - Iā€™m either unable to play entirely, or I have huge amounts of time to sit back and grind.

I canā€™t imagine the grinding being all that fun for people who can only commit an hour or two a night. It might seem as though their entire night was spent whacking rocks.

7 Likes

Thats the thing, some people out there have a daily routine/schedule on the work days of the week. They only come home for about 4-5 hours total of game-time before they have to get up for work the next day. Then the weekend is spent grinding all those materials you missed up on during the weekdays. I always look forward to every weekend, why? Because I hope to make at least even 5% progress on my builds. Just grinding takes more time than actual building.

1 Like

olmost the entire playerbase lol
some maybe during work :innocent:

1 Like

Still, minecraft had annoying useless zombiefleshā€¦

Nah, i can follow you with the useless steps in compressing and refining. I mass crafted some shopping stands. 6.5 hours is too long. But i started it at night so when i woke up it was ready.

So far i have been able to work around the waiting because on the plus side, to me, boundless has much more stuff to do.

Thats my answer on your final statement :blush:

Iā€™m conflicted by this poll. I feel like gleam lanterns and bricks are far too grindy. I canā€™t even make gleam lanterns anymore because I do not have the resistance to go find glowing lamellaā€¦ That completely stopped me from building my current shop and other two shops. I donā€™t have the item that I need for lighting, Iā€™m not going to sit here, build it and put tons of regular gleam up just to have to replace it when I finally am able to collect and craft gleam lanterns. It makes me sad. I donā€™t even mind that I have to get the extra item but I mind that I have to not only have to find where they are, but I now have to level up twice just to get the resistance to the atmosphere, then level up more to get more armor / resistance because of mobs, then collect a large amount of them, and craft them into lanterns. Theyā€™ve added four extra steps for me, technically five - having to slay very strong mobs while running around poking mushrooms. Itā€™s just ridiculous. I actually created a new character just for gathering items because my crafter (first character) has a horrible skill set that I didnā€™t want to waste all my points or a reset to redo. So, while my first character has the resistance and slight survivability, she does not have the damage to effectively kill the strong mobs AND deal with the extra hp / shield that the blocks on that planet have. Iā€™ve tried, it went horribly. My second character has the damage, but not the survivability.

Then there comes the bricks - the second part of my new project. Before the change I had (and still have) maybe about 10k stone I planned to make into bricks. I put it off because I needed compact clay and, at the time, I was still completing my first project which still heavily needed refined rock and stone. Those items were not a hard grind, just a lengthy one because I needed a large quantity of the trunks and rocks to make a small quantity of the refined stuff. Since the color of stone and wood that I needed were abundant in T1 planets, it wasnā€™t an issue. A few hours a day and I could build for a few hours after the refining process was complete. During the refining process Iā€™d go collect other materials or build with the stuff I had crafted while sleeping. It was literally endless. In comes the brick change conveniently the same night I had finished my first project. The servers go live and bamā€¦ two more items I have to collect in addition to the clay -> compact clay I had put off for the last 2-4 days. It didnā€™t matter that they were relatively easy to get. It was still two more items I needed to find and grind in order to make one item. Why are bricks so much more complicated to make than refined stone / wood? It was more an annoyance than anything else. I said screw it and decided it wasnā€™t worth my time to collect 288 more blocks and then mix and cook them. ā€œBut we increased the output by 2xā€ and?? I still have to put in 2x the effort to get those extra blocks so itā€™s no real compensation for the recipe change. Now if they had replaced clay w/ a different item, then fine, not gonna complain. But adding? No thanks. So now that 10k stone I had continues to sit in storage taking up space. To make things worse, I bothered to farm all the materials I needed after being salty at the recipe for a few days. The light blue stone that I had picked for my new project was surely going to be gorgeous. I had seen bricks before in other peopleā€™s projects and the darker grey igneous stone was amazing. Fast forward through the mixing and cooking process -> I take the brick from my furnace, place it on the ground and am instantly annoyed because the color is just meh and the little grainy specs of gray within the brick made it less beautiful than I had imagined. All my hard work was for naught. In the following screenshot you can see the brick I cooked next to a block of sand. The refined wood and stone that I used is also in the screenshot.

