Money feels worthless, core gameplay loop stagnates

[Jabes]

I don't know if anyone else has tried to cover this already, I did search the discussions and could find anything at a cursory glance.

I'm going to preface this by saying I utterly adore My Time at Sandrock, it's one of my favorite farming sim games to date and I will continue loving it through to the end of its content, and potentially DLCs.

The big thing I'm struggling with though is that I don't feel a consistent drive to engage with the core gameplay loop of taking a commission and completing it.
If I have side quests or main quests to chase at the same time, I really enjoy it.
The quests in this game are so dang fun and engaging.
The thing is, when those quests run out, there will be no reason to keep playing.



This problem comes in a few parts.

First problem is the biggest, which is why it's the title of this discussion.
After you've cleared the first 10 hours or so, your character will consistently have enough money to buy literally whatever you want, whenever you want.
The only thing you ever have to save up for is bigger plots of land, and their prices are so high and offer so little in-game advantage that I don't pursue them

Stardew and Harvest Moon solved this by giving constant mini goals that costed increasing amount of money and were required for progression in the form of tool upgrades and meaningful farm upgrades.
(Speaking of, the buildings are really cheap, and the stable is the only one I've found useful at all.)


The second problem I have is that the relationship bonus is great, but only a few characters feel like I'm building a relationship with them for any reason.
Plus, story... there's hesitation now.
Heidi will always love me... right???


The last problem is reputation rewards don't scale.
I've been number 1 since the end of Autumn, year 1.
I ended the first year with 20k rep, and I'm looking to end the second with over 30k rep.
It'd be so much cooler to have a larger bracket of workshop rankings and to feel like I've actually earned something as I work my way up the ranks.
Instead I get a paltry sum of data discs, water, and a handful of gols. I have more than enough of all of these things.
I'm also looking over at Mi-an who's next on the podium with 3000 rep, who never gets included in my cool adventures, thinking I've utterly destroyed the poor girl


Anyway, this was a long winded way to talk about something that's not really an issue in the final implementation :p
The game is still deeply enjoyable for well over 70 hours thanks to the story based quests. I'm just noticing a larger and larger gap between those quests appearing and it's starting to mute my enjoyment in the late game.

[mielon]

It's still early access so maybe they will balance stuff after 1.0, it's true that it feels the only one that's competing in workshop ranking is Yan but he cheats and steals others credit. I'd say increase the points later for others when hes gone and give out more tokens and better rewards (maybe more unique stuff to buy for tokens). After the main story finishes just by doing 4 commissions daily i'm 10 times the amount of points over 2nd place. Also Mi-an's workshop could use a visual upgrades as the story progresses with advanced machines and stairs to her roof where she can have more space for stuff and a garden (could even be a questline helping her upgrade the house).

[Luke]

Idk what you on about m8, the sore reason for me to make money is to afford water for my farming hobby, cuz the fat water man don`t want to sell you affordable water even in the end game, Burger man legit has 120k gols in hes store register cuz of me lmao.

[Aerogems]

Try building yourself a McMansion with 3-4 stories on it and several rooms the maximum allowable size and then see how long your money supply lasts. Sure, there's no real benefit to doing so, except to give you a place to put the various status boosting artifacts you dig up, but it's a great way to get rid of any excess money you feel like you may have.

[Kathykins]

It was the same in Portia. Finished the story many times there, and did most, if not all side quests. When all that was done, I found I had very few goals to work towards. I don't find commissions and friendships give me the drive to keep playing. I never liked the consept of "buying" friends, and I find it tedious because I gain so little every time I interact with NPC's. Even loved gifts on their birthdays give a pitiful amount, as far as I've seen.

Sure I could build a mansion and re-arrange the yard, but I find it pointless as long as my workshop is functional, I have what I need and its at least somewhat decently efficient. I'm not very good at giving myself goals and will often just forget them.

[Aprifrit]

I feel you. Also.. I feel the main story is bit funny. Story kinda gets boring towards the end. The peak moment is during the Duvos attack, then everything goes "tralalalaa tea party ´n everyone goes home". Aside building the theme park.. I kinda expected more. "What about Matilda?" etc. I kinda wanted to have answers to Portia´s story too. I also wanted more personal drama towards the builder. Now s/he is just a hero who does everything okay and s/he doesn´t have even proper rivals .. Here´s hoping there will be ..more.. side quests? *careful hope*

[Jabes]

Originally posted by Luke:

Idk what you on about m8, the sore reason for me to make money is to afford water for my farming hobby, cuz the fat water man don`t want to sell you affordable water even in the end game, Burger man legit has 120k gols in hes store register cuz of me lmao.:wowsno:

Have you not been setting up dew collectors?
I set up a patch of them and kept adding to it as my needs grew. About mid game I set up a 4x4 square of the standard kind and I've been steadily making more water than I can use ever since.
I think right now I have about 300 water?
Not dew, water.

