This issue has really been bugging me lately. The bench crafting vs automation balance is a serious issue, and there has been a lot of disjointed back and forth on the topic since the alpha weekend. Most of those posts are scattered and not coherent, so I wanted to sum up the problem and all of the possible solutions I've seen so far.

The Issue: Bench crafting is ridiculously efficient early game. So much so that a lot of players simply skip over early automation and hold the space bar (or mouse button) down for the first few hours of the game. The same holds true when completing milestones, as its much faster to just hand craft those modular frames when you have the resources then to wait for the assembler to finish it's glacially slow work.

Possible Solutions:

• Decrease the speed of bench crafting
• Increase the speed of automation
• Change game balance (increase tier requirements, etc)
• Crafting bench overheats
• Recipes at crafting bench cost double
• Upgradable crafting bench that starts slow
• Exponential increase craft 'turns' for complex items
• Limiting what the crafting bench can craft
• Do nothing

Observations and Pitfalls:

• Decreasing the speed of the crafting bench makes early game more tedious than it already is, which would be a huge turn off to new players and the desire to start new games.
• Increasing the speed of automation might work, but would have unintended consequences down the line with ratios, speeds, tiers, etc etc and would do nothing for players that still want to hand craft their way to Tier 6.
• Crafting bench overheating would just be worked around by building multiple benches. A global or player-based overheat might work, but probably wouldn't add enough disincentive to discourage it, and would needlessly prolong the early stages of the game.
• Doubling the cost of recipes when done at the bench might also help offset the issue, but then again maybe not with how crazy efficient hand miners are and the ability to spam smelters with them.
• Upgradable crafting benches don't address the problem of needing bench crafting early game and having a slower bench early would be painful and not solve the issue of a faster bench crafting t6 items rapidly.
• Exponentially increasing the amount of 'hammers' complex items need at the crafting bench is a decent suggestion, and one that might gain some traction. This means you can still create those ingots, plates, and rods for early game progression, but would suffer a heavy penalty for trying to craft modular frames. Enough so that you would only want to do it a couple times in order to build your first few assemblers to be able to automate the rest.

Optimal solution: Any complex component that requires an assembler or above cannot be bench crafted.

This is an elegant solution brought up by multiple users, and does not affect any existing ratios for production/crafting or end game balance. Players can still bench craft quickly to get through the tedious early stages (biofuel can go jump off a Sky Manta), while also forcing player to automate for higher tier components and setting up the foundation for easier integration in the future. The only concern here is that some recipes like the Assembler require components that can only be made in an assembler, so a few alternate, possibly inefficient, recipes would have to be added for initial construction to allow the player to bootstrap.

Conclusion:

What are your thoughts on the issue? I would love to hear some intelligent discussion on the topic below. Now that we've beaten that dead horse, it's time to move on to the next game breaking issue: implementing the food court you promised at the top of the space elevator!