New crafting/progression will take a while to kick in, but will be introduced gradually so we can polish some of it as we go. It will fundamentally change the game, so we can't just flip a switch. Especially given our situation, the game is still using old-world gen, so there will be a transition period where it's a bit unbalanced/odd, until we get that clear move to world-gen v2.
Imagine if we want to make Thorium rarer, but it's kinda too late with world gen v1, so there's this weird balance going on. We have solutions, but it's just this awkward situation we are in as we design the game, and Hytale is already a very complex puzzle to solve to begin with.
The goal of Chapter 1 is mostly to kickstart production on our end, see where we need to scale the team, and so on. Already making changes and making improvements. To give you some context and example, we had to hire a game designer a few days ago, who starts next month and will probably need another one soon. This is caused by moving developers to work on gameplay and increasing the work demand on design. As you can imagine, there are 100s of features and systems to implement in the game, and it's important to have a strong design core team that understands much of it to maintain the coherence of the game flow. At the moment, a large percentage of the design effort is spent on future crafting/progression, so it's a short-term problem. I've personally been putting in extra time to make sure we can deliver something fun, but I know it will take 2-3 chapters to get into a very good momentum where the game "clicks" for a lot of people.
Chapter 1 is meant to introduce some features/systems that will be built upon. I'm being a bit vague right now because I will share a proper teaser later, when we are further along in development. I have some very fun surprises for you all :)