delray
Greenhorn
I hear there's a new patch coming soon. Here are a few thoughts on things that I think could use a balancing pass in terms of gameplay and income.
- Desert Trader. He allows to buy too many complicated items way too easily and cheaply since you can just replicate endless amounts of gems in Crystalariums (and gems in general are very easy to farm even without those). You basically are freed from interacting with multiple game systems (like cooking), thanks to this shortcut. It's just too much. Infinite amounts of stock in this store should be done away with. Just think about it, endless spicy eel, endless staircases, endless bombs, cheese, coffee. Too good to be true.
- Pigs. Just too much income. Every time someone asks how to get rich quickly, someone else writes pigs, pigs, pigs. Especially combined with Botanist and Artisan, they just bring way too much dough. They make other animals look completely unattractive and make them function as decor instead. They should be toned down to the level of other animal produce. Make them make 25% more than sheep make and it'll still be plenty.
- Cooking. Such wasted potential here, an entire module with dozens of cooking recipes that you almost never have to interact with. Why aren't ready meals more profitable than the sum of their ingredients? Prices for every recipe should be audited and boosted depending on how rare and how hard to get the ingredients are. Straight up things like fried egg where you turn a single thing into another thing shouldn't offer any extra income. But complicated things that'd require getting ingredients from multiple different sources, fishing, foraging, animals, farming, especially in different seasons, they should make you big bucks. This way we could have entire farms specialized in producing specific foodstuffs, rather than just churning out truffle oil and wine. Imagine a farm that'd be focused on making fish tacos for example, planting wheat and red cabbage when in season, fish ponds producing tuna, chicken coops to turn eggs into mayo. To combine all those multiple sources of produce into fish tacos to get a much larger income than you'd get on any single ingredient. Or imagine accumulating cheese all year so you can combine it with hot peppers into pepper poppers, or waiting with your apples from your orchard until the cranberry season to make cranberry candy for sale. I think that'd be so much more fun and require some good long-term planning from the player to get the best rewards. It'd also make a lot of things that aren't otherwise very attractive to farm (apples, tomatoes) to become some of top earners. Only benefits in doing this.
- Fishing. Compare fishing to pigs. You have to work very hard in the mini-game, spend your entire rainy day at the river and you still are going to make only 1/10 of what your pigs just dug out of the grass on the same day. The amount of money you make from fishing holds up only in the very early game. Past that it's no longer an activity of any value or interest. I think fish that we catch early game should remain as they are, call them normal and silver fish, while late game and best equipment/skill level should give access to gold/iridium fish that'd sell for much more than now, just so it remains competitive to other sources of income. Just gatekeep those very expensive late game fish behind much stronger fishing rods, tackles and baits that player can't get before the 2nd or 3rd year.
- Crab pots. Again, in the early game they make sense, but later on it's just a spam of items you don't really need, cheapest sealife and outright garbage. You could make crab pots far more appealing by making them on a very rare occasion able to catch items from the treasure pool. Not a big chance, just a tiny one.
- Fish ponds. I think their collection "buckets" should function like autograbbers do, so we don't have to go check on them every day, just go there every once in a while to collect accumulated produce. If they didn't require daily attention, their income and the bonus items they generate would be quite okay. And if cooking was made more important in the game, reproducing actual fish in fishponds could also become a thing, especially if fish inside the ponds had quality better than normal.
- Slime Hutch. It's very difficult to figure out what that's for. The income is so minuscule it's not even worth wasting space on one. I think it'd be beneficial if this building was reworked to host all sorts of monsters, not just slimes, so we can farm their drops from the farm. Add cages (like the villagers use at the halloween to host the captive skeletons), add ways to replicate other monsters.
- Silo, it's just too small for its purposes and takes up so much space you have to spam so many of them to support having all kinds of animals on your farm. I'd bump it to a few hundred hay at least. You shouldn't need that many of them.
- Artisan vs all other farming perks. Artisan boosts literally everything, you turn animal products into artisan goods, you turn your plants into artisan products, honey is an artisan product, even fish roe turned into jars is an artisan product. This should be the skill that offers the least of the boost of all of them, while more specific and more focused skills like shepherd would allow to outcompete the generalist artisan in terms of income.
Some smaller rapid fire things:
- Wine. I'd extend the time it takes to mature it in kegs to a couple weeks, to tone it down compared to other goods. Too much income in wine currently.
- Crystalarium. It should require some input, rather than just replicating crystals forever once they are put inside. Could be using coal to power them up, for example.
- Secret Woods. Can we graduate slimes here to higher levels after the first year has passed? One-shot monsters are moot in late game.
- Levels and XP. Why not let player go to level 20 and unlock all the skills from all paths eventually. Of course at a much smaller pace. At the moment we just max all skils in year one and then there's no character progress whatsoever.
- Weapons. Allow Clint to work on low level weapons to improve their damage and upgrade them to higher levels, so we can have a wider variety of them than just the three galaxy weapons?
- Qi quests. So many exploits to farm these. Especially the Pierre/Qi Fruit exploit should be addressed, but also the usage of staircases to beat the mine challenges or buying flour by the thousands to turn into bread.
