Are better tools more efficient?

[LordStuff]

I read some posts that steel tools aren't really that much more efficient than iron tools. Some of them are more than a year old so I'm a bit sceptical.

We are only 3-4 guys on a private PvE server so resources are a topic.. Are the steel tools worth it (they are rather expensive)?

[LittleBallOfPurr]

They gather more yes, they cost more to repair. So there is a trade-off there. I think Obsidian has the highest gather, yet is pretty fragile so perhaps best saved for things like mining Star-Metal. Star-Metal tools are what I go with.

[LordStuff]

Would you advise going for steel rather than iron?

I was hoping that, with the buildings getting much more expensive, the tools get better too and we'd get resources faster.. I'd not want this game end up being 90% grinding..

[LittleBallOfPurr]

Absolutely.

Some other things that could be of interest to you;

1) It's sort of easier to farm metal from NPC's. The further North you go, the better their loot drops, they frequently, even usually, drop metal bars (Iron, Steel, Hardened Steel.) If you kill your way through the major cities, you get all their drops, plus the chests. Whether this is as fast as manually farming and making, I'm not sure and might be setup dependent, though it's a lot more fun in my opinion.

2) If you are harvesting, I saw a video yesterday (interwebs so no idea if this is true and/or still applicable), that says the perk for harvesting twice as much from corpses, actually applies to every single resource in the game. Yellow lotus potions are cheap, so worth testing it out quickly as nothing could double your harvesting as fast as this.

3) If you want easy insulated wood, the Scythe will completely ignore all resources except for Dry Wood, from dead desert trees and Resin from the North trees. It's pretty RNG but way faster than collecting bark to dry your own, in my opinion.

[Aurani]

Depending on how much you wish to build you'll be gathering a lot of wood, stone and iron over the course of your adventure, upgrading your tools once you get a healthy supply of iron means you'll spend less time clicking trees and nodes and less time moving to new areas to gather the required materials, each upgrade gives between 1-2 more per swing, it pays off in the long run.

If you wish for this game to not be grindy you'd better tweak some server settings.

[almighty_hood]

the grind part really depends on you, being as how you have a private pve server you could change the resource gather rate to be higher and/or the resource spawn times to be faster.

steel tools imo are ok but i tend to make the combi "pickaxe" not a pick and hatchet, the combi pickaxe does both wood and stone/ore and gives when harvesting wood both bark and sticks aswell as the wood yield. it also saves on some repair costs and a tool slot in hotbar lowering weight abit on what you carry.

oh and the combi pickaxe, also gives other items from different biomes aswell like resin from trees its a very handy item to have.

[LordStuff]

Originally posted by ParadoxedHope:

Absolutely.
2) If you are harvesting, I saw a video yesterday (interwebs so no idea if this is true and/or still applicable), that says the perk for harvesting twice as much from corpses, actually applies to every single resource in the game. Yellow lotus potions are cheap, so worth testing it out quickly as nothing could double your harvesting as fast as this.

Which one would that with the corpses be? I only see the Survival Perk "Hard Worker - You harvest resource nodes twice as fast".. Is that the one? Also, does "harvesting" include chopping wood and mining ore? Well I'm gonna try it anyways, so..

[LittleBallOfPurr]

Originally posted by LordStuff:

Originally posted by ParadoxedHope:

Absolutely.
2) If you are harvesting, I saw a video yesterday (interwebs so no idea if this is true and/or still applicable), that says the perk for harvesting twice as much from corpses, actually applies to every single resource in the game. Yellow lotus potions are cheap, so worth testing it out quickly as nothing could double your harvesting as fast as this.

Which one would that with the corpses be? I only see the Survival Perk "Hard Worker - You harvest resource nodes twice as fast".. Is that the one? Also, does "harvesting" include chopping wood and mining ore? Well I'm gonna try it anyways, so..

Not the harvest nodes faster but I think the one right below that. I think it is a butchery perk, the description reads about harvesting twice as much, apparently that doesn't just apply to butchery though. (This is/was most likely a bug)

Yeah all things should count as a resource node for that other perk, should, so hard to tell from the often inaccurate, incomplete and vague descriptions the game has though.

[LordStuff]

Sounds neat..

[LordStuff]

And twice as fast means I'll chop a tree in less hits, or I get twice as much? Because latter would be great, and the first one meh..

[LittleBallOfPurr]

Originally posted by LordStuff:

And twice as fast means I'll chop a tree in less hits, or I get twice as much? Because latter would be great, and the first one meh..

Twice as fast should be in half the hits, which should be half the durability use, so should equate to twice as much per tool repair.

[LordStuff]

Originally posted by ParadoxedHope:

Twice as fast should be in half the hits, which should be half the durability use, so should equate to twice as much per tool repair.

Not as bad if you think of it that way, still I'd love twice as much per node :/

[LittleBallOfPurr]

Originally posted by LordStuff:

Originally posted by ParadoxedHope:

Twice as fast should be in half the hits, which should be half the durability use, so should equate to twice as much per tool repair.

Not as bad if you think of it that way, still I'd love twice as much per node :/

That next perk is supposed to be bugged out to do that for all nodes.

To be fair though, you're all playing on a private server, so I would just go to the server settings and put harvesting to x 1.9 (x2 will mean 2 heads, 2 boss items etc.)

[Wikkyd]

Originally posted by LordStuff:

And twice as fast means I'll chop a tree in less hits, or I get twice as much? Because latter would be great, and the first one meh..

The first one is great too, for 2 reasons.

1. For every swing of your tool, you use 1 durability point. So half the swings means half the tool repairs.
2. Half the swings means half the time to resource farm.

In fact, what you should be looking at is amount of resources gathered per unit time. In which case either option (half the hits or double the resources) would double the amount harvested per unit time.

[LordStuff]

It'll still be posing a problem if there aren't many resource nodes around, though.