#resource collection

subnautica? 100 hours in the first 2 weeks.

planet crafter? almost 14 hours in the first 3 days of purchase.

Thank you so much ✨

Of course!

You can find the Jadecest Resource Collection here!

The Worst Mechanic in Video Games

I’ve gone on record saying that resource collection is the worst thing that can be introduced to a game.  I stand by it.  The problem with resource collection is that it’s a very specific practice.  In almost all systems, there is a need for a very specific resource among a bunch of randomly generated ones.  In some cases, resources are more easily obtained by knowing specific locations in dungeons to find them, or what enemies specifically drop what items.  But there’s still always the specificity of what exact items you need, and you typically need them in bulk.  Think Etrian Odyssey, if you need an example.  There’s always some form of quest where you need to obtain specific resources to complete side-quests.  Now, this system is a more mild version, in that they’re for side-quests, and generally you can obtain what you need while you explore a particular dungeon floor.  Even more helpful, the quests requesting items often open up on the floor which offers that exact resource, so there’s some level of trying to make this easy on players.  But there’s always at least one quest that asks for something exceedingly rare, or something that you need such a high number of that your only choice is going back to grind.

Then there are systems like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, where there aren’t a whole lot of variants of resources, but they’re all rare.  Drop items have a small percent chance to be obtained, and you generally need more than one thing.  In Bloodborne, it’s not as bad because you don’t have nearly the same scope of weapons, and Dark Souls makes it passable for people who just play magic-users like sensible people.  But for anyone using weapons, your options are to know exactly what you want going in, or get ready to grind like crazy in your exploration for a workable thing.  God help you if you want to max out your armor as well.

Basically what it comes down to is that there’s never enough resources to accomplish a goal right away.  There’s universally some level of grinding that’s absolutely required where resources are involved, and grinding sucks.

Variations of Grinding

I just got this one today, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard it.  “What’s even the problem?  All games have grinding.  You have to grind for levels, or grind for gold sometimes too.  It’s tedious, sure, but they’re all the same, so you’re getting mad over nothing.”  Bullshit.  All grinding is not the same, and resource grinding is by far the worst variant.

With level grinding, your expectations are very fixed.  The resource in question is XP, which you get from every single battle.  As a result, each step is observably in the right direction.  You watch a little meter go up, or even just keep track of the numbers toward a new level.  If the grinding expedition is particularly lengthy, you also have the intermittent reinforcement of individual level ups.  There’s observable progress going on, because the resource in question is only useful for one function: leveling up.

With gold, it’s a little different.  Gold is used for damn near everything.  Weapons, armor, items, building facilities, and any other unique functions that the game can come up with.  But the thing about gold is that, because it’s so widely used, it’s perfectly generalized.  You get gold after every encounter too (or in some systems, items you get after every encounter that are sold off to obtain gold), so it’s like XP; every encounter is an observable step in the right direction.

Resource collection isn’t like that.  Resources are very specific, almost like XP.  Each individual resource is typically used for specific purposes, but unlike XP or gold, you don’t get them after each encounter.  There are drop rates.  It’s completely randomized.  Even if you know where in a dungeon to look, or what enemies you need to fight, it’s not every time that you’ll find the items you need.  If the drop rates are high, there’s typically little problem.  It doesn’t take too many trials to obtain what you need.  But in many cases, the schedule of reinforcement is so wide that it doesn’t feel like progress at all.

I can think of two examples of this.  One is a game I played a long while ago called Rune Factory Frontier.  In it, I was at a point where I needed to improve my weapon, and required Silver to do so.  Silver was in a specific location, and I knew just where to get it.  It took hours.  The rate at which it was given was so small that progress basically came to a complete halt for hours.

The other is Final Fantasy XII.  As much as I enjoyed this game, getting the Tournesol is a load of shit.  We’re talking a near 10 hour process.  One drop item was so rare it takes multiple hours to collect four of them in total.  It’s an absolute nightmare, solely because of how resource collection is handled.

