Hi, fairly new player here wanting to give a little input on tools.
I’ve just reached a stage where I can craft gold level tools and wow what an involved, time consuming and resource intensive process it is! Now, I don’t mind this at all, however I feel this opens up a possibility to balance the aim of having a game where a community relies on skilled members to help each other progress but also allows a player to experience all the paths a game has to offer (e.g. I like mining but I also like to break that up with a bit of combat / exploring and returning to a place to call my own).
Currently, to make copper/iron tools you need 2 ingots of material + other items.
To make gold tools you need 10 gold + 20 copper + other items, the ability to mix, compact and refine all to get one tool at the end.
This seems excessive given other people’s reports of little improvement with regards tool impact/durability. However, it does offer an opportunity.
Why not allow novice tool-makers to forge tools out of gold ingots, or alloy ingots (this would mean being able to use the mixer) but the tools are not as durable as the compacted/refined versions? So you could use a novice gold hammer, but you would burn through the hammer quickly as compared to an adept gold hammer made with the compacting, which in turn would be less durable than the master gold hammer made with compacting and then refining. The trade off here would be your gold ore would go much further with a master level hammer as opposed to the novice level, however you still have the option of mining items that require gold.
This keeps things open for casual or experimenting players but creates a need for those highly specialised craftsmen which in turn gives a pay-off for those specialised people - after all would you rather pay top dollar to the master craftsman for a long lasting tool, or pay a cheaper rate which uses more ore? I think this would help from a community point of view as a group could boast having the master craftsmen. You could even go down a route of having to acquire skills for each category of tool, so you have weaponsmiths, armoursmiths (assuming armour makes an appearance) and toolsmiths, maybe even specialisms within those categories - but crucially it doesn’t eliminate the ability for a small group to manage, albeit less efficiently than a large city.