Items Hellstone/Meteorite from crates

Fichom

Fichom

Steampunker
Heyho,

a quick little addition to the game: add hellstone/meteorite ore/bars to the loot of Obsidian/Hellstone and Gold/Titanium crates.
I know it's kind of a niche type of addition, but it could be great for some challenge maps and generally more renewable resources in the world(I know meteorite is renewable, but hellstone, as it currently is, isn't).
 
I'd even add them as direct loot, given how much effort it takes to fish in lava.
But I wouldn't be completely against them being in obsidian lock boxes - meteorite even is available from Shadow chests, but not from the lock box(though again, meteorite is already renewable, while hellstone/hellstone bars aren't, which is kind of my main point).
 
Huh . . . this is actually a good point.

I feel like the best solution for Hellstone is to just make it a possible drop from Obsidian/Hellstone Crates.

As for Meteorite, there's not really a fishing equivalent, so maybe make it drop from Obsidian/Hellstone Crates as well?
 
This would ruin the balance of the game, and it would ruin the 'symmetry' of the game with all crates having the same ores.
Click to expand...
I don't see how this would ruing the balance of anything? You gave 0 context, explanation or proof.
What symmetry are you talking about, I wonder? Nothing symmetrical about fishing - the higher the grade of a crate, the better are the ore rewards. And yes, all ores up till chlorophyte(let's argue hallowed bars aren't ore, given you can't mine them out) are available through chests, apart from 2 pre-Hardmode ones - Meteorite and Hellstone. So go figure that one out.

First of all, starting lava fishing is already hard enough, and your options are
  1. get the Hotline Fishing Hook, which is super-rare and requires Hardmode
  2. get the Lavaproof Fishing Hook accessory, which is a reward from obsidian/hellstone crate(yes, it's literally called hellstone crate lol), and the chance of getting it is 1/5 - and that is, of course, only after you done some fishing and be lucky enough with:
  3. catching lava-critters which are pretty rare and hard to get, and have somewhat bad fishing-power wise(if we presume you get all 3 types at equal frequency, your average bait power is 25%, which is quite low)
Idk, your comment just leaves me thinking you never fished much before or, at all.
 
Last edited:
Fichom said:
Heyho,

a quick little addition to the game: add hellstone/meteorite ore/bars to the loot of Obsidian/Hellstone and Gold/Titanium crates.
I know it's kind of a niche type of addition, but it could be great for some challenge maps and generally more renewable resources in the world(I know meteorite is renewable, but hellstone, as it currently is, isn't).
Click to expand...
Not trying to necro or anything, but I do want to bump this one up. It could really be useful on sky block challenge maps to have a renewable source of hellstone.
 
IndigoGollum said:
Fine, make hellstone appear in hardmode crates after it's obsolete for tools.
Click to expand...
Again, this take really makes 0 sense. Getting to the progression of fishing where you can fish in lava (to get the hellstone crates) is so much harder than any other ore. I think that difficulty makes it hard enough. I mean it for sure won't break regular maps - getting hellstone by just defeating eater/brain is so much easier than trying to get to lava-fishing level.
 
Fichom said:
Again, this take really makes 0 sense. Getting to the progression of fishing where you can fish in lava (to get the hellstone crates) is so much harder than any other ore. I think that difficulty makes it hard enough. I mean it for sure won't break regular maps - getting hellstone by just defeating eater/brain is so much easier than trying to get to lava-fishing level.
Click to expand...
That one was sarcastic dude
 
You could actually skip progression with this, similar to the old reaver shark it means that you could get things earlier than usual but it requires an activity they do not enjoy.
If you do enough of the angler quests, you can get a golden bug net which functions to catch lava critters and get hellstone pre-boss again, just with even more steps.
As IndigoGollum said, if it gets considered it should check for if the evil boss has been defeated.
 
Speeding Ticket 1 said:
That one was sarcastic dude
Click to expand...
As you can see by CannedPotato's response, might not have been (I'm not super-active here, so idk who people are and their character, so I might be wrong ofc).


CannedPotato said:
You could actually skip progression with this, similar to the old reaver shark it means that you could get things earlier than usual but it requires an activity they do not enjoy.
If you do enough of the angler quests, you can get a golden bug net which functions to catch lava critters and get hellstone pre-boss again, just with even more steps.
As IndigoGollum said, if it gets considered it should check for if the evil boss has been defeated.
Click to expand...
Sure it would, it would only require you to first get to the ocean, get some decent fishing gear, and start grinding angler quests.
Let's assume it takes you 20 minutes of playing to setup for fishing (finding good fishing spots in most biomes, getting the angler, getting iron/lead for a rod).
Let's assume you get a bit lucky and get the golden bug net after just 40 fishing quests completed. Let's assume that getting bait, going to your fishing spot, and actually catching the quest fish takes, on average 5 minutes, and that the rest of the time in day is spent sleeping in the bed (4 minutes / day) - let's round up to a total of 10 minutes/quest. It means that fishing for the bug net in this somewhat lucky scenario takes about 7 hours of playing (and by "playing", we really just mean fishing), and you are done. Oh wait, no, now you need to fish in lava.

