So, I’ve been playing for a while and come come to the conclusion that tier 2 stone building is much more time consuming and difficult to do than tier 2 insulated wood. Why is that? Shouldn’t they be on par? Or relatively the same? Stonebrick foundation cost 10 brick, 4 shaped wood, and 7 iron reinforcements.
100 stone, 40 wood, 14 iron bar.
Insulated wood foundation cost 4 insulated wood and 7 iron reinforcements. That’s 8 wood dried, and 14 iron.
Black ice foundation is basically no different and has no added difficulty other than needing to find black ice to mine it.
The difficulty to make hardened stone is just tacking on extra hours of crafting time to get the same damage resistance as something that took 5 seconds to get.
IMO this needs to be balanced, it’s broken.
I agree… I was thinking the same and even thought of making a post about it!
It feels weird, specially considering how easy is to get black ice from raiding the ice temple in the north, I went there to get the recipes and got back with something like 48000 black ice.
Not to mention that, except the reinforcements… all the parts you need to make T2 insulated wood and T3 black ice are harvestable from the world… no further process needed. (dryed wood from the dead trees, resin from north trees, and black ice…)
Agreed.
And 3 nodes of Black Ice with a hardened steel pick = 500 and change Black Ice on a 1X server.
It is ridiculously easy to get if you know where to get it.
It’s rediculously easy, it’s like the devs want you to settle in the north. But I wanna be in the jungle, or volcano.
This is just for bumping purposes.
LOL. For bumping purposes…
Anyway I’d love to make bricks as easy as the other materials in the same tier.
I wouldn’t like it the other way around.
So making 2nd option for t2 or t3 (insulated wood and blackice) harder to make wouldn’t be a good choice.
But lessen the load of stone per bricks could make a huge difference.
I like this game more than ark because it has “less grind” I mean the same time playing here and there I can build bigger things HERE and have to kill less forest as well… and I like it.
But it only applies for insulated wood and blackice I would like to use more bricks because it looks nice. But with the current situation I need like 20 furnaces with t3-t4 thralls to make enough brick for a mid sized T2 castle in hours. and watching you tube while waiting for the bricks is not as fun as building in the game itself.
Also shaped wood is a bit of a pain. With the 1x gather rate multiplier those 10:1 ratios should be at max 2:1
Well… if you have a mid sized log you can make 2-5 “shaped wood” in real life by slicing it up.
and not the other way around… 
also shaped wood needs drying too before it will be good enough for carpentry work.
So yeah thread needs some bumps to lessen the grind and allow us to play more.
I wouldn’t mind if T3 hardened brick would be easier to craft…
IMO what feels weird is the fact that you don’t need any processing to make the T3 black ice (or T2 insulated wood) since you get all you need from harvesting stuff in the world. (Excepting the reinforcements, they are a requirement for all of them equally.)
It doesn’t feel right that a top tier building piece can be crafted with zero time investment (just the needed to get the materials) after getting the feat.
And the materials are easily available in great quantities too… as I said above, harvest dead trees => get tons of dried wood, harvest normal trees in the north get tons of resin, go to the north temple get thousands of black ice in one trip… quite enough to last a long while.
IMO, what could probably would have been required is a new type of brick made from something else and black ice, and use that in making the pieces. Give that a proper time and cost and make it balanced accordingly to the rest of the building tiers in the game.
we should wait and see what they plan with Khitai building (new T2?/T3).
Maybe they have adjust cost when they add it
It’s weird how most threads have people who disagree and have valid reasoning, but this one doesn’t have any. Makes you think :,)
Agreed. This is just totally broken and because of it we see black ice structures in the desert. It’s so much easier to build T3 black ice that there is no reason to build hardened brick.
Please bring the material costs in line with each other.
I was not totally 100% true in my statement here… I realized that you at least need to make the ‘insulated wood’ in the carpenter bench, and I ommited that when I wrote the above post…
BUT, the point still remains: insulated wood is 1 dried wood + 1 resin (assuming T3 carpenter) for 1 insulated wood… while shaped wood is 7 wood for 1 shaped wood (again, assuming same T3 carpenter.) See the difference? There’s a 7x multiplier in the number of raw mats you have to get to get the same amount of usable product for T3 hardened brick.
Also, I was thinking, maybe this is balanced like this due to the increased difficulty of the purges in the north? So people settling there can have an quick to access T2/T3 to protect themselves better from the hordes of enemies? Just thinking out loud 
If that’s the case, I’d prefer if it was done a bit better… atm, balance is too lopsided on the side of easiness (IMHO.)
And considering the advantages of settling in the north… it’s just too convenient… the best thralls, the best materials, the best loot while killing npcs/skeletons, etc etc.
EDIT: typo
It makes settling anywhere else a drag. I was working on planting roots in the jungle, like I have on many many serves. I use to upgrade to black ice because I didn’t knkw that there was another t3 option. Turns out there really isn’t another t3 option…
A reply to this, in the game files, the new dlc stuff is Winter, I can only assume it’s going to be the same mats, insulated wood and a reinforcement
Thing is you can just use a map room, wherever you want to put your main base and teleport to the Temple of Frost. There you can get all the black ice you’d ever need in one journey. Spec encumberance so you can carry all the black ice from the Temple back.
Now, you may have a long journey to get home, unless you’re in the volcano.
So if you do have a long journey, make a second map room near that obelisk to teleport to the closest obelisk to your base, there’s 2 obelisks in the Jungle, so you shouldn’t have a long journey on foot.
With map rooms and obelisks + specing Encumberance where you can carry literally the entire exiled lands with no penalty…building anywhere in T3 Black Ice is viable.
Not only viable, pretty much the only option.
I did made reinforced brick HR outpost at assgarden. It was a pain in the bumm to “wait” for all those bricks.
Steel reinforcement was “easy” just made like a 100 round in that city Npc-s drop some steel.
But while I managed to make a “small” HR office my clanmate made a whole castle out of blackice not too far. Same time at least 5x bigger in size. Only difference was the choosen material. And the specs: He specialized as a fighter I specced as hoarder.
So there is other T3 option it is just simply too much time/work to make it.
(IMHO reinf. brick looks better tho. Same HP)
Made an account just to post on this topic.
This is a HUGE balance issue and now that the Khitan buildings have been released and are using the reinforced brick recipes, well, we really need to see this addressed. Quite frankly, even if each foundation only used 3 hardened brick - that’s 30 stone + 3 stone consolidants per foundation - it is still a huge investment compared to just gathering 5 (lol) black ice. But FIFTEEN hardened bricks?! 150 stone and 15 stone consolidants, plus whatever you used as fuel to bake the bricks?! Why?! How is this even remotely fair or balanced?! Not to mention how much wood you need to gather for the shaped wood versus how easy it is to make insulated wood…
The building lines are badly in need of a major balance pass. Cut down the amount of shaped wood and bricks required for every recipe down to something close to that of the insulated wood and black ice recipes, and maybe we’d finally see some actual variety in the landscape outside of RP servers. As it is? Black ice everywhere, all day, every day. Isn’t that just boring and terrible?
i actually like it the way it is for one reason. if you want to use the t3 building items (using hardened brick) from the dlcs to make your base look better you have to grind more. basically the extra grinding is for better looking structures. thats how i look at it anyways.