I really think it's fine with the refinery. Copper bars convert into 10 pixels a pop, ore into 5 pixels a pop so if you just go for all the ore you find it should be fine. I've got 550 or so copper ore just from mining around. It rewards you for mining, and hanging out on a planet to mine.
This. The later in the game you get, the more late-game ores you get; and they are worth progressively more. Platinum is 50 an ore, and in the level 40 planets is really common. Additionally, mobs drop more as level increases. Methinks you are all just trying to scan everything too early in the game.
The refinery is good. The problem is with the 3D printer; I've repeatedly found myself back from a planet raid with 10k+ pixels and use all of them just scanning the things I wanted.
From the sounds of things, it's really not too grindy. Level 1->40 content in a few days? Fair enough, that's the current cap, that's about to be re-worked, but damn...... That's grindy? Like WoW. WoW.
I was honestly hoping the first basic 40% of the game might take me more than a week. Maybe I'm not a "gamer", but I'm definitely not Korean. Hehehe, the "grind" of Starbound's beta, a few days. It's lol'able.
The problem is the potential for it. Nothing above tier 3 is actually implemented properly now; everything above that just increases armor/armor pen by +1 for each tier, with no bosses/craftables beyond the next tier of metal. It took me close to eight hours of play to get past the UFO. I got from the start of tier 4 to endgame in two. Once there's actual grind there (and not just "lel find a planet with the right ore, dig for 15min") it'll be painful, and more importantly it'll almost certainly be excruciatingly linear in the same fashion as Hardmode Terraria. Except without magic stuff to keep things shiny.
Have you ever built any sort of large-scale construct in a game like this? It can take easily 2000+ blocks just for a square-shaped blob that barely fills a quarter of the screen, never mind something the size of the randomly generated bases/towns/whatever. The 3D printer needs to be able to print blocks because it would be absolutely idiotic for it not to, and they need to be cheap (1p per, in my view), because otherwise building anything interesting is prohibitively expensive. That same ~2000 block storage bunker? A minimum of 2000p with my preferred rate. Even with that cost a large building with lots of ornamentation could easily run 50k+ pixels.
If it isn't done right in-game, people are just going to use inventory editors like they did with Terraria. Because seriously, if I want to build my own human-style compound, I'm not fucking mining out an entire extant one for the materials and props, and I'm not grinding hundreds of thousands of pixels to print them.
I said it was fine for it to print blocks! Likewise I can't keep you from using inventory editors. I really don't mind that. I still think the refinery takes care of most of this on it's own. 10 pixels a bar, for copper. I dunno how fast it goes up, but if it even doubles, by the end of the third tier you're getting 90 pixels per bar/pair of ore. A large pocket, but by no means uncommon near the bottom of the map, of 20 ore, will give 1800 pixels.
The refinery both makes pixels at a pretty ridiculous rate, and encourages people to do something beyond running across the surface of the planet looking for treasure chests, beaming up, then going off to another planet to do it again. (I'd also like to say if I sounded cranky in my previous post, I really didn't mean to come off as such! I'm just presenting my point. Not trying to confront anyone.)
Did... did you even read my post?
I'm not taking an argumentative tone, I'm just saying... I make more in pixels from killing the things that attack me on a planet while I mine than I would if I melted down all of the bars in the refinery. My entire stock of copper (~800 bars) netted less than one surface trip to raid a castle. Either way, that's not the issue I was pointing out.
Let me put it this way: Some of the things I built in Terraria required upwards of 20,000 blocks to build. Assume a cost of 1p per block printed, and you've got a cost in the tens of thousands of pixels. Now add in the cost of all the props and you easily double the cost of the blocks. If blocks cost even 5p to produce it would be physically impossible for anyone to get enough pixels to build interesting things without either cheating or treating the game like a second job.
The bottom line is that if we want to be able to get creative and build things, there should not be this arbitrary barrier of either having to mine out a shitload of material from generated bases, or mine out a shitload of ore to be slowly melted down so we can buy the material. There's literally no reason to throw up barriers like that, and people who want to build under those conditions are either going to give up and not bother or give up and cheat in what they need. A game that forces people to cheat to enjoy it (for no reason at all, to boot) is flawed, especially when it would be so easy to integrate it into the extant mechanics.