Stone Crafting XP
Honestly, I support the change. Here is what I posted some time last year and I still stand by it:
People in here were arguing over whether or not it is an exploit, or even the definition of “exploit”. From a developer’s perspective I would definitely consider it an exploit.
I don’t think you could argue that the developers intended for players to maximize the duration of teaching pies by logging out and only logging in to press the same button a couple of hundreds or thousands of times and for them to get hundreds of thousands of XP that way. Inaction or tolerance so far should not be confused with acceptance or intent.
I think at the very least we could settle on “exploity”.
Others also bring up the concern of people wanting to use their time efficiently since they have a limited amount of time to play, jobs, families to support, etc. So I have to ask, specifically if that is the case, why would you want to spend a large amount of time just mining rocks and pressing workbench buttons? I get that plots are precious, but personally I’d rather do things in the game that are fun to do to earn XP, or to support the devs.
I might be a minority in this, but I deliberately didn’t eat any rock pies on my main character for that very reason, because I wanted to actually enjoy leveling up while playing the game instead of just getting there as fast as possible. And yeah, my crafter and hunter both overtook him a long time ago, but I have no regrets regardless.
Anyway, all that said, I’m not saying this change is perfect, but it is a step in the right direction in my opinion. How much people have been relying on it and don’t want to see it changed simply highlights the imbalance of XP gain distribution across the different activities to begin with.
My main suggestion is to remedy that imbalance, ideally along with the stone crafting XP removal or reduction. Hunting was already buffed to oblivion in my opinion and I imagine might even become one of the next big powerlevel strategies if this change goes through. What I would like to see:
- More (much more!) XP for uncovering regions, especially on high tier planets
- More XP for gathering
- More XP for building
- More XP for objectives and feats (especially mid- to late game)
Forging Changes
Devs in the thread already pointed out that the change to gem item efficiency is not intended, and I am actually glad to see that the new tier of items were changed to all have the same flexibility. Forging difficulty aside for now, this brings me to another thing I would like to see changed while we are at it: why do all the different gem items have different flexibility values to begin with?
- It can be bypassed anyway by putting one emerald or diamond version in the first slot of the smart stack before forging.
- It doesn’t really make any sense to me that especially amethyst and topaz should suffer from lower flexibility when they are already underdogs due to their base damage. Because the game works with flat damage reduction from armor (for both blocks and creatures), higher damage will generally always be more valuable than higher action speed. Especially because for slingbows that also means burning through augments less efficiently.
Prestige Changes
Looking really interesting so far, for anyone interested I made a spreadsheet which shows the changes to all the blocks’ base prestige values. Here are some highlights:
| Block | Old | New |
|---|---|---|
| Decorative Gems | 140 | 22 |
| Machined Titanium Alloy | 80 | 24 |
| Machined Iron | 60 | 19 |
| Deco Marble/Gravel/Wicker/Mosaic | 50 | 19 |
| Dark Glass | 12 | 13 |
| Ornate Gleam Door | 12 | 20 |
| Decorative Wood/Stone | 12 | 12 |
| Brick | 10 | 9 |
| Refined Gleam | 10 | 5 |
| Gleam | 6 | 3 |
From what I tested in game so far, the bonuses can be several times higher to compensate for the new low base values. Along with the, I guess you could call it “normalization” of the blocks, it will definitely be interesting to see the impact to player behavior on prod.
I do think there could maybe be a few more tweaks, for instance the new decorative blocks are still only on par with machined iron, despite being way more effort if you ask me.
When it comes to the bonuses, I really wish there was a way to see a breakdown, or at least some more information. I do hope that showing at least some more information in game (not the debug menu) is planned for the future.
I tested a few plot configurations in an empty 8x8x8 space. Beacon Control adds 5 base prestige and Refined Gold Alloy adds 20. So, with only one of each placed it appears that it was applying a whopping 500% bonus?
Total prestige:
- Just Beacon Control: 10
- Beacon Control and 1 Refined Gold Alloy: 150
- Beacon Control and 2 Refined Gold Alloy: 291
- Beacon Control and 3 Refined Gold Alloy: 432
- Beacon Control and 4 Refined Gold Alloy: 573
What seemed odd is that chiseling any of the alloy blocks didn’t change total prestige at all, but I didn’t do any further testing yet.
Exo Worlds
Huh? Oh yeah, that is also a thing, almost forgot. 
Not much I can comment on that yet, but I do think it’s fascinating how much impact small changes can have, even propelling them to the forefront of the debate.
Developers: “New types of worlds, new items, new blocks, new end game content!”
Community: “Yeah, but that one small change to a single value, though…”
Tl;dr:
- Stone XP to 0 is fine imo, but would be better bundled with XP buffs to other activities
- Please consider giving all gem items consistent flexibility like with the new items
- Prestige changes look interesting and will hopefully switch things up!