Even with high rates of giving out resources, when the process is randomized, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll hit a point where you have to grind for a specific one needed for the function you’re trying to achieve.  And many games decide that you don’t need just one thing, you need multiple, which pushes the delay away from other functions of the game to an even longer interval.  There have been many cases where I became over-leveled and had more gold than I knew what to do with, solely because I had to grind for ten goddamn years to get a specific needed resource.  If the goal were completable just by buying the resource, that issue never would’ve happened, and it would’ve been a process with observable progress.

Justified Hypocrisy?

“Steve you hypocritical piece of shit, how dare you.  You like the Atelier games; where do you get off saying resource collection is bad?  The entire game is resource collection!”

You’re right, the game is nothing but resource collection.  But when your game is literally nothing but resource collection, I can’t fault the system in the usual way by complaining it detracts from the main gameplay.  It is the main gameplay.

But more than that, the Atelier series is this weird, almost magical aversion of the resource gathering system.  Yes, resource collection exists, but it’s so easy to get around.  There is always (in my experience) a location in which you can obtain a resource 100% of the time.  Sometimes you have to explore beyond where you have, but it’s obtainable.  The real variance comes in quality and traits.  Quality, like certainty of obtaining resources, tends to simply come with time.  But traits...traits are highly varied, and give specific skills, so those actually do fit in with my complaints against the high level of specificity of resources.  So what gives?

This is where the magic comes in.  Resources are all generalized.  Barring some items that have very specific requirements, most things can be synthesized using anything in a particular class of resource.  And unlike most other systems, the class of a resource does not inherently have better or worse items within that class, so rarity seldom matters where classes are concerned.

Moreover, the system actually allows you to cycle through items.  Most notably, there’s an item called a Supplement, which can be made from literally any basic resource in the entire game.  By cleverly utilizing supplements, you can cycle into many different items that fit the class of item you may need for a particular synthesis.  It can take some work to find the necessary chain, but there is almost always a way to pull it off.

“Okay, but what about the traits?”  Like items, they’re able to be cycled.  Let’s take the armor and weapons synthesis in this game.  You typically need a specific stone for weapons, and a specific material for armor.  In that way, they’re typically the most restrictive things in the game in terms of how you synthesize them.  But, like all other items, they’re made from multiple things.  Armors require something from the Liquid class, and weapons require something from the Fuel class.  And the thing about classes?  They’re not just base resources; they’re other items you synthesize.

So assume you don’t have, say, the HP +30 trait on the material you need for a Cloth to make armor.  You look through your inventory, and find that you have other resources with that trait.  Odds are good that this other resource can be converted into a synthesized item, that can then be looped around into something of the Liquid class.  In that way, resources are far more generalized.  They may not go directly into that synthesis, but there’s a way to effectively convert them into something that can be used, if you’re clever enough to figure it out.

That’s the big difference here.  The Atelier series, unlike anything else I’ve ever played, offered a way to make resources that you collect fully generalized across potential synthesis creations.  While there are some that still require specific items, and those are typically obnoxious to worry about, they’re infrequent enough that it’s not often that you have to stop, and there will eventually be a location where you can find that resource nigh 100% of the time so it never has to feel like you’re grinding for resources.

Idealized Resource System

If you’re going to insist on a resource system in a game, there are a few things that are critical to put in there to make it not suck.  First and foremost, resource output needs to be high.  Getting too few of a resource is always terrible, and can cause a lot of problems with grinding when the resource you need is rare.  Second, sensible drop rates.  Rarity isn’t necessarily a problem, but oftentimes it becomes one.  If I’m spending more than 20 minutes on obtaining a single unit of a needed resource, you’ve done a bad job.  Percentages for drop rates shouldn’t hit the single digits.  Finally, generalizability.  I don’t care if this is done via conversion of resources, via a trading system where you get rid of resources you have a lot of for resources you have none of, or just letting me outright buy them with money.  Keeping resources too specific is a pain in the ass, especially when a specific resource has a million different functions, and also is really rare.