[Zelrune]

I agree with you that the other builders are significantly behind me in the commission board and only Yan with his cheating was my only competition, but.. I'm at 18,000 points and Mi-an is only at 3k. Really wish there was a bit more competition here.
I really, really wish at 5 stars you start competing with high level workshops in the other cities...
(also yes, Mi-an is really excluded from the entire second half of the game.)

Other than that, I absolutely don't agree with you having enough money in the game to buy whatever you want unless you been using some insane min-max strat I haven't found in the first 10 hours of the game, especially if you've delved into housing and housing upgrades. There are plenty of times in the game where community donations were requested and things need to be bought, and now that I'm 100 hours in I feel comfortable not needing to do commissions if I wanted to for the rest of my game but, in 10 hours? Only if you want to experience the bare minimum of content, with no farming, housing, or ranching. My cute horse was 22,000g!

[NSpectre7]

I noticed this as well, though I don't think it has to do with the ability to get money so much as it is based on how the game expects you to play it. You spend very little time getting resources in this game. You can take one day to mine a dungeon, or go logging and come back with enough stuff for at least one main mission and a few side/commission missions. The time sink is refining these materials into things like plates, wires, pipes...etc and since you don't know what you will need for the next mission/commission you hold onto the resources you farmed rather than start the long refining process. The game doesn't really feel like it wants you to be a builder unless it tells you to. You don't need to make lights, or water towers, or whatever else, so you simply wait around for the next big mission, blow your resources then go and gather more. The commissions are either easy and barely worth doing unless you need a quick buck or they are crazy and not worth doing even if you had no money at all. Not to mention that refining takes forever so it feels like a chore even if you had the resources to make the requested item.

Compare that to Stardew or just about any other farming sim game where you need a boat load of resources to craft something very simple. The game play is the farming, vs the game play is the refining. I think the My Time Series is awesome because it feels so immersive, but without the quests it feels kinda pointless(as you said). I think they could help that by having more expensive side quests(or everything in general) like making the museum bigger should cost far more than it does. Or generally giving us more chances to interact with the town as a whole, and upgrade the infrastructure. Building lights, trams, mine carts, fixing houses, railings, fences...etc. Give the player a reason to use these schematics that you give them. I think it would be hard for them to make the other workshops actually challenge the player. Maybe if the other workshops all woke up early to fight with commissions and the npcs always took the easy or high profile ones.

I also think the inventory system really screws with the game play as well. Perhaps I would feel more inclined to turn my resources into fabricated items if it wasn't such a hassle to carry and store them. I think what would really help this idea of 'the factory" and builder workshop is if they gave us a material storage similar to guild wars 2 where your resources and manufactured items had a pre-arranged slot and any time you dump off your ore or created objects they sort themselves into their assigned slot. Trying to maintain twenty boxes with relics, poop, meat, and whatever else doesn't inspire me to add more to the chaos.

[Dimensional Traveler]

Originally posted by NSpectre7:

I also think the inventory system really screws with the game play as well. Perhaps I would feel more inclined to turn my resources into fabricated items if it wasn't such a hassle to carry and store them. I think what would really help this idea of 'the factory" and builder workshop is if they gave us a material storage similar to guild wars 2 where your resources and manufactured items had a pre-arranged slot and any time you dump off your ore or created objects they sort themselves into their assigned slot. Trying to maintain twenty boxes with relics, poop, meat, and whatever else doesn't inspire me to add more to the chaos.

When you open a chest there is an option to move all items in your inventory that are also in your chests into those chests. It is labelled "Auto Sort".

[Jabes]

Originally posted by Zelrune:

I agree with you that the other builders are significantly behind me in the commission board and only Yan with his cheating was my only competition, but.. I'm at 18,000 points and Mi-an is only at 3k. Really wish there was a bit more competition here.
I really, really wish at 5 stars you start competing with high level workshops in the other cities...
(also yes, Mi-an is really excluded from the entire second half of the game.) :Speech_Confused:

Other than that, I absolutely don't agree with you having enough money in the game to buy whatever you want unless you been using some insane min-max strat I haven't found in the first 10 hours of the game, especially if you've delved into housing and housing upgrades. There are plenty of times in the game where community donations were requested and things need to be bought, and now that I'm 100 hours in I feel comfortable not needing to do commissions if I wanted to for the rest of my game but, in 10 hours? Only if you want to experience the bare minimum of content, with no farming, housing, or ranching. My cute horse was 22,000g! :Speech_Alert:

I'm not going to disagree with your experience at all, hearing other peoples opinions is absolutely what I wanted to do and I'm glad to hear that you've not had an issue with it.
I'm just sharing how it went for me and is impacting my enjoyment now that the main story isn't providing as much of the drive.

