Game Mechanics Bring Back Refineries!

No, I do not say this ironically. And yes, while the 1.19 changes to gathering were overall healthier for the game, most of the failures of the refining process were faults of outside contributing factors rather than the direct mechanic, so at least listen to what I have to say first.

The Pros to bringing back unrefined materials and refineries: You can actually gather materials and decide which specific variant at a later date! For me this is the primary reason as to why I wish to see refining return. With 1.19's release, you now have to choose which specific material variant you want at the source, which is problematic for one main reason. You don't exactly know which specific variant you will want, or need in the future. I could be gathering voidstone, but I have to decide whether choose ingots or gems, and in the future I may need gems for accessories or ingots for armor and usage in weaponsmithing. If I end up gathering primarily ingots, I could be out of luck if I need to level up my jeweling. Unrefined materials, however, allow you to choose at a later date, at the moment you can actually make a decision.

The Cons to bringing back unrefined materials and refineries: I think it's important for us to look at why 1.18 gathering was bad in the first place, and how we can make it better. For one, weight was likely the most contributing factor as to why people have negative perceptions of refining. Luckily, the durability system is better for us in every possible way and we should keep going with that. Secondly, the actual refining mechanic was incredibly slow, and so combined with the actual leveling progression of gathering, the process was incredibly gratuitous. I don't see as to why the process can't be instant. And the last thing I can bring up, is how bad the actual refinery locations were. While there were some refineries in spots close to large node locations, nor am I saying that refineries should be so commonplace as to where they are directly near every major farming spot, they were incredibly inconsistent. You could want to refine materials and have incredibly long walks to wherever the closest refinery was (also consider the fact that all the exact locations were not exactly common knowledge), so having them in more generalist spots like in, or close to cities, would be an incredible improvement.

Honestly? I don't have too much to say about the topic. There are much, much more qualified people than me to speak on the topic and I'd love to see them respond about it. I also imagine this has been brought up at least once, if not multiple times in the past, but this could serve as a reminder and allow us to see just how people's opinions have shifted over the course of 1.19 and 1.20.

 

Your only advantage is nullified by that you should already know which professions you’re doing from the start. The system is designed to be so grindy for most people so that they pick only a few professions. Like most people aren’t going to be willing to add or change their profession by the time they’re even level 30 bc they don’t want to spend hours in parts of the game they already finished. And even if this wasn’t true, it’s just common sense to plan ahead instead of gathering resources randomly. It doesn’t make any sense why you would gather resources if you didn’t know what you were going to do with them. If you’re leveling up crafting professions that require two variants of the same resource, just gather equal amounts of those 2 variants (or proportional to the number of professions).

The only real pro with refineries were that they had cool models and made the world more immersive. But that doesn’t outweigh the cons by any stretch though. What made their models cool imo was bc it was Wynncraft and I was amazed they could do this in Minecraft without mods. If it was any other game I wouldn’t be impressed.

So it’s just a heavy net negative to bring them back in terms of making professions more tedious and frustrating (also remember that refining success rates were also a thing too).

 

That answer is simple. When leveling up your gathering you don’t know which resource you will need in the future, and having to “just collect equal amounts then duh” isn’t really applicable when you consider things such as changing up what type of build you might want to use, or what crafting profession you want to level. Just because players “can just plan ahead duh” does not mean that the option to be able to choose must be taken away. While someone like Salted may have said that professions are designed to have players grind only 2 or so at a time, is not argument as to disregard more entirely.

This is true, and I believe someone brought this up to me before and I forgot to mention it during this post, and they told me it would be cool if the actual success/failure rate happened when gathering at the direct source rather than at the refinery.

 

The option to choose isn’t taken away to begin with. It’s just not practical already to switch professions after the early game regardless of refineries. Hence why I think it’s odd to argue in terms of refineries being practical when it isn’t practical to have refining success rates or to require even more backtracking. You’re going to need more materials anyway if you switch to another crafting profession, so you’re not gonna save that much work. If you really don’t want to grind materials again (which one shouldn’t be doing professions to begin with then since grinding is the whole point), then you can always buy or request materials from other players.

 

Yeah, this was me. Having the success/failure decision happen while gathering beats having it at the refinery by a long shot. You know exactly how many materials going to get after refining, get more immediate feedback on the success/failure rate while gathering, and you have 100% confidence that your materials won't suddenly disappear when refining them.

I'm still not entirely convinced that bringing refineries back would really be worth it, though. When I did profs in 1.18 vs. 1.19/1.20 I didn't mind the fact that you had to choose which material you wanted. On the other hand, bringing refineries back would reintroduce that interjecting stage between gathering and crafting, and I don't think there's really any refinery placement that can remove that source of annoyance.

There's also still the issue of when material tier should come in. Should it come up during gathering (you can get "T3 Unrefined Material" that will refine into a T3 material always) or should it come up during refining (you just have "Unrefined Material" that refines into T1, T2, or T3). Either way invokes different experiences. Getting T3 materials while gathering makes you feel lucky while gathering, and you know you're guaranteed to get that many T3s after refining them. On the other hand, getting T3 materials while refining keeps the process simpler (only one, tierless version of unrefined material exists, and not three), but there's also less sense of agency when you dump stacks of unrefined stuff into a refinery and either get 0 T3s or 10.

 

what cons, exactly? nip nop already said to make the process instant, keep the dura system over the weight system, and keep the base gather chance over refining chance

 

The backtracking and that it is an extra step in the process. Even if they were placed better, it would still be inherently more back tracking.

Now that I think about it, I would just give the ability for the player to refine materials in their inventory without the need of an actual station. It solves the OP’s problem without introducing any backtracking. So I guess I’ll change my vote then.

 

What if you put them at every major city?
You only need to refine when you wanna craft stuff mainly (unless I’m forgetting smth)
So u have to go there anyways to get to a crafting station, so if right next to them is a refinery it wouldn’t matter that much l

 

That’s not a bad idea actually. I guess a better title would’ve been “Bring Back Unrefined Materials!” over “Bring Back Refineries!”.

 

I would like refineries to return, but the changes I would make would be:

• Have the success/failure happen when you gather, not when you refine
• Remove tool durability and material weight, having a limit to how much you can gather kinda makes 0 sense and it's just annoying
• Make refineries exist near/within cities
• Make refineries a structure you can place on your island like you can with the crafting stations (possibly add a universal refinery for housing?)
• Speed up the time it takes to refine
• Make it clear how much of your materials will become what tier in the refinery
  

 

At that point, we might as well craft all items using unrefined materials (or one refined material per gathering profession instead of two). Going into your inventory to refine materials sounds like something that happens seconds before crafting, so there's not much point.

 

It still fixes the OP’s problem though and it isn’t much different from the status quo anyway.

 

If the tier of the material comes in after refining, then it will also save inventory space until you refine.

 

pretty cool idea i think