Originally posted by CrazyGoblin:

A huge amount of the grind can be trimmed down SIGNIFICANTLY if you already know a thing or two about the equipment and what/how much of something you'll be needing further on. But if you don't know that already and just want to explore and try new things, it becomes prohibitively expensive.

When it comes to grind and avoidance of "time wasters", people often do some things by mistake:

1. Dying too much reduces skillpoints, which in consequence reduces:
- Movement speed
- Damage reduction by blocking
- Damage to ore veins
- Damage to enemies
- etc.
Basically, it reduces your progress, making everything even harder and more time consuming than it was supposed to be. So, avoid "dying 3 times in a row" cases like a plague.

2. People are afraid/feeling lazy about moving their base. They often waste A LOT of time on ore hauling. It takes few hours less to just grab everything with you into a new biome. Or at the very least, install yourself a metal teleportation unblocker mod and save yourself literal hours of being stuck in the open sea. Some people like it and thus are protecting it in discussions, but if you find yourself "drifting away" for Youtube vids during the first 1/5 of the path, it says a lot. I don't see it as a "problem someone needs to fix". I see it as a bad decision made by the player, but since most players are dumb, lazy and prefer oversimplistic decisions, 99% of them just cannot see it as their own mistake.

3. People don't "optimize" their decisions. Like, when you need some bronze, some people would return to their main base and go to their original copper/tin sources, and then haul ores to their main base for crafting. Same for sudden iron or silver needs. All you need to do is to go around your current biome's islands and find all the resources there, within 5-15 minutes of walking/floating. Teleports are giving people too much confidence to make such silly backtracking. I think that is why devs think teleports should be removed, and I completeley agree with them. Teleports do help with backtracking reduction, but because of metal tp prevention, it gives people too much reason to stick with "main base" concept.

4. Oh, and there are tricks to dig faster. If you dig up earth around the vein to make it float above the ground, it'll have no support, and thus will save you 5-6 additional swings of a pickaxe per automatically destroyed segment. Should be very handy when dealing with silver ore. It doesn't work if there are too many segments, though, so hack em up into smaller chunks, or they'll not autocollapse.