Now for ornate gleam doors. I donā€™t mind that they require power. The amount of power that they require is also fine I suppose. Seeing them everywhere w/ little effort would be unfortunate. However, that 3k power that they require is a major pain in the behind to get. 3k refinery power is either 10 advanced refinery power coils or 30 regular power coils. Both of those are rather high numbers if you ask me, especially for a door. Still determined to get them, I looked for ways other than buying to make my coils. 1.5k workbench power to make on top of some refined gems, machined gold alloy. and titanium furnace base. The items? I guess no problem, Iā€™ll suck it up and farm them. The powerā€¦? Again, 1.5k = 15 regular coils or 5 adv coils. Okay well what do I need for this adv workbench power coil? Surely thatā€™ll be more convenient making 5 of those versus 15 of the regular ones and theyā€™ll be more useful in the long run. Looks up recipe ā€¦1.5k power to make an adv workbench power coil. Great, now I have no other choice but to grind to make 15 workbench power coils, to make 10 adv refinery coils, just to make one.effing.door. And in all of that grind is more stuff I simply cannot obtain because, as I mentioned before, lack of resistances on the planets I need to go for some of it. I donā€™t want to buy everything, Iā€™d prefer to farm the majority of it because at the time, I had very little money to work with. Farming was and kinda still is, my only choice for such high craft, high value items. The adv power coil could at least have a power reduction as itā€™s the key to being able to craft the higher power coils and other stuff. 1k power would be fair for it I would say. So, in this case the materials for the door are not the issue. The materials to obtain the cores to get the power to craft the door, is the hard grind. Again, I donā€™t mind grinding within reason, but that surely is not within reason.

I feel like Iā€™m at a complete standstill. All I can do at this moment is farm plants maybe some silver and gold, maybe low level meteors to get the exp I need to level up to be able to skill into resistances to go to the higher places. Iā€™ve even put 5 points into the death penalty because meteors mobs can be brutal and -50% exp is a lot. Itā€™s a horrible grind and Iā€™ve been doing it for days now. At level 31 (main) and level 26 (alt) I donā€™t feel like Iā€™ve gotten anywhere in the last week. My level has gone up on my alt but I donā€™t feel any closer to obtaining the items I need to continue crafting my desired items on my main so that I may build again. I have friends that feel the same way, sadly.

I love that this game is beautiful and has so much more to offer than Minecraft but I do have to agree that the Minecraft grind was cake compared to this. A few hours grind in Minecraft would ensure I was building for days, not just a few hours. I donā€™t want it THAT easy but being able to see even a small amount of real progress each day would be nice.

2 Likes

Does Boundless? Really? What more does it offer? Minecraft has Alchemy, Enchanting to Forging.

Boundless has more kinds of materials to make tools out of, but the Materials donā€™t actually do anything but increase damage to be able to mine on higher worlds without needing the damage skills. Where Minecraft has 1 world and many biomes, Boundless has many worlds with their own biomes, and on Minecraft because there is only 1 world, every block is the exact same time/hits to destroy, no matter where you are in the game.

But in Boundless, cause it has different worlds at different levels, the high level worlds take more hits, and world 4+ get shields where if you donā€™t do enough damage, you canā€™t even destroy the blocks. Whats more, going back to the Materials donā€™t matter, with enough damage and forge mods, you can get a wooden hammer to mine the best resources in Boundless.

Where as in Minecraft, there is actual progression. You need Iron to mine Diamond, you need Stone to mine Iron, and Wood to mine Stone. And as I said with every blocking taking the same hits no matter where, the progressively better materials also break blocks faster, and last many times longer too. Where as on Boundless, itā€™s many different settings, and not a flat ā€˜Gold is just better than Ironā€™. Gold swings faster, but breaks faster and does less damage. It isnā€™t better.

There are not a lot of things that Boundless does that Minecraft itself doesnā€™t do. It even has portals to other worlds/diminsions, only in Minecraft they stay forever and donā€™t cost anything to keep open (Another Grind and kick in the shins for Boundless.)

And Boundless has no feet to stand on, if you take in free mods. Calls all I have to say is ā€œFeed The Beastā€ and there is no arguement you can make about Boundless being better, cause Feed the Beast does everything Boundless does, even more better, and even THAT isnā€™t as grindy as Boundless.

Thatā€™s why i said to me.

In minecraft vanilla i was done fairly quickly. Going to feed the beast changed the whole game in a very good way. But still, buggy ass hell because there was always a mod that slowed the game down or that had issues.

Im just a boundless fan because i like the way multiplayer is set up. I have neighbours right now. One of them helped me and i helped him. That is something i never had in minecraft. I like the levelling rpg style. I like the fact that i have a builder, a gatherer/hunter and a tank. Those things have added value for me.

I think i put in 1000+ hours in minecraft/feed the beast. And i think that boundless does a better job for me. I like the idea that the developers can add new machinery, energy sources, add farming, quests and combat in this big universe. Those are cool things that appeal to me.

im am now at a lvl with my miner where farming stuff with a normal iron hammer on turbulent worlds became really really quick.

Also pls people dont be impatient that much. More stuff will be released

@Jirodyne u only know grind because your skill build isnt focus enough or u dont have enough characters to diversify and play what u want. Both is easily solved

I felt wood cutting to grindy. Made a lumberjack character and now i use wood and sap everywhere just to get rid of it. going for bark farm now

That is the issue with the game, not me. Either way, thatā€™s getting a little too off topic. This is meant for building after all, and mainly the grind for that, not the grind in general.

just refined several smart stacks of stones and wood ā€¦ u wanna buy?