I hate TL;DR, but if I was to put one, it would be: Please get settings to mean something.
After the Nth time facing this I decided to write a post:
First, you make your base, it would be a nice “careful” moment to, like in the old days, know that making your base does interfere with resources. If you make your base in a huge mineral vein or a forest, that goes away, like it should. It seems it is not the case anymore. You need to build like steps of foundations to prevent trees from growing in your “stuff”.
Then, more to the point: There is no actual ruling about the settings.
I am a survival junkie. I love games like Project Zomboid or Frostpunk. I used to love Conan Exiles survival. You set up your server for thirst, for hunger, for respawn, for enemy respawn, and it did worked for a while.
Lately, after the “ages”, it does not work anymore. You go away to explore or gather some resources, when you come back, enemies are back, resources are back. You dont even need to worry about actually going after other resources. You just need to go away from the place so it “de rez”, when you come back, everything might have respawned anew given a little time.
I think we should have a real long time for respawn. I think the people who defined the “setting” UI, never had a thought that “from 1 to 10” for faster respawn, given that 3 is already almost immediate, is 7 useless levels of faster respawn, while having like “either 0,2 or 0,3” is a huge gap. However now it does not make a difference, because the setting does not matter.
Someone not in the “survival junkieness” might say “well, you can set the quantity for each harvest” which does not relate to the same economy principle of respawn. Meaning, you can set the quantity to 0,1 if the respawn does not work, it only makes your “times harvested” grow, without actually limiting “having harvest” per hour played count.
And loot has invalidated the settings of quantity harvested. Blanket setting of recipe number does not discriminate if the recipe is harvested or created, disproportionally changing the quantity need further down the tech tree.
All those aspects are used to make different aspects of the “normalization” of a given pattern of resource, and have their “math distribution”, when you crap on one, you crap them all.
In the survival aspect, there is one of the main aspects to take care: It is not because you can build that you can sustain. Sustainability is getting a bad rep because of politics, but in survival games, it is its foundation. Starved for being rush is one of the many things that survival games have.
This kind of stuff, craps on many aspects of the survival part of the game.
In a theme park mmo like world of warcraft, they need to make those systems in which you have “energy like restrictions”, “locked ins” or “gate keeping”, because there is no “smarting it up” instead.
A survival game is fun for those who like it, because it does not need to artificially gatekeep you. You are kept by thirst, hunger, resources. And you can smart it up and try to beat the system. That is a good thing. If you dont like survival mechanics, dont play a survival game.
If you get this game to not be a survival game, it will be a mediocre something else, because it is not built to be something else.