I've made a start on the next big update which, as expected, is going to take a while so I thought I would drop a progress update since its turning into a bit of a can of worms.
Please note that none of this is live yet and it will be a while before it is.
The first thing I tried to do was to lay out where Enchanting would sit as part of the Tech tree as a way of deciding when you would first get access to Enchantments, is it an early, mid or late game feature? The problem is that the way I have Tech setup each time I want to add a new 'core' tech like the Enchanting bench would be, I would need to add 2 decorative techs as well.
However for Enchanting, I actually wanted 3 different 'core' techs. One for the bench and two more for silver and gold armour. Which meant I needed to also create 6 more decorative blocks and the way I create these blocks its not just 6 blocks, its 6 groups of blocks. E.G the banners decorative tech involved creating short and long banners for every wood type for a total of 16 blocks, for one tech. This was starting to feel unsustainable and overall tech has been bothering me for a while so it seems like time to rework it. The idea with Tech tokens is that I wanted to reward players with decorative blocks and it felt like a nicer reward to let you choose which decorative block you liked most instead of giving you one randomly. However what seemed to happen most often is people would horde their Tech tokens until they felt they had enough to start spending some. Meaning most players spend a lot of time never unlocking decorative blocks.
I debated a few ways to improve this but in the end decide to remove the Tech tokens/systems and instead have mini objectives to unlock decorative blocks.
I'm hoping this is a little more interesting and allows you to earn the decorative blocks a bit more consistently as you play.
One of the most consistent ways to earn Tech tokens was the survival challenges. This is another reason I wanted to rework Tech because the link here feels wrong. Players more interested in the survival challenges are probably less interested in decorative tech, and those looking to decorate are less likely to be interested in combat challenges.
So since challenges used to reward Tech tokens their rewards now need a look over to fill the gap, which is where Enchanting can come in and I can reward recipes for beating challenges instead. This feels more on theme where doing well in combat challenges is how you unlock some specific combat related enchantments.
However my aim for all these updates is a combat update and another thing that feels wrong is choosing to level up enemies, which was also a reward for challenges. In a similar vein, the idea with choosing to level up enemies is that you would be making a choice to fight tougher enemies for better chances of finding those leather strips, but again ultimately it feels wrong to choose to make things harder with no option to revert the difficulty. So I'm removing the 'reward' from challenges to level up enemies and have instead rebuilt the systems for how enemies level up to be more dynamic and happen based on various criteria you complete. E.G defeating enough of a certain enemy such as beating a lioness for the first time or equipping a piece of armour will raise the max potential level for enemies you encounter.
I've started to lay out the foundations for how I want Enchanting to work and it will involve gathering various types of essence from different locations. So you will find a different essence in hot biomes compared to cold ones or deep in caves vs ontop of a mountain.
Because of this, it finally feels like I have a reason to sensibly balance the need for additional bases and portals to travel between them. As a result I've finally enabled the last tech unlock to let you craft your own portals.
The above 3 changes are pretty much finished which has let me start laying the foundations for enchanting. I'm still building a lot of its core logic and UI but it's coming along nicely. One of the things slowing me down is adding a bunch of new equipment and deciding how many is a good balance. For example, I've started by letting you craft/equip boots and 2 rings at a time however most games with enchanting typically also have things like gloves and a helmet. This way you have more choice around what enchantments to mix and match but since I'm still playing with everything I'm not sure that much choice really matters yet. As I add more enchantments I will probably find it more important to have more choice but for now I worry it would just feel arbitary/grindy to add them. FInally as part of creating this new equipment I need to rethink the UI for equipping things a little and I'm not quite sure how far to go with it yet. I'm considering reworking equipping armour to be like equipping tools where you can compare two pieces of equipment to see which is better and why.