- Desert Trader. He allows to buy too many complicated items way too easily and cheaply since you can just replicate endless amounts of gems in Crystalariums (and gems in general are very easy to farm even without those). You basically are freed from interacting with multiple game systems (like cooking), thanks to this shortcut. It's just too much. Infinite amounts of stock in this store should be done away with. Just think about it, endless spicy eel, endless staircases, endless bombs, cheese, coffee. Too good to be true.
- Pigs. Just too much income. Every time someone asks how to get rich quickly, someone else writes pigs, pigs, pigs. Especially combined with Botanist and Artisan, they just bring way too much dough. They make other animals look completely unattractive and make them function as decor instead. They should be toned down to the level of other animal produce. Make them make 25% more than sheep make and it'll still be plenty.
- Cooking. Such wasted potential here, an entire module with dozens of cooking recipes that you almost never have to interact with. Why aren't ready meals more profitable than the sum of their ingredients? Prices for every recipe should be audited and boosted depending on how rare and how hard to get the ingredients are. Straight up things like fried egg where you turn a single thing into another thing shouldn't offer any extra income. But complicated things that'd require getting ingredients from multiple different sources, fishing, foraging, animals, farming, especially in different seasons, they should make you big bucks. This way we could have entire farms specialized in producing specific foodstuffs, rather than just churning out truffle oil and wine. Imagine a farm that'd be focused on making fish tacos for example, planting wheat and red cabbage when in season, fish ponds producing tuna, chicken coops to turn eggs into mayo. To combine all those multiple sources of produce into fish tacos to get a much larger income than you'd get on any single ingredient. Or imagine accumulating cheese all year so you can combine it with hot peppers into pepper poppers, or waiting with your apples from your orchard until the cranberry season to make cranberry candy for sale. I think that'd be so much more fun and require some good long-term planning from the player to get the best rewards. It'd also make a lot of things that aren't otherwise very attractive to farm (apples, tomatoes) to become some of top earners. Only benefits in doing this.
- Fishing. Compare fishing to pigs. You have to work very hard in the mini-game, spend your entire rainy day at the river and you still are going to make only 1/10 of what your pigs just dug out of the grass on the same day. The amount of money you make from fishing holds up only in the very early game. Past that it's no longer an activity of any value or interest. I think fish that we catch early game should remain as they are, call them normal and silver fish, while late game and best equipment/skill level should give access to gold/iridium fish that'd sell for much more than now, just so it remains competitive to other sources of income. Just gatekeep those very expensive late game fish behind much stronger fishing rods, tackles and baits that player can't get before the 2nd or 3rd year.
- Crab pots. Again, in the early game they make sense, but later on it's just a spam of items you don't really need, cheapest sealife and outright garbage. You could make crab pots far more appealing by making them on a very rare occasion able to catch items from the treasure pool. Not a big chance, just a tiny one.
- Fish ponds. I think their collection "buckets" should function like autograbbers do, so we don't have to go check on them every day, just go there every once in a while to collect accumulated produce. If they didn't require daily attention, their income and the bonus items they generate would be quite okay. And if cooking was made more important in the game, reproducing actual fish in fishponds could also become a thing, especially if fish inside the ponds had quality better than normal.
- Slime Hutch. It's very difficult to figure out what that's for. The income is so minuscule it's not even worth wasting space on one. I think it'd be beneficial if this building was reworked to host all sorts of monsters, not just slimes, so we can farm their drops from the farm. Add cages (like the villagers use at the halloween to host the captive skeletons), add ways to replicate other monsters.
- Silo, it's just too small for its purposes and takes up so much space you have to spam so many of them to support having all kinds of animals on your farm. I'd bump it to a few hundred hay at least. You shouldn't need that many of them.
- Artisan vs all other farming perks. Artisan boosts literally everything, you turn animal products into artisan goods, you turn your plants into artisan products, honey is an artisan product, even fish roe turned into jars is an artisan product. This should be the skill that offers the least of the boost of all of them, while more specific and more focused skills like shepherd would allow to outcompete the generalist artisan in terms of income.
Some smaller rapid fire things:
- Wine. I'd extend the time it takes to mature it in kegs to a couple weeks, to tone it down compared to other goods. Too much income in wine currently.
- Crystalarium. It should require some input, rather than just replicating crystals forever once they are put inside. Could be using coal to power them up, for example.
- Secret Woods. Can we graduate slimes here to higher levels after the first year has passed? One-shot monsters are moot in late game.
- Levels and XP. Why not let player go to level 20 and unlock all the skills from all paths eventually. Of course at a much smaller pace. At the moment we just max all skils in year one and then there's no character progress whatsoever.
- Weapons. Allow Clint to work on low level weapons to improve their damage and upgrade them to higher levels, so we can have a wider variety of them than just the three galaxy weapons?
- Qi quests. So many exploits to farm these. Especially the Pierre/Qi Fruit exploit should be addressed, but also the usage of staircases to beat the mine challenges or buying flour by the thousands to turn into bread.
