I said "... you don't really use the shovel". I am not an english native speaker, but I am fairly sure that sentence means "using a shovel very seldom" not "you don't ever use a shovel".
That's fair, I Have read you stronger than you meant. Sorry!
But there's also this bit of misunderstanding:
It postulates that you need to make each quality step down would need either one more swing or half of that at least to be noticable. I explained why I disagree.
Not quite; my point of going for the "massive" improvement, was just to explore the limit of the idea "Every quality has immediate feedback". You didn't say you'd want the improvement to be that high, but I went there to find the limit, to think how that would look like. Nineteen swings for a dirt block sounds boring enough to turn anyone away, so we shouldn't go There.
Is there a better middle ground between that place and the current? I dunno, in the current one I will indeed shovel with about 3 different shovels during a playthrough. Would I want to use them more often? Mining / underground fortress -runs are fun, but those are pickaxes. Shovels? For when I need massive amounts of clay for .. some reason. Wtb a reason!
Even if such a reason was given in the meta (you Need to build your own base AND trader Doesn't sell enough cobble OR you Need plenty of forged iron and thus need clay for the forge, for examples), and I ended up using shovels a lot.. I'm fine skipping qualities. Especially when they're absolutely free for the most part; when you get your gear from questing, you don't need to make the forged iron for them, and thus a "lucky" quest will cut your iron and clay mining times by 20 mins each. Win-win, or lose-lose..?
If they disattached crafting progress from questing, and somehow made us make our own shovels; then for sure it'd be not just nice, but also required to have shovels improve every other rank. Otherwise we wouldn't spend the effort to make the upgrades. As long as they're freely granted by questing at rapidly increasing qualities, I can't say I'm too bothered.
TFP updated the game from some 100 block shapes (?) in A16 to now 1000 or 2000. They surely did all this work just to give you a glimpse of a really big useless menue while you select the shape for the horde fence, right?
Well, of course not. But they aren't giving us a reason, or even the ability to sit still building. You have a builder in your group, who is able to do that only because he has a group providing for him. He wouldn't get tools without you feeding him books. He wouldn't get water without you feeding him dukes. He wouldn't eat without you looting cabinets for books. So there's at least a minimum of questing to be done in the meta, it's practically mandatory. And as it is so much faster for improvements.. the meta points strongly to "quest until you Can build". And then you're building mostly for fun, the hordes are made impotent essentially by a couple Electric Fences. (Which you have to buy, or loot 30 books for)
They may Want the meta to be something different, but it is what it is. Atm it's questing. If your group manages to play different, great. Solos don't have the option.
As a miner, I'd be going nuts with random blocks remaining at 1-5 HP after two swings. I talked about breaking safes.. why do I do That when there's lockpicks, one might ask. Because the lockpick mechanic is infuriating. Stare at a counter for 20 secs, completely randomly breaking lockpicks; randomly enough to go "back" in progress several times, so there's actually No progress until it opens. Nothing you can do to do better, just keep listening to the error messages. I'll just save the inventory slot and a bit of my sanity by beating on it for 60 secs, at least I know it'll end. Random is fine, but some implementations ... no. (This isn't me randomly @%$#ing about lockpicking, this is me drawing the picture "I really don't like things being annoyingly random")
Have you tried making a good looking underground fortress? Even something simple, one with straight walls, with something like 15 wide 10 high 40 long, hollowed out area for horde fighting? Straight "cut stone" ramps for access, which need to be smooth so you don't bounce your way along them all the time? Trying to keep that in line, with blocks taking random amounts of swings to remove... ouch. Goes from relaxing to nerve-wrecking, every misplaced hit mean you'll have to swap to a repair tool and cobble up the dented stone wall. If I hate the randomness of 20 sec safes .. spending hours straight for tunneling with randomness.. I'd hate it.
Kage builds larger and more complex though. But Josh...
This. Kage occasionally builds something big and standalone, but mostly uses simple (if a little overbuilt) killing corridor stuff. Woodle's 49 or 70 day playthroughs, he usually slaps down a few block to make a corridor with a melee position and at the end of the season makes some kind of a bigger thing. This is also what I usually do; play until the character is strong enough to bother building something big, then build something big, or restart. No point in making something big early when you can make it fifteen times faster after a few dozen quests.
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