1st of June Progress

Well you'd probably repair them anyway when you return home. I prefer to think of it as an abstraction.
Though there's no reason that technology that can zap you thousands of kilometers up and down from planet surfaces to high orbit with unerring precision can't just swipe all of your tools mid teleport, teleport them into a fix-o-tron or what have you, then teleport them back to you.

 

I'm not okay with this.

 

Since the tools are repaired just by returning to your ship, it cuts out most of the tedium of repairing tools. If you want to build hellevators on your home planet, I don't think this would really stop you, especially since you could also use explosive weapons to build it much faster.


Tiy wants the game to focus on exploration, and digging straight down means you will miss a lot of cave networks and other similar things you could be exploring. Tool durability enforces that to a degree without actually preventing players from doing it. I think the goal was to make it so that digging straight down took closer to the same amount of time and effort as finding caves and exploring on your way down. The way it was in Terraria, hellevators saved so much time that almost all players made one at some point. They often wouldn't even make an underground base to change their spawn point.

Anyway, fast travel of some kind, from telepads to elevators to futurama-style pipes, would be really nice to have for construction on your home world. They'd also be valuable in dungeons for creating unique puzzles. I don't think they would work against exploration at all. Personally I like the idea of futurama-style pipes because you'd have to build the path of the pipe and then you could see your character fly through it, a bit more work and a bit more reward.