Given the amount of quests you've done, let's assume you have full angler gear + golden fishing rod, and access to best bait (magma snails and, if lucky with initial hellstone crates, master bait + lavaproof fishing hook) and potions. Given the good gear setup, let's assume you get a bite every 2 seconds. You have about 2% chance that it is a hellstone crate. If we assume the same odds for getting hellstone/hellstone bars as we do other bars from the current hellstone crate, we get the bars about 25% of the time, and ores 15% of the time. To skip progression, you'd need enough to make a molten pickaxe (at the minimum), which needs 20 bars. Let's assume that this would take 3 successful drops of hellstone. But don't forget, you could get other ores as well.

With the current drops (and let's assume we can't get tin or copper ore, which actually makes things worse), you'd have 1/7 chance of getting hellstone (instead of any of the other 6 ore/bar types), which is about 15%. Let's also make a crazy assumption that we can just add up the odds of getting bars and ores into a single probability of 40% (25% for bars + 15% for ores), to make maths easier. The chance of getting hellstone ore/bars from a particular crate is ~6%.

Combining this with the rates of getting hellstone crates at 2%/catch, you can expect to have a chance of 0.12% of getting hellstone with any one catch. If you had about the same luck as you did with getting the golden bug net (about 40th percentile), it would take about 400 catch attempts. For a single drop. You need 3. That's another 45 minutes of fishing, if you are again somewhat lucky. But that's again being quite lucky, and assuming you have quite good gear to get a hook every 2 seconds. If you are a bit less lucky (60th percentile), and your gear allows for a rate of 4s/catch, it would be closer to like 2~3 hours of extra fishing.

So yeah, in conclusion, I'd argue that it is not really a viable method of "skipping progress" (though for sure entirely possible), given how much time it takes to complete. The reason reaver shark was an issue is because you could get the strongest pre-hardmode pickaxe in as little as like 10~15 minutes if you got lucky, an hour if your luck was kinda low. It would take 7~8 hours to get enough hellstone bars for a molten pickaxe with hellstone crate fishing (if you are a bit lucky as well, quite a bit more if you weren't), which is like 10 times slower at the best (and easily 100 times slower at the worst).
 
@Fichom
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
Click to expand...
From this Game design journal on optimisation

I get where you are coming from, but the fault in the entire argument is people will do this. They did it for reaver shark, they do it with pre-mech duke fishron, and without a single doubt we will do the angler's quests for 10 hours in order to get better gear earier in the game, even if it takes longer.
 
CannedPotato said:
@Fichom

From this Game design journal on optimisation

I get where you are coming from, but the fault in the entire argument is people will do this. They did it for reaver shark, they do it with pre-mech duke fishron, and without a single doubt we will do the angler's quests for 10 hours in order to get better gear earier in the game, even if it takes longer.
Click to expand...
I didn't read the article in this time, obviously, but I will. But I get a feel I know what it's talking about. And it's talking about min-maxing. Min-maxers (I'm one as well) don't go for strats that are bad, they abuse the system so they would get a benefit, not a demerit.

Yes, there will be players that will grind for 10 hours to get gear that they could've gotten in like 5 hours if they played normally. Why do you see that as an issue, though? The reason reaver shark was nerfed was because it was ridiculously more efficient to go for it than to actually play the game (it was actually better than molten pickaxe). So a lot of people did it.
Imo, that still wasn't a real reason to nerf it, since it would take the effort of playing through quite a large portion of the game (or researching a lot) to stumble upon it yourself, but I understand the devs wanting to nerf it, and I respect their decision.

After reading most of the article: So it's a bit different take than I expected, but it kinda talks about min-maxing for most of the applicable part of the article - the "Undervaluing Time" part, which is 20% issue of players doing mind-numbing tasks to make the game a bit easier for themselves, and 80% about min-maxing. But the Morrowind example (the 20%) is kinda not applicable here, because it's players exploiting the system of the game, rather than the mechanics. Fishing is a legitimate mechanic in Terraria and it's an activity that was put in by the devs with the intention of players participating in it actively. Walking around (or jumping at a wall) is just a way the game gets you where it wants you to be, and not the actual core of the gameplay. That's why it's so egregious in Morrowind - the player is doing something that wasn't meant to be an actual gameplay activity, to make the game easier. Fishing is an actual gameplay activity, and the act of me doing it with larger focus is just an act of min-maxing (or an attempt to do it, but not really successful since it's not actually beneficial).

And what the article didn't touch upon is, most players that do min-max actually enjoy the process of optimizing their strategy. They enjoy the fact that their effort is bringing them closer to a goal in a better, quicker way. Reaver shark was one such optimization - why bother fighting the EoW or BoC when you can just fish for 10 minutes, which is not only safer than fighting, but also faster. And it was so good, that it kinda became an expected thing to do, to the point that you could find the idea to go for Reaver shark with a single google search. That just won't happen with hellstone crates. It's too convoluted and much less efficient than just playing the game normal way. And for the few guys that do decide to go that route... well, all the power to them.

