itch.io

The problem comes in sooner than the blue rocks. The problem is the lack of choice in the earlygame.

Not having meaningful choices is the *sole* reason why your earlygame is boring, and that's easily resolved by adding new earlygame content, making the existing earlygame content more interesting, or quickening the earlygame to get to the interesting non-earlygame parts faster. Your lategame is not boring, and it would not be boring even if significantly slower than it is now, because you actually have meaningful decisions to make in lategame. Interesting parts of a game are allowed to be slow (and I believe they actually should be), but it is a problem if uninteresting parts are.

You can get reasonable choice in IL pretty early - do you want to do wanders, short quests, long quests, or combat/magic training? You know exactly what the reward for all of those are and can choose between them fine, and all of them have their own merits for precisely what they'll do and how it benefits you to do these grinds. In your game, you... can break rock A, or rock B, or rock C, or rock D, and they're all the same difficulty (or if they're not, you have no way of knowing that, so you can't use that to judge your choices) and you already know they're all going to give the exact same reward so that doesn't even count as a choice. And while you do it, none of this actually feels like it's speeding anything up because all the numbers are hidden and the difference is minuscule anyway.

It would be fine to make your game one that expects long-term idling. If you want, you don't actually need to speed up the earlygame (although you should probably add to INFO that you can and should prepare a loop that walks through a large amount of rocks in sequence so that you can AFK break them all, in that case); it's just that that particular gameplay loop is still less interesting than the rest of the game. If you do want to make long-term games, you should look into implementing the QoL features that games like Idle Loops contain, such as the ability to edit your next loop while the current one is running, to make it more about preparing your loops ahead of time instead of the game's current implied expectation of active play and making almost every loop different from the last.