Oh shit yea now I see what you mean. I wasn't even thinking about the torches with evercoal. You can always use the cheat menu, but ultimately I know you don't like to use it for the same reason I don't. I'm still using a very old rig that doesn't like it when I have more than a few torches burning so I've already been limited.
Hopefully that will change in the near future, but I'm not entirely convinced that the crystals will be limited to only one pick up once the game is final. He tried that with one build a while back and there was a lot of negative feedback because of it. If you noticed since then there has always been some way to keep getting crystals.
Right now the dungeons behave differently than the open map. The dev has been flip flopping from "destroy chests and they won't return" to "loot chests and they will stay empty". Maybe he's getting the coding wrong and his intentions are rarely being implemented the way he wanted. But I think ultimately IMHO that the end result will be that the players will have a way to be able to acquire enough crystals to enjoy their game and possibly a way to always be able to acquire another crystal. Personally, I would like for there to be only one crystal that could be acquired multiple times like maybe in the demon dungeon as a rare drop from some final boss or something. Only not too rare...
The build 8.6.1 nuked all dungeons, but the open map completely resets all storage not created by the player including anything that can hold an item, i.e. chest, workbench, campfire. It feels like he is trying to find a sweet spot for making some things accessible infinitely without making it a game breaker. Only its been wildly unsuccessful like he's trying to hit a bull's eye from 200 yards by shooting from the the hip.
I am perfectly fine with having a limited resource in the game (Crystals). I understand that the Dev seems to be trying to make the game more challenging (and I am fine with that as well), but tying useful crafted items to a non renewing, rare, resource just sounds like a bad idea.
- When they nerfed the harvesting of 'wild' fiber or wheat, farm plots were a viable alternative.
- When they nerfed health regen and Stamina recovery, it made health and stamina potions more viable.
- When they changed Legendary armor to require a Crystal for T1 armor, it made Royal armor just that little bit more viable.
- When they removed sand from spawning literally everywhere on the map and restricted it to the desert, it rather sucked and it did add a little challenge, but the sand piles spawn everywhere in the Desert.
I just hope that there is a good reason for the change to Evercoal other than 'Evercoal makes the game too easy, let's make it harder to get by requiring Crystals'. There is no tradeoff in that, it just feels like doing something 'just because'.
If they had said they wanted to make Evercoal a more valued item and thus they were increasing the costs to 250 wood and 250 coal, I would have griped and grumbled about it, but I would have rolled with it.
They could have added 'new stuff' to make Evercoal. A new resource to harvest (Sulphur). A special crafting station (Lava Forge) that requires 'Unobtanium' to make. Create a quest with the Wildlings or Morvayne (bring us X number of troll/drake babies).
PS:
Just sitting here forever trying to write up my response, I wonder if they were thinking that Evercoal was too easy to make and thus invalidating the need to harvest coal for use in the Furnace.
If that was the case, they could have just left Evercoal alone and created a new item in the game 'Hellfire', which can be used to 'eternally power' the forge, but the item requires a crystal and some 'Unobtanium' to craft it.