Regardless, to not be unproductive at the slightest. Sure, there could be a check to see if you defeated EoW/BoC, but it feels like an extra step that really won't make much of a difference imo - that being said, I'm not against it.
 
That description is making a straw man of what the point actually is.

Min-maxers don't go for strats that are bad, they abuse the system so they would get a benefit, not a demerit
Click to expand...
Incorrect, min-maxers will absolutely go for strats that are bad if it means their resulting power is ahead of the curve. Min-max strategies are defined by their redundancy to an eventual and marginal benefit, not usefulness.
There will be players that will grind for 10 hours to get gear that they could've gotten in like 5 hours if they played normally. Why do you see that as an issue, though?
Click to expand...
Reaver shark was nerfed was because it was ridiculously more efficient
Click to expand...
The factor of it's efficiency is not something the effected players will care about. Terraria players have been known to get the best gear for their selected classes at all costs and this would be no exception. As explained in the first parts of 'undervaluing time', players will not care about the invested time for a reward whether that time spent is enjoyable or not, this is an issue because it isn't fun. It is a bigger waste of time than the reaver shark and these players have better uses for their time than this.

But the Morrowind example is kinda not applicable here, because it's players exploiting the system of the game, rather than the mechanics. Fishing is a legitimate mechanic in Terraria and it's an activity that was put in by the devs with the intention of players participating in it actively.
Click to expand...
Intention ≠ Effect
- It is certainly an exploit, but players did not care, if the developers came out and said that we are not meant to do that, nobody would stop.
- 'Running against a wall and jumping' was never patched, which by the same logic as hoiks in Terraria makes it an intended feature. Developers saw it, dismissed it and let it be.
I think it is a very relevant example actually. 'Systems of the game' and 'mechanics' are synonymous terms and whether or not someone behind the desk wanted people to run against a wall for hours at a time does not take away from the effect that players did do it.
On the flipside, one of the biggest selling points of Terraria is that features of the game are optional. You can build a town for your NPCs but nobody is making you, moon events, duke fishron and empress, all of pre-hardmode and certainly fishing are all things that you are suggested to do but Red will not hate you for just not doing them. It was not implemented with the intention of players participating, it was implemented with the suggestion of players participating.
The Terraria community houses many people that by choice refuse to touch fishing because they just don't find it fun, which is completely valid. However those players gladly bit the bullet of fishing for a reaver shark to gain that edge over the early game challenges, it was not fun for them- for them it was a necessity.

And what the article didn't touch upon is, most players that do min-max actually enjoy the process of optimizing their strategy.
Click to expand...
The summary of the article is that optimisation can easily cross a line into taking the fun away from a game. Enjoyment is present in working towards a long term goal with the promise of a good reward, but it is how players burn themselves out and fall away from further joy of playing the game's main progression. I agree that optimisation is fun- the selling point of many RPGs is the joy of refining a process. The issue that the article discusses is when that premise of optimisation skips over other fleshed-out features of the game, a universal goal of every game is to be experienced- not necessarily the way the developers intend but at least to make the player feel something. Optimisation becoming not fun is when it gets to a point where we do not experience the game, we are simply doing a chore.

Writing this out has killed me somewhat, I do not have it in me to continue talking about this and it is clear that if this does not change your mind nothing will. Have a good night.
 
Brunoaraujoespin said:
Would be cool but make Hellstone only appear in obsidian lock boxes and meteorite only in space crates only if you broke a shadow orb
Click to expand...
What if there's no shadow orb in the world? :)
And still, assuming you mean Sky and not Space (that doesn't exist) crates, getting meteorite this way would make it super easy to get (destroying a single shadow orb is a super easy task in regular maps, requiring only a few bombs (and if you are lucky, not even that with crimson hearts).

Putting hellstone in obsidian lock box doesn't make sense, since you can't get it from regular obsidian chests. You'd then maybe have to consider placing it in the chests as well, but that makes no sense, since the whole difficulty with hellstone is mining it can be dangerous. Visiting the Underworld would be that much more of a pitstop rather than an experience if you could find hellstone in chests. Not to mention, it would probably be easier to get it than in my method, since obsidian lootbox is 100% from obsidian crates.
 
@Fichom I don't think that forking off this discussion in a new thread (especially an Off Topic thread) is necessary or appropriate.

Just continue to discuss it here. Thanks.
 
Tunnel King said:
@Fichom I don't think that forking off this discussion in a new thread (especially an Off Topic thread) is necessary or appropriate.

Just continue to discuss it here. Thanks.
Click to expand...
Ok, sry if I caused an issue. Just our discussion veered off of the "suggestion regarding terraria" to "how games in general are played", so I didn't want to create extra work for moderation - guess I did the opposite
:boulder:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom