Currently, chests are full of useless junk, inferior to all similar tier crafted items. I propose that crafted items should instead all be white rarity, and good weapons and armor should be found in chests. Furthermore, chests should contain less weapons (about a third of what it is now) but all weapons from chests should be at least green quality. Finally, chests should contain more guns and (when they come) staffs, instead of mostly swords. To counter the fact that weapons (and randomly generated armor?) are found more rarely in chests, more rare, useful items should be found in all chests (uncraftable items and blocks, mostly)
I agree with this post. For me, part of the appeal of an exploration game is finding weapon/armor upgrades. If you allow players to craft the best armor & weapons, you've eliminated an important motivational factor for continued exploration. To add to this I think it would be better if players can find all varieties of biomes at the highest tiers. This will allow for top tier biome-specific weapons/armor. There are a lot of cool biome-specific weapons right now but because they only appear in early biomes..the opportunity for greater game play variety is lost.
What I would love to find outside of the interesting crafting recipes for furniture, codices, and vanity items, are as follows: Weapons and gear with interesting effects. Biome/planet -specific weapons and whatnot. Utility gear like the vine, ice hook, etc. (I would love to see more of this!) Unique techs that you can't acquire otherwise. And stuff like that. The gear you find in chests should not necessarily be better than same-level crafted gear, but it should be more interesting. If all crafted weapons and armors are basically vanilla in function, then weapons to be found while exploring should have unique effects and attack patterns and stuff. I'm sure a lot of this lack of variety will be filled out once the developers are finished with the core content, and can focus on expanding the breadth of the game / filling in the cracks.
