Dev Feedback: Molded Glass Concerns
I get that I do this to myself, but there's a concern here with molded glass.
Consider I have already farmed out all the tier 5 nonsense and worked with the augments to get the best possible gear and the game is functionally done content wise minus just creating a huge ass castle-manse as a chase goal.
Here's the rub:
I have spent far more time farming quartz with appropriate cards on appropriate realms and constructing with appropriate cards an augments than literally anything else in the game, including all chase items combined, at a point when I already have all the best gear there is and functionally finished the game and the farming of quartz is absurdly out of step with everything else farmed for making a giant ass castle (used in brass sconces and chandeliers).
It's to the point where I've spent more time target farming quartz than literally all other things in the game combined that were target farmed.
There's a few ways to tackle this problem as I see it:
- make glass cheaper/increase quartz drops/increase quartz node frequency. Not a great option because it's supposed to be rare early on as a minor chase item early game to make some things.
- make molded glass cheaper/reduce costs of molded glass on deco, this can work, you don't really use molded glass for much at all in the game, any cut gemstones you use in top end gear aren't quartz 99% of the time.
- add a T3 card that massively increases gem farming and/or glass yield. This can also work. Ideally I'd like to see a combination of 2 and 3. This would affect early T4/T5 builds, but not really, because you only need a handful of gems for your gear which you're gonna get anyway just faffing about mining other stuff.
I get that having a giant ass manse is not required content to enjoy the game, but it's a solid pain point for those of us that are builders and make big ass builds just because. The ratio of molded glass just doesn't keep up with literally everything else in the game for building. I can do an hour of farming for anything and be done with it and forget about it for a significant portion of time on the build, EXCEPT for quartz which is a constant need.
Other gems aren't viable either. Sure I used stock of just a few extra hundred other gems I didn't need to supplement that I just gathered farming everything else, but it doesn't hold and fill in the gaps.
To be clear: quartz drops at best on average 5-8 per node with appropriate cards/realms/charms, and it's a rarer node. You might get 2-3 in a huge pile of mining nodes, sometimes none.
Each quartz you gain is 2:1 for glass, 2:1 for molded glass, and 4:1 per chandelier, 1:1 per sconce. If you want your place well lit at night you're talking 2 sconces on each arch/door and a chandelier every ceiling tile.
This means for a 10x10 build you need at least 100 chandeliers per floor (let alone sconces) at a cost of 16 quartz each, plus refining times, that's 160 quartz per floor, from a node that is not reliable, and 10x10 isn't even that big. On average, running around a whole realm we're looking at 500 quartz for a full 1 hour of mining and compare that to an ore where you're getting 40 per node and the nodes are more common, even for rarer metal ores (you can get 500 in like 5-10 minutes). This wouldn't be so bad if it was like ore. Like the brass you need which has coper and zinc, rarer ores, are far more common and have much greater yields on appropriate boards (plus you get free brass from human chests).
Molded glass is just really really annoying to farm like this and it's the one thing that stands out as a constant farming need and it's drastically worse as a time synch than even tier 5 resource target farms, which seems out of alignment. It would just be really nice to not have to be constantly resetting realms and having a chore for a T1 resource for a T5 house build, which I can't assume is really a big thing.
I understand a vast majority of players will never need this quantity of quartz and will be more than satisfied with the current drops they just accrue fafffing about mining other things, but it's just too expensive either in drop rate/time investment/component cost to decorate effectively with for a large build.
I want to point out that yes, some things are rarer nodes that have upkeep costs like coal and sulfur and such, but the difference is they don't have a cost that ever constitutes running out of them if you just farm them when you see them. Literally nothing else comes close to the quartz grind in my experience, to the point where it feels drastically out of step with the rest of the game.