Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-26330892-20160415221318/@comment-24108228-20160416231104

Sorry for the wait, been a bit busy.

This is what I think you're trying to say, tell me if I got any of this wrong:
 * This suggestion is an alteration to the way metal tools, weapons (and armour?) are made.
 * Metal now has 3 forms (4 including the ore), refined metal, heated metal, and molten metal.
 * Tool heads can be crafted directly using hot metal, saving the time you would spend making moulds and waiting for them to cool. However, due to the fact that the metal you're crafting with will cool down over time, it can be very hard to keep large batches of metal at "hot" temperature, restricting it to the creation of smaller numbers of tools.
 * Tools can also be made in clay moulds, which are shaped at an anvil (reasons) and then processed with molten metal to give you the corresponding tool head. This is better for large batches, as you no longer need to babysit the metal, you can just keep it in the fire and it will stay molten for as long as you're crafting for. However, this requires waiting for the tool heads to cool, and the moulds themself require preparations to build.
 * Refined metal is largely useless, and is probably a bad idea to make, since ore is retained by the 10 minute save but metal isn't, so cooking your metal before you're going to use it merely increases what you stand to lose to a disconnect.
 * Tools are made differently now, instead of "Handle + Iron" it's "Handle + Tool Head".
 * Stone tools may/may not be affected by this, and items without a clear "head" and "body" part (such as flint-and-steel, ladles, and armour) are also a bit mysterious.

With that out of the way, my thoughts on this would be that it's really just needlessly making the smithing system more complex. I like the concept, and the balancing system is interesting (mass production requires lots of moulds to do properly, but smaller batches can be done by hand), but as someone who's recently been a tribe's smith for a group of 8 (almost all of which who were woefully under-equipped before I showed up), really most people will only need a sword, and possibly a water container/fire-starter.

A couple of people will want a sickle, and maybe an architect or boat-builder might ask for an axe, but there's never any reason to mass-produce anything, I only made 5 swords and 6 gold jugs, and I was providing tools for the largest tribe on the server over the course of an hour. Nothing will ever warrant the time it takes to gather the clay, craft the moulds, set up the smeltery (this scale of operation wouldn't fit in a forge), and fill and empty each mould.

This issue could probably be solved if you sat down and figured out how to sufficiently nerf direct crafting/increase accessibility of molten crafting, or just found a better incentive to make lots of tools, but really this is just an alternate system for metalworking, not really having many defining perks or downfalls compared to our current one. Survival 303 is a very simple game, resources being very predictable and basic, and options for personal growth being fairly linear, this is essentially what makes it good, as it's easy to dive in and interact with other players, since the main gameplay itself boils down to big decisions that you make with few options in-between, more focus being put on what you do with others. As far as I can see, while an interesting idea, it's more centred around a more complex game.