After watching the recent crafting Q&A, I’m honestly more concerned about the direction than I was before. What they’re describing doesn’t feel like an evolution of the system. It feels like a step backwards into one of the worst periods mining has already gone through. We’ve been here before with the quantanium meta, where gameplay wasn’t really about mining, it was about flying around scanning rocks for long stretches of time just to find the one worth interacting with. That wasn’t engaging then, and it isn’t going to be engaging now. The core issue is that they’re tying the final outcome too heavily to the very first step. If material quality at the point of extraction determines everything, and you can’t meaningfully improve it later, then the entire gameplay loop collapses into scouting. Players are not going to spend time mining average nodes if those nodes can never lead to meaningful results. The system itself is telling them to ignore most of what they find. That has a ripple effect across everything else. Refining stops being interesting because it’s no longer about transforming materials, it’s just about handling what you already have. Crafting loses depth because it cannot overcome limitations set at the start. What should be a layered system of player choice turns into a narrow pipeline with a fixed outcome. This is especially concerning because non combat professions are one of the few areas where the game can offer long term depth and player driven engagement. If those loops become tedious or overly dependent on luck at the front end, a lot of players simply won’t engage with them. That doesn’t just hurt mining or crafting, it hurts the broader player economy and the diversity of playstyles the game can support. What makes this harder to understand is that these problems are not new. They’ve already seen how players respond when value is concentrated into a small subset of resources. Other games have run into the same issue and moved away from it for the same reasons. The lesson has already been learned. The concern is not that they are adding complexity. The concern is that they are adding friction in the wrong place while limiting how much players can influence outcomes later in the process. That combination tends to reduce engagement, not increase it. There is a version of this system that could be deep, flexible, and genuinely rewarding, where different professions feed into each other and players can specialize at different stages. What’s being outlined right now feels like it moves in the opposite direction, and that’s why it’s worrying. EDIT: I'm going to copy this from another post I have made on other threads, this is not just a whine thread I have made many posts laying out a more constructive way of doing things so I will just post that here. I am of a firm belief that crafting should be implemented as an additive feature onto mining and salvage rather than a rewrite of those systems. I want crafting to be a deep supply chain with multiple links and off ramps creating a system with choice as to which level of interaction you want to have that also incorporates a off branch into science and exploration. 1. Mining (Resource Gathering) Mining is about finding and extracting materials, not determining their final value. Resources are defined by things like concentration, composition, and location, not an arbitrary quality number. Every deposit has value depending on how much effort you want to invest. 2. Refining (Processing) Refining separates usable material from waste and determines yield and efficiency. Better refining means getting more out of what you mined, but it does not decide final item quality. At this stage, materials are clean and standardized. 3. Material Processing / Engineering (Middle Layer) This is the missing step and where depth really comes from. Refined materials can be combined, treated, or modified to create different properties. This could include alloys, composites, or specialized material variants depending on inputs and processes. This step introduces real decision making based on what you are trying to produce. 4. Science / Research (Progression Layer) Players invest time and resources into improving blueprints and processes. This can affect things like output quality, material efficiency, production time, or specialized traits. Blueprints become a form of knowledge progression and can be traded, copied, or specialized. This creates roles for players who focus purely on research and optimization. 5. Crafting (Final Assembly) Crafting uses processed materials and blueprints to produce the final item. The outcome depends on preparation, inputs, and player choices, not what rock you found at the start. Higher quality items require better materials, better blueprints, and more investment. 6. Economy and Specialization Each step supports different player roles. Miners gather, refiners process, engineers improve materials, researchers develop blueprints, and crafters assemble products. This creates interdependence and a real player-driven economy instead of everyone chasing the same high-value resource.