Whatever the matter, I didn't exactly min-max like crazy, just leveled in a way I thought sensible. I remembered to place adverts, completed commissions as I got em, and refined products when I had the materials spare.
The game steered me to play that way and never really offered a challenge in doing it, particularly after I got a coffee tea tree, some melon plants and started doing cooking quests.

I've not been experiencing the bare minimum either, as far as I'm aware.
My house is exactly as I want it, nicely furnished, I've been farming as much as I could since the moment the game allowed me, I take days off to play with citizens, I kill time in the arcade, I've got 2 perfect mounts, all buildings and still 100k left over.
Donations set me back, sure, but in every case it was less than half my money and I earned it back long before the next money requirement came up.


Comparing our experiences, that suggests that the 3 money bonuses that are offered (fast delivery, high quality, and advert) are too powerful when combined for how easy they are to get.

I still feel like I want more expensive items though. More clothes, furniture, upgrades.
Those money requirements still feel far too uncommon and low to me.
The difference between yard upgrades and everything else really makes everything seem like a drop in the water compared.

[Harris]

Originally posted by OnlyJables (Mon):

The big thing I'm struggling with though is that I don't feel a consistent drive to engage with the core gameplay loop of taking a commission and completing it.
If I have side quests or main quests to chase at the same time, I really enjoy it.
The quests in this game are so dang fun and engaging.
The thing is, when those quests run out, there will be no reason to keep playing.

I'm at the point when Trudy comes back, and money already stopped being an issue for me. I don't expand my yard past level 5, I don't bother with dew collectors, because the water I buy from Burgess is more than enough, even considering how much water farming demands. I settled for a plain 4k horse and realized it does the job, which was also the most meaningful feeling of progression for me so far. After getting that and the sandwalls, I don't see any meaningful way to spend money anymore.

In the beginning, I was commited to the #1 workshop thing, because 10k gols and other goodies looked like a lot at the time. I was doing commissions like crazy for the first few seasons, and between that and the main story I often had little time left for side quests. I had more and more of them thrown into my face and at some point I began answering "I have a lot on my plate" to most of them. While some can be initiated at any time by talking to the NPC, some appear to be gone forever now, and I feel like I'm missing out on content. So now I just care enough to stay a bit ahead of Yan and only in it for the fancy award.

Eventually though, yeah, I see your point how the game is quest-driven, so when I run out of those I'm not sure how my late game is going to look like. I suppose I could keep playing with the goal of building a huge, fancy mansion - but that playstyle is really different from everything we've been doing up to this point. I feel like this games should have a meaningful endgame, with quests that don't take place until after everything's said and done. Like maybe you become a commissioner and a new Builder arrives, which you can be kind and helpful towards... or not.

[Zewtastic]

I'll just say, I was fine with how acquiring money progressed.

I made it to level 10 base towards the end of the playthru and was ok. I didn't have anything I wanted to buy anymore.

[pcdeltalink]

Originally posted by Luke:

Idk what you on about m8, the sore reason for me to make money is to afford water for my farming hobby, cuz the fat water man don`t want to sell you affordable water even in the end game, Burger man legit has 120k gols in hes store register cuz of me lmao.:wowsno:

Dew collectors (and eventually advanced dew collectors) you’ll have more water than you know what to do with eventually

[mielon]

Originally posted by pcdeltalink:

Dew collectors (and eventually advanced dew collectors) you’ll have more water than you know what to do with eventually

You can get Super Dew Collectors quite early, resources for it are available as soon as desert unlocks (Gecko Station Ruins) and with iron pickhammer you can collect aluminium scrap from Valley of Wispers even with poison fog around(nodes are close to the entrance). Doing it early saves you alot of money and gets you ready for self sufficient water suply for farming later. Remember that you can always hold onto main quest without a timer and not complete it to get yourself a supply of stuff.

[yoru]

Money is worthless? I'm near end game and I'm still living in mason's tofu house because I can't afford the dream mansion I want. LOL. 100k is nothing cos upgrading the plot exponentially increases so much I'm about to give up. I just upgraded the plot to the 120k one (with 20% off from trudy but still) and it blew my savings.

I think the reason you feel this way is because you don't have your own ideas/goals and require constant quests to drive you. It's the same as how I can play vanilla minecraft for 2000 hours because I come up with things to do for myself, the next building I wanna build etc, but my friend quit within 40 hours because after she got the base achievements, there's no one telling her what she should do next. (I'm not trying to be rude btw, everyone's different.)