This just reinforces my point. Those gums aren’t cheap or easy to craft. And what I’m crafting is something that I can use as a decently effect tool for mining. I don’t think I’m asking alot for the whole process to be less of a resources sink and more reliable. Frankly, I’d rather have big recipes that are reliable than moderately expensive ones that are hard to control.
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I agree, but I’m thinkin’ the added complexity was intentional to’try and create a supply/demand market.
Still, I’d much rather the game be far more linear.
Yeah i think the forge need to be more linear than some RNG, i’d prefer to gather a bunch of things then add the buff i want. so it’s more reliable. Now you have to cross fingers to get what you want.
This is what i liked about bomb mining, you would make the bomb and you had the same efficiency all the time. The range you get from forging is OP i am not gonna debate on this. To me the 3m range from titanium bombs was plenty.
Bomb mining and hammer was going as a pair so i don’t get why is some person saying the hammer was useless. And we still need hammer to get blocks so i can craft stone, refined,bricks etc… Plus i had to craft fairly same amount of hammers and bombs.
If this is going to stay like this, it is going to need some seriously balancing about energy and how do you refill the max energy. Because with the current state, when you mine with gems tool the max energy drop down so fast is incredible. I have to eat 15 prime steak every 5-7 min.This not fun and really annoying. Plus, when you have gems tool, using well feed buff isn’t an option you have to go for the persisting buff or else the tool breaks too fast.
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This is a bug with max energy drain I think, I seem to recall James was aware and posted it was a bug that’d be fixed.
I think the bug you are thinking is the one that the energy regen. do not kick start if you hold the mouse button. because the issue i am describing was pre-release and have been already stated and they did nothing about it yet
Nope I meant the same bug as you. I posted in a thread someone else did about it going down too fast and it was said that if it is doing a % reduction instead of flat value against those with high max energy (Epic Energy / high zeal) then it is a bug and will be fixed.
I got the same on my miner/gatherer - eating cooked meat every few mins to top off energy because even e.g. sprinting drains it very fast. I’ll see if I can find the thread.
What is the need to reduce the effectiveness of the bombs? less AoE half the resources? O_O … if you want to balance the methods of mining … easy, improve the hammers
Yeah i know the thread you are talking about, they think sprinting is using a % of max energy reduction instead of a flat numbers. but when i have mining it’s using a flat number from the cost of energy of the toll for swinging it. It’s just to high on gem tools. i can’t sprint while i am mining.
Ohhh I see. I figured given how fast the max goes down the max energy drain % was applying to any energy draining activity incl. hammers but perhaps not then!
Edit: It’d be nice if Tool Mastery gave a reduction in energy/max energy drained because it’s soon as you start doing things faster that it really becomes a problem. (So does the laughably bad base 100/tick energy regen.)
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As long as you can afford to forge them Hammers are just fine. Base hammers could do with a bump (pref. speed or block armour tuning, not base dmg) but once you can forge they are plenty good enough on a miner specced character.
In the case of forging, complexity is not as much the issue as reliability and control. Maybe they should add another stat that allows you to more precisely control the effects with a menu in the centraforge that allows you to select the prefered effect boon points go into and/or boon preferred. Maybe use the control stat as a base for that.
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I would also suck up higher ingredient costs to assure a reasonable level outcome - say a max L7 boon item where you have to use particular compounds for boon points.
Some people get off on skipping grinds… like how they know it’s an exploit: they’re getting ‘aroused’ by the fact they’re doing something that’s partly unacceptable but still possible at - this very moment. Problem is they don’t know they’ve had quite an advantage for a long time over others. And so right now they actually still do.
Currently, hammers and bombs have a roughly 1:20 ratio in terms of blocks revealed per block-breaking cycle, even with their respective aoe centraforging. Difference being that bombs become increasingly destructive volume-wise and hammers tend to become faster.
Thus hammers become strictly superior for mining if the player can break 20 blocks in the time it takes for somebody to set us up the bomb.
This is just my oversimplified understanding of course. of course the devs know better than me 
But it does feel that the bomb identity has always been muddy. Messy AoE boom tool? It was great for mining, and meh at all other things, but that was fine since people were happy with the mining bit. But now? It’s not great for mining. It’s not great for landscaping. It’s niche at best in combat.
I believe the AoE bomb boon has really, really limited use cases. There are not very many situations when destroying a 1400 block sphere is going to be particularly useful. On the other hand, there are certainly many cases when destroying a nice clean 9x9x9 cube would be super useful.
I have a few thoughts to bounce around, which are:
- Replace Bigger Boom boon with Cubic Boom boon. (3m radius bomb clears a 7x7x7, no more 7m radius bombs)
- Have bombs return a small % of the blocks they broke at random.
