MadNomad wrote:but for those high quality trees you also need good quality soil
It's not a hardcap so no you don't. It's a simple average (not even a root or anything like that), so extremes pull up the average by quite a bit even if the other variables are crap tier. (Furthermore after one generation you can compost leaves and seeds in your no-longer-softcapping Compost Bin for higher-quality soil. There are also other compostable things you can get more indirectly at higher qualities due to having planted better trees.)
MadNomad wrote:high q ore
Pot -> Tree -> Pickaxe or Stone Axe -> Ore (softcap; you're practically certain to be softcapping your highest quality nodes by tool at low STR)
Pot -> Tree -> Saw + Boards -> Bricks -> Smelter
Pot -> Tree -> Saw + Boards -> Coal
It affects literally every aspect of the metal quality formula.
MadNomad wrote:crops
Pot -> Tree -> Herbalist Table -> Seeds (from WWWs)
MadNomad wrote:stone
MadNomad wrote:feldspar
Pot -> Tree -> Pickaxe or Stone Axe (see above on softcapping)
MadNomad wrote:clay
This is one of the few things not significantly affected (still slightly due to Bone Ash being affected for Bone Clay), but it's a base resource. Further into the crafting chain there's highly likely to be something else that does get affected significantly.
Everything influences everything. And at the start of the world, that's really cool, because it allows you to progress in countless ways and they all feel meaningful to some extent. But it also means that if one thing has absurd values, it ruins the balance by cascading into everything else. Early-game this is cool because trading (at significant price!) for an upgrade to one of your tools feels like a massive upgrade and the impact is still somewhat limited. But much later into the world when things that should be out of your reach for who knows how long are discarded like trash, it gives you massive upgrades at extremely low cost, which gives far, far better value for your time and effort than trying to progress in any other way. There's no longer any point to upgrading anything yourself; your time is far better spent scavenging and trading.
And let's be real: Nobody gets
just a Treeplanter's Pot late-game. It's especially ridiculous that you mention crops, because there are tons of abandoned claims that will give you at least weeks of farming progress through simple and quick scavenging. If you ever get the opportunity to trade, you will be able to get ridiculously high quality crops at bargain prices. But you'll run into plenty of high-quality resources of all kinds, both in scavenging and in trading, that will simply eclipse whatever you get 'genuinely'. There's hardly any point to playing the game until you've finished speed-upgrading everything to relatively high qualities, at which point you're already in the end-game, having skipped all the most fun parts of the game.