“Rebalanced tool damage to make progression feel more pacy, and mining feel less grindy.”
um… what part of this is “less grindy”?
it now takes me 3 hits on starter world stone blocks when before it took 2 with the skills i have atm…less grind? no. Was this the intent of the “re-balance” where is the “less grindy” part?
I’m not a lvl 50 with maxed out skills, i can say this is the most grindy building game i’ve ever seen.
if youre just now visiting this thread here is the tldr:
gaining enough experience to earn the skill points required to specialize in meaningful areas of the skill trees takes too long and costs too much (i.e. we need either faster xp and more skill points, or less cost to unlock skills)
block toughness per type needs to be streamlined across worlds and tool durability increased
farming blocks on more difficult planets needs incentives beyond just new colors
now for my personal thoughts. i wanted to be able to play as a solo player who isnt forced in some way to be reliant upon the skills of others, either by hiring them or buying from them or w/e. the devs seemed to want to really stick with forcing us to specialize because its a multiplayer game and they want some aspect of the game to facilitate the multiplayer interaction ( i guess so not everyone ends up playing solo )
well…
why not both? meaning: what if the skill tree worked a bit differently than it does now.
as for now, you can place skills wherever you want with no regard to any form of specialization. this i think, is a detriment to the game since not specializing can cause you to hit a dead end of sorts where the cost to earn skill points is greater than the investment and time youre willing to allocate to achieving these goals. meaning, you spread your points out across too many avenues and now youre in a position where you need one or two more skills to really get stuff moving but the cost of earning the next couple of skill points is too much (80k+ xp) for your level of dedication and the skills themselves cost so much (10 points+) that the effort required is simply beyond what you are motivated to pursue. this can create an issue with the players motivation to keep trudging through the game breaking blocks after blocks for hours on end. tbf it seems that players would be more motivated to set up some macro to farm blocks while they afk than to actually sit around and do it themselves with how grind heavy the skills acquisition becomes at the rate it escalates.
anyhow, what if instead of allowing us free reign on what skills we choose to equip with our skill points, the game simply offers ‘avenues of specialty’ that constrict us into certain paths, while allowing us the freedom to specialize in subsequent specialties once the first path is finished. here is how it could work. for the sake of explanation lets say there are only three sets of specialty. building mining and crafting. you pick one and the other two become locked. so you pick building and mining and crafting become locked to you. you earn all the skills in building then mining and crafting open up. you pick mining and crafting becomes locked till you finish with mining. the way i would make this work so that there is some form of progression gating without burning out the players too quickly is this:
i would have skill points be awarded at a set interval. no more skill points being tied to leveling up at ever increasing rates. basically every xyz amount of XP you would earn a skill point. once you finish a specialization, your next specialization skills cost MORE than the first. and eventually, your last costs MORE than the second.
example: (this is just an example, dont focus on the numbers, im not a dev and have no idea what numeric values would be most appropriate) every 5k xp the player earns a skill point.
mining is your first skill. there are five skills in mining. each skill costs 5pts more than the last.
skill 1 is 5 skill points, skill 2 is 10 skill points, skill 3 is 15 skill points, skill 4 is 20 skill points, skill 5 is 25 skill points.
building is your second skill. there are five skills in building. each skill costs 10 pts more than the last but being your second skill the initial skill cost 2x what the first skill set did.
so skill 1 costs 10 points, skill 2 costs 20, skill 3 costs 30, skill 4 costs 40, skill 5 costs 50.
crafting is your third skill. there are five skills in crafting. each skill costs 15 pts more than the last but being your initial third skill costs 3x what the first skill set did.
so skill 1 costs 15, skill 2 costs 30, skill 3 costs 45, skill 4 costs 60, skill 5 costs 75.
in this way we could obtain skill points in a steady manner while still having some progression gating as we become more experienced. this would allow the players to also rank up the skills that arent locked into their specialties along the way without having to suffer too greatly at the hand of ever increasing xp requirements to level up and earn skill points. so eventually, you can specialize in a wide array of skill sets but to start youre going to be more focused on sets of skills without the freedom to make the mistake of spreading your skill points too thinly to really make a difference in any one area. this would also allow you to earn the skills that really improve the characters you have that are outside of the ‘specializations’ such as the radiant light from your character, double jumping, health and damage, etc etc etc.
sorry for such a long read. maybe what ill do eventually is actually base a real well thought out example of this concept using the actual skill tree we have in game with the values that are set already.
I particularly don’t like that role approach you just took towards the skill system. Because there’s no real one way to be a miner, builder or crafter.
