Just to cover a few things I still see room for attention, but overall very glad where this game has gotten thus far.
-Thrall leveling should be made possible, likely through the torturer table with relevant crafting thrall for station thralls and by having the combat/dancer thralls follow you through the world to level. This should cap off at tier 3 so tier 4(named) thralls retain their purpose. The process for combat/dancer thralls should be very slow given their low level limit but this gives players a trying to capture thralls the option of skipping the line or settling with whatever they find since they explore a lot and don’t have time to search near and far for T3/4.
-Feats should condense themselves as you progress. Currently, as you level, if you plan to craft your necessary gear to keep leveling you learn the feat available to you to stay up to date with your surrounding enemies. Then after about level 30 you start to notice a number of your recipes are irrelevant yet the feat points are spent. It seems wasteful to expect everyone to ignore this or harvest yellow lotus potions to make the most of their limited feats. I would suggest rearranging ALL feat points related to weapons and armor to be like construction pieces, with an expected total feat points required to be fixed and divided across the tiers leading up to the final tier. This would lower the amount of points needed ofcourse between each tier as to not further the burden of having to progress in feats but at least you wouldn’t feel like any points were wasted along the way.
-(Long read) Many attributes I think are good and well placed, but the encumbrance trait line feels like a complete waste, while the vitality line is almost mandatory just to live. For starters, both mandatory in some small fashion for all builds that plan to explore, because of how heavy everything gets by the time you are “geared up” and with how much damage enemies end up doing even with updated armor.
==Encumbrance should be removed and gently spread out as you level. Something along the lines of 3 points per level, and change encumbrance gear to instead grant weight limit % or a fixed amount. The traitline is poorly made to be built into any permanent build, and the traits range from far too useless to game breaking like someone with 1,000% weight limit sprinting at full speed. Just spread it across leveling so the progression of the traitline retains and with unique armor granting you the ability to carry a more rational and balanced amount. If need be, reduce total attribute points granted as you level to reflect the extra points you may have to throw the balance off.
==Vitality bonus health pool should be migrated to a per-level basis and add some adjustments for investing into vitality. The new bonus per vitality point would instead lower the duration needed before your health would regenerate after taking damage, and by level 30 would instead grant additional total health as to retain its purpose for hp tanks.
So essentially all players would have natural health gain, regardless of level or vitality, to begin after say 60 seconds of taking no damage at the same rate (1 per 1 second). With this baseline, players would naturally gain perhaps 5 points of health per level regardless of vitality. With these 2 changes, vitality now lowers the time needed to wait for health to regenerate after taking no damage by 1 second. By 30 vitality you would of lowered it by 30 seconds, but now instead of natural health regen bonus, it instead lowers the time needed by another 30 seconds to provide the same effect it does now. In addition, it now converts additional time reduction to instead increase your maximum health by an additional 5 for each point into vitality. This stabilizes the higher levels from not practically requiring vitality to survive end-game content and gives those who invest into it the same benefit from climbing past 30 points.
In relation to survival, temperature effects being diminished (vitality level 20) should be relocated to the 3rd survival attribute bonus with maybe further benefits and node/animal resource enhancement should be condensed into the 2nd survival bonus. Give vitality level 20 maybe a reduction to crippling effects are less severe (condensing of encumbrance trait line being removed). The 5th bonus of survival should be faster recovery time from staggering hits and crowd control (half the duration) with a 50% chance to change incoming crowd control effects into a stagger instead.
These are just a few of my suggestions, thoughts?