- Have the energy saver, cleanser, and healing boons bring increased durability by default, and slightly reduce mob resist chance to bomb damage.
These things should help to define the bomb’s roles a little better. Bringing a % blocks returned while removing the aoe boom (capping at 4m radius with gem bombs) should make it a more viable mining tool as the “quick and messy” alternative to the precision of hammers, while also curbing the ridiculous cavernous bomb tunnels that have and still do cut through the mining hotspots.
Having the cubic boon will give it a place in building and land-clearing, as bombs are quite valuable for mass-block breaking but are currently unattractive due to their blast shape.
Finally, the combat-based buff boons are super cool, but their value vs cost just isn’t right at the moment (imo) to want to use. The bomb damage and aoe is nice, but because they are slow, energy-hungry, and single-hit, the way mobs can negate their damage entirely is far more devastating than with fists or bows.
These are just my brainstorming thoughts right now. A big part of the outcry is that bombs went from hero to zero, and while I had no problem with nerfing bomb mining, I do think that it could still use some love. 
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I don’t even call its a grind now.
Its time wasting.
I will suggest most people to build / hunt first until the alpha beta end.
You most definelty upped the grind, and damn well meant to. The recipes tell us your intent clearly. You doubled and tripled the mat requirements on many recipes. You could have made recipes more complex but reduced the amounts to offset the complexity, but you didn’t. You just added the the additional requirements in and multiplied the input mats. Congrats you made the game even less fun to play. Players are understandably leaving because of it.
Every time to up the grind you drive away more builders and attract stat whores, and at the very core of what mmo is it all still revolvers around being a voxel building game. Drive away the builders and there won’t be nice stuff to look at.
The idea was put forward to use crappy materials instead in voice last night. Which lead to the coining of the phrase. “Boundless build what you can not what you want.”
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To continue off of @Karko 's point , how do I build THIS?
I’m talking about plot requirements… and the number of blocks needed just to make these blocks… and the Spark… and the tools I use along the way… and the food I’ll most certainly have to eat…
How many man-hours is something on this scale SUPPOSED to be? Because I feel like it’s completely out of reach unless I devote the next year of my life to mining coal, and… I’m not ready to do that.
And this is what most people settle for:
You guys have taken what is and should be an extraordinary building system, and basically kneecapped it by making it impossible for all but THE most dedicated players to build anything truly special within the span of one lifetime.
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While this is a valid point, to some extent, what do you think would be a reasonable timeframe for a single person working alone and acquiring and crafting all the materials by themselves, to build the city in your picture?
Two hours? A day? A month?
Edit: Moreover, do you really expect the majority of players to even want to build something of that scale by themselves?
I’m asking non-sarcastically. It’s hard to tell tone on the internet. 
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Probably a couple months of play time, if I had materials coming in (at least with relative ease). Once you get used to the idiosyncrasies of placing and chiseling blocks, the act of building is actually pretty smooth. Everyone used to ask about my old build on Epsilo and think that it must’ve taken forever to build, but my answer was usually, “3 hours of gathering, 1 hour of building.”
… It’s that other part that kills it. If I got one block of building material for every block I acquired out of the game world, it might add another month to this. As it stands, though, that’s nowhere near how the math works out in the end.
You may scoff at these numbers; other people may scoff at these numbers… But I know what I’ve seen.
To your point about what people actually want to build, as opposed to what they wind up building… I don’t think we’ll ever see that now, because there are so many constraints that none of us will ever have the freedom to just go anywhere our minds take us. What I CAN tell you is, if you were around back when I arrived in 2015, and people still had UNLIMITED blocks… even the most mediocre builds looked truly epic by today’s standards. That’s the only insight I can offer into other people’s intentions - I know that when they did have more freedom, they behaved quite differently from how they do now.
Edit: Another question comes to mind, from what you said:
Even if those players were in the minority… why would we necessarily want to stop them?
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Well, I believe you, people had the same reaction about my first proper build. I’ve had the game for a while, but I only really started playing a couple months before the wipe, not counting several attempts where I gave up in frustration because of network issues, until they smoothed out some of the issues for less-than-ideal internet plans.
The build I’m talking about, my little house on Elopor just prior to the wipe, took about 4 or 5 days, mostly spent gathering clay for bricks.
I don’t think it would be THAT much worse now. Maybe another day added, tops. Of course, plots felt a bit easier to get back then, so that might slow things down a bit further, but other than that… I legitimately don’t think it’s all that bad.
Now, that’s a medium sized build at best (400 plots or so), and your first picture was more of a megaproject. I honestly think that the developers envision that sort of thing as being more of a community effort than something that anyone can achieve easily by themselves. If everyone could build their own cities, all cities would feel empty.
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