Is this a good place to post a small critique? Everyone seems to just be using this thread to post bugs and the whatnot, well whatever, I'm posting a small critique here.
I think that the crafting and mining skills need to be removed from the mod entirely.
Now, you may think to yourself that seems a little extreme, removing two skills that are so vital to progression. But that is exactly why they need to be removed.
Because mining and crafting are so important to progression, they present a huge wall of all encompassing boredom and wastfullness that the player has to overcome.
Mindlessly grinding in the mines and crafting several thousand tonnes of useless bullcrap is not not fun. At all. With combat, grinding is acceptable. the player is moving, attacking, etc and constantly remaining active, when the player gets bored of a certain group of mobs they can simply move on to a different area and have a different combat experience due to area design, mob variety, and weapon classes. With alchemy, crafting tonnes of things is acceptable. Because the player is crafting consumable items, needing to craft many potions to level up encourages players to keep a healthy stock, and when the player fully moves on to the next tier, the outdated potion stock can be given/sold to other players who might not want to take part in the alchemy mechanics, thus nothing that the player crafts is entirely useless. With mining, grinding is unacceptable. Sure, mining more ore than is needed to craft one's equipment can net you some extra gold, but there are many more effective and fun ways to fill one's wallet than mindlessly waiting and digging for hours on end. Mining is a completely inactive experience. There is fundamentally no difference between mining copper in the games first mineshaft to mining chlorophyte in the last. With the crafting skill, having to craft tonnes of things is unacceptable. Sure, much like mining and alchemy the things that are crafted and no longer needed can be sold to other players/npcs for profit. Sure, along the way the player is going to craft a lot of usefull stuff that will increase the crafting skill naturally, but what is left after all that is still a huge wall that can only be overcome by collecting tonnes of crafting ingredients, then crafting tonnes of useless garbage that the player does not need. I believe that these two skills create a cycle of bordom and wastfullness that spans the entire length of the game, eating up untold hours of time that the player could be using to actually have fun and progress. Instead of locking essential crafting recipies and ore behind a time wall, they should instead be gated behind things like area design and questlines/quest items. This way, a players progression is judged by how much of the fun part of the game they've completed, and the actual skill they've cultivated, not simply how much time they've invested.
TL;DR: The mining and crafting skills slow down progression to the point where the game is no longer fun.
