I have noticed that as I have leveled other crafting professions alongside my friends that the need for materials grows increasingly higher as you craft higher tier items. While the evolution of moving from iron to steel to other products makes sense, it creates far too much of a grind for players in my opinion. I either have to focus on performing quests, or spending hours gathering resources to hopefully get a single one of my professions to the next tier. I feel like this should be balanced out in some way.
Also, higher tier materials shouldn’t require so many low level materials to make. I shouldn’t need to mine 1000s if not tens of 1000s of iron ore to be able to make a large amount of Starmetal ingots. If there needs to be some kind of balance, make it require more Starmetal ore to create an ingot, flux and maybe a certain amount of raw iron ore to make it. Increase the amount of stuff necessary to make it if it needs to be harder. I should be able to craft higher tier items without having to spend my time grabbing tier 1 and tier 2 materials.
I think wood is a great example here, why do I need two types of wood and sandpaper to make another kind. We could make the amount of aged wood higher, like 8 or 12 and maybe 2 sandpaper to make timber. Make it so there isn’t such a huge need to have piles and piles of resources taking up space just because we need it to craft up.
I still haven’t quite figured out the methodology behind the crafting design, but if you can only play casually or a day or two a week, you really can only focus on crafting or leveling and if you have friends that play, they end up leaving you behind in more than just levels and content.
Edit: The basic point I’m trying to get across is make every tier of metal type require a certain amount of items to create. With metal, Iron to steel makes sense for those tiers, but make the other tiers really only require the higher tier metals in higher amounts along with the items. Like Starmetal, since it only exists in Aeternum and the refinement process is still in its infancy, it takes 20-25 ore and 4 flux to make an ingot, or something of that type. I don’t understand why we are mixing steel or iron in with it. Just like silver to make gold. Gold shouldn’t need it.
The whole crafting system is bullshit… like why the hell do I need silver to make gold? Anyone did gold from silver other than counterfeits? It simply should only be “star metal ore” to “star metal ingots” (maybe some powder like flux etc) not some bullshit iron ore… then you are PVP ON and stupid LVL 60 farming 1-25 zone and killing you while you are lvl 18…
but the same is for hides and also for hemp… how can i use modified hide to make another hide? like glue it up or what?
This absolutely fucks economy, coz only ore, that will have price will always be Iron… On my server iron ore cost 0,5 coin per piece and star metal cost 0,03 coin per piece… did someone even think about how it will work? Why did no one tell them in alfa/beta? - coz they only allowed nerds who have the all-time of the world to hit veins and log trees all day long.
This crafting system made basically 70% of everything worthless and starting locations will be super competitive, coz there is a lot of iron… just stupid
Would love to see some commentary by the team who made this bullshit. Rather have 0-300 then 0-200 needing like 300.000 iron ingots to make it lvl 200. Who Am I? someone who can spend 16 hours hitting veins?
literally my professions other than “gathering” ones and cooking are below 20… i rather sell it…
I’d be interested to know what their thoughts were behind the crafting system. I believe they expected there would be people who would be selling resources for coin and people trading for things they need, but because of the economy the way it is, that really isn’t happening.
I think with time, they will adjust as they get the major bugs out of the way. I think having some kind of way to understand the thought process/logic for some items would help, but there should also be a point where older materials just aren’t required anymore.
As someone who has made it to some of the higher level areas, there are good iron farming locations in some of the higher level areas, especially some with a bigger amount of large ore veins, but still not enough to make up for the amount it takes to craft those higher tier items.
Getting Starmetal ore and the higher tier ores can be challenge all on its own. The veins are in difficult locations and are usually tapped out by one person or another. Iron may be plentiful, but when it takes 1000s or more iron ingots to make steel to make starmetal, it is so much more than the higher level materials.
It is too much of a grind as it is unless you want to dedicate a majority of your time to crafting.
i am with you there, using the base materials isnt the problem, its actually part of the solution.
example from a different game was ffxiv, which did exactly that: ignoring lower level materials and only focus on the new ones. which locked out the lower level players from the possible money of higher level (ans most likely richer) players.
They noticed that and i believe with stormblood they brought back the old mats, which made them very valuable and gave people a path for income.
Tho i do not agree with the amount thats needed.
Because this leads to lvl 60 players camping the starter zone nodes.
its not viable to have to buy 6000 iron ingots from the trading post to craft ONE lvl 60 item, which then also might be absolute garbage and unsellable, so of course the high lvls get out and farm the mats themselves, to minimize losses. cant fault them
If it was a minimal amount needed the higher level players wouldnt feel the need to bother going out and gather like 100 iron themselves. they would buy that.
The way it is now was a nice try, but it is wayyyy over the top
Now that makes sense. I can see where that would work. Still, I think having steel be a requirement for Starmetal is a bit much. Having iron be a part of it would be fine, but steel just makes it a drain on flux, in my opinion.
I do agree to some degree that keeping lower level materials helps give new players a path to money, but I believe there could be a better way to strike a balance besides just tuning down requirements.
The other thing that hasn’t really come up is the rare materials. It is far too difficult to get those unless you have a house with all of the high tier trophies, a bunch of gear with luck including your gathering tool, and a bunch of potions that increase your luck. Even then, it is really low chance that you will find it. That could use an adjustment and also help with balancing out material usage.
They could easily half the required “older” tier material requirements and it would still be kinda boring.
Right now the easiest way to level crafting is to just gather 5.84 million Fiber/Iron Ore/Green wood/Air/Earth/Water motes and stone (Combined of course dont wanna list them individually). That is what it requires to do it the most optimal ways and you will spend no refining materials at all.
I dont think that was the intention when they created this system but its a fact. And we can talk about how while leveling crafting is almost entirely useless with the exception of arcana/cooking but thats a talk for a different day.
Having to have basic ingredients alongside upper tier ingredients to craft items is a good thing for crafting, one of the things they got right imo. The issue isn’t the grind, its what you can do with the raw and refined goods in the economy.
What you’re experiencing is value depletion , you do not feel your labor constitutes the effort, not because it takes Iron + Starmetal, but because the final good or refined product is worthless to you in the end, and better items could be farmed in the wild to repleace whatever you’d need to do with crafting.
If you could turn around and sell a Star Metal pick for 700c you’d be alright with the grind etc etc, but atm you can sell one for 150-200c and it’s much easier and quicker to subvert effort in crafting and do a few boards, in 1/3 of the time and purchase the item.
I appreciate everyone who has made a post. I didn’t think about the economic side of things. If there were more to be made from crafting high tier stuff for something other than yourself, then I agree that the grind would make sense. Plus it would create a way for people to feed into the market, purchase those grindy mats from lower level players while also having a supply of goods for low tier players on the market.
It sounds like to me the first fix would be to find a way to add value and improve the economy before changing anything about crafting.
the teirs just represent the rairity of the item in the world, not its utility. The game is not actually designed to have higher level players only in high level zones. the vast majority of the server will eventually be high level, and they expect this people to be running faction missions, gathering, trading, crafting in all areas.
also, if you use refining bonus items, you can essentially lower how much low end resources you use,
for example, people say one orichalcum is contains 48 iron ore, but if you use good refinement components, you’ll actually end up using on average 13 iron ore for 1 orichalcum ingot. which is a 13:7 ratio
if one could actually get there hands on the refining gear, that adds 6-10%
which cuts it down to 10:6. or 9:6 (for a 5 piece set)
common doesnt mean useless/garbage when it comes to making things. People just like the idea of high teir items being super valuable, but in the long run the game is better if most nodes are valuable.
also note iron, starmetal, orichalcum ore, are all the bottom teir items from these nodes. None of them are meant to be super valuable. Note that starmetal can drop brilliant gems, and azurite, and orichalcum is mostly going to be farmed for the tolvium and cinnabar, and perfect gems.
these are all just basic items needed for basic weak crafting.
But there is no supply/demant on 80% of stuff you can sell. Basically iron is the most expensive because you even need it for CLOTH items WTF?
Likei wrote… IRON is 0,5 coin per piece, but starmetal is like 0,07 coin per piece… is this what “good economics” look like? that you destroy the experience for low lvl players, coz 60 will farm Everafall and kill every lvl 15 that has PVP ON on the way… this doesn’t seem like the ideal to me.
Better have 8-12 ore to make one STARMETAL ingo, then needing IRON ingots to make it… I totally understand IRON → STEEL, but that’s where my understanding for the crafting system ends.
even if they changed it, the amount of effort required to make a starmetal ingot is intentional, so it would be something like 30-40 starmetal ore to make a starmetal ingot.
also in actual metallurgy, requiring multiple metals to make a different alloy is common. Almost all the strong “metals” are a combination of metals. iron itself has a number of alloys
basically if your problem is with the amount of resource or effort required to craft, thats different than what is required