Problem:
Few number of players actually enjoy running amok foraging and searching for purity spawns. I, for one, could care less for it and despise it. I don't plan on staying with Salem in the long term because there's no future in it. What i mean is, skills help in some areas, but as far as purity goes, making full use of purity is only but a dream for most. Most players will not find any spawns and quit before they do, once they realize how difficult and rare these spawns are.
Granted, the first step in Salem is to establish a decent homestead with T3 fields and defense or look for purity spawns *yawns*, this is a bloody sandbox most want to build, craft and create... Many quit during this process, or raiders wipe out everything they worked on in the base for the last 2 months and is now completely destroyed and gone within a few hours while they were offline, then they quit heh. Then, after hundreds of iron bar forging and making braziers, you get to look forward to foraging for the rest of your time in Salem, this should keep you busy for at least several months running around the map looking for spawns.
Now, I enjoy the sandbox features and stay cause I like to build, terraform, and farm, but no matter what, staying in town farming, building up, raising skills and biles will NOT make you a successful Salem player until you find purity spawns to produce good purity products. Foraging for the best purity as the only means to achieve decent purity above...3%, to me is a waste of time and extremely boring as hell.
Solution:
Allow players to achieve max purity without requiring to find those 8-10% purity spawns, they should be very helpful if you find them but not an absolute necessity to be successful in the game. Include skill bonuses to purity based on level, is the simplistic approach, using crap purity resources would require players a massive amount of levels to make up for not using high purity resources for the same results as someone with no skill. My suggestion is to change Salem to a more skill focused sandbox to which players can choose to stay at home and develop their characters and towns. If this sounds easy, its not meant to be, it would require multiple proficiencies to be developed and hundreds of levels to compensate for using a low purity resource, but at least there's hope and a future worth working towards.
P.S.
I have been playing since May, have not engaged in purity foraging much, not sure if i ever will. Maybe just remain a low bile player and build/develop areas for fun. eh. I also don't bother raising biles much either, until recently i decided to plan on argo hunting down the road. Point is, after all this time I have no loyalty towards Salem. I can quit today and not look back or miss the game except for the terraforming and building, I would miss my friends. And for some reason since last update I've been falling through the bloody ground at spots, the height mapping is off on edges of cliffs... If I quit the game I will not miss foraging, ever since I started months ago I always thought it was a retarded feature and still think it is. I feel my IQ start to drop til it hits 0 while foraging and eventually end up in a catatonic state, endlessly staring off into space.