First off. Love the new update. I have been testing sense 0.2.0 and I love this game. I do have a few suggestions and bugs from this newest build.
BUGS:
1. Crystal Caverns - Vegetable Orb and Mineral orb have different layouts. One says "three", the other "3"
2. Crystal Caverns - Vegetable Orb only gives 1 item
3. Lumenleaf Grove - Advanced items never drop.
4. Clockwork Spire - Some Tick items do not work, See Printer.
Suggestions
1. Lumenleaf Grove - If scavenge speed is maxed show "Speed maxed" or something. or maybe just show the time it takes next to "scavenge" so you can see how much should be
2. I never used scrapping. Maybe if items auto scrapped once you had 100 of them and an upgrade to auto scrap and that rarity then it would be more useful
3. I like the Idea of portal and I believe that it will lead to the highest scores. However sending everything one by one is not the best. I have a few Ideas to make this better
-- Have a place in research where you select and it adds to a pool that you can use for portaling items rather then the areas resources.
-- Or break the portal upgrade into 4 or 5. first one allows area one to access all areas items. second allows area 2 to get access to all items.... repeat for rest
-- Or you can turn a portal from one area to another on and then all items you roll are automatically sent to that other area.
I will include some of my highest score before portal below
Amazing to see your notes! I very much agree with all that you have mentioned.
The salvage is at pretty simple mechanic, meant to make your "useless" items a bit more useful, but currently the payoff is too minimal - i will rework the mechanic slightly on the next update, as it will be used to create powerful trinkets
As for the portal, it is sort of the same thing, it will need rebalancing to make it less tedious to use, while still being expensive as to not make the game too easy
I actually am also planning on a major item rebalancing across the game, as i hope this next version will be the last that changes any of the existing levels in a major way
I am happy that you like the game, Sorry for the bugs, those will of course be fixed!