When I dig my shafts, I don't waste my precious metal resources digging through stone. That what a flint pick is for. Yes, it is a bit slower. But more speed costs more money, how fast do you wanna go?
Metal resources? At the beginning stage of the game I don't have a lot of metal resources, especially not those gained from processing ore. If I do get resources, of any description, that can be used to make a pick, it's usually from worldgen loot chests. That basically means I would have to waste time and resources either gathering a few picks with good mining durability or to use up resources which have less durability which include but are not limited to various gem-based picks.
I've been trying to wean myself off of having to go and find worldgen loot as that also takes up time. So the question boils down to how much time I want to waste exploring versus the same amount of time wasted digging holes in the ground. It just doesn't feel balanced enough that I can favor a method and be able to mine in an efficient manner using early resources.
Most modpacks don't care if you favor one method or another but Infitech seems to go out of it's way to unfairly tip the balance so that you expend 5x as much time and resources to get anywhere in the modpack.
This is also a reason I want to skip as much of the Steam Era as possible in order to get to the electrical era in GregTech, although mostly I just want to get on with building stuff in this modpack, but here I am tied to making the Steam Era a thing.
To me this is a very grindy modpack right now, you have to expend a lot of effort finding resources instead of simply getting a quarry up and running and doing things way more efficiently.
Whilst I appreciate that Jason has to have things balanced for multiplayer I feel it's killing my singleplayer experience, especially when resource collection options are taken into consideration.
Cheers ...
BrickVoid