It also takes a lot away from the sandbox experience.
With the current system I could deem more important to first Max out mass crafting to gain experience faster instead of going for dexterity, power and tool mastery, or instead rush ahead the fighters way. Only to come back and do crafting as I then noticed I wanted.
It certainly opens up for mistakes, but with the in-game wiki coming down the line it will be far more difficult to get into something you don’t want to. Plus it lets generalists be that while keeping specialists in the mix.
You could implement some way for people who do want to specialise to level up more easily without needing to do multiple things. Have some kind of shrine that you can activate to give you bonus experience or an experience multiplier in a certain area (mining, crafting, hunting, trading, building).
Not sure how to decide the size of the multiplier (character level, distance to shrine, start high and decrease over time). Also need to decide whether shrines could be found in the wild, built by groups of people, craftable on a smaller scale by individuals.
To stop people from switching up too often, make it so you can only activate one shrine at a time and only one per week.
Something like that could let people specialise when they want to but also not be stuck with it for the rest of their game. 
if it locks you into a profession’s list of skills then you cant be a generalist any other way than having the full skillsets. and since the acquisition of the skillsets becomes harder each new set you go for you wouldn’t simply just have everything right away, but it would allow players to eventually with enough time and effort obtain the skills for the professions. so end game long term players would essentially be self sufficient and be able to contribute in all areas to their guilds versus only being able to do that via different character options.
if they were to associate specific attributes to the skillsets too that would be fine, such as miners get dexterity, crafters get intelligence or w/e, and builders get power. the previous statement is just a very generalized example.
id still need to really go over the skills in game to form a more cohesive idea of this very bare bones concept
That’s the thing you’re forgetting. Boundless is meant for specialists and generalist, not a be good in everything. Your proposed system only works for specialists, not both.
It generates a dependency towards the “perfect” skill build for a certain profession, vastly limiting the sand box experience.
Specialisation needs to be rewarding for all types of specialists. If I want to craft, the XP should be as rewarding as killing monsters, otherwise the game suggests it wants me to be a hunter rather than a crafter. The more resources an item needs for production = higher XP, a bit like hunting a harder monster gets more XP, or mining a gem gets more XP than mining a starter planet rock.
The problem at the moment is as a crafter, how do I get the resources to make things in order to level up, and how do I unlock the skills necessary to make items when I have to level up first?
If I can’t get the resources myself, I need money to hire people, or buy the resources outright. I don’t have money until I can sell goods, which means getting them myself and oops, I’m no longer a crafter, I’m an evil generalist!
If I have to make stones out of rock until I level up in order to unlock the massive amount of machinery needed to make bricks, the world will be awash with shops selling stones (assuming those crafters can get a shop stand from somewhere!).
Maybe two types of skills are available - attribute points and skill points. One is fixed with limited unlocks, the other you can jiggle around as much as you like, so as a newbie I can up my strength and vitality enough to make a start on the skill tree of my choice and be effective enough to mine and hunt on starter worlds, but not on moons/rings as I haven’t invested skills. Once I’m up and running as a crafter I can respec my attribute points into intelligence and luck - quicker production and the chance to create more than one of an item per run.
This way you can generalise on the starter worlds, which I think is necessary as not everyone will enter the game knowing what they want to do by max level. Some will like to try a bit of everything before deciding on a career - to me, the starter worlds should do this job. Maybe the two paths of attributes and skills will allow for this?
Specialization… i’d like to stop everyone right there…
Its a building game not an MMO the dev’s might want it to be an MMO… but its not… in 100 hours of game play i’ve seen a max of 6 players and with the XP and leveling system like this there is no way new players are going to stick around to make it an MMO…
Dude i keep telling them this…i keep saying an Open World, Sandbox Building game cannot work as a Full MMO…it can have MMO quailities but it aint gonna last if they try to mash the two together wrong
no u too take the 'sandbox experience" by making it so that we are either mediocre at everything or bad at a lot of stuff and great at one or two things…that isn’t a sandbox IT’S FORCING our hand cause it causes us to choose for the sake we must instead of being given the choice of going OH hey i feel like going killing or something let’s go do that! instead u want this scenario…
.“yo i maxed out my Fighting skills but now every other part of the game is not that great because everything else about the game is stupidly slow…even though I MYSELF want to really mine i am now forced to ask someone else who may or may not help cause they are busy as well grinding and getting resources themselves or i’ll have to waste cash that could have gone to tools and just end up buying the blocks that will cost me atleast 300c for a decent amount maybe more if i have to keep coming back”