Taking Pickaxes out Completely........

-You start with the matter manipulator, yet you use it for less than 5 minutes.

-Take Pickaxes out, and use the costs to upgrade the matter manipulator (and Drills, or make them useful for speed, and downgrade the amount of blocks down to 2x2)

-Upgrade the Speed, Block amount, and distance, whether it be placing or mining.

-Make it look different each time, don't just change the color.

- Add more block amount when mining than the current max, and could change the shift to shift 1, shift 2 etc, to change it from 1 block to 4 block to 6 block to 10 block placement. or another form of hot key. feedback please.

-Make it to where you cant place items far away without the matter manipulator in your inventory.

-Don't make it an item that disappears when dropped, and can be deleted in the trash.

-Perhaps you could add chips to it to make it a weapon as well. (not just a pooey one either) ((both melee and ranged))

This is just a suggestion, and a poll to see if it might actually get done. I would Love to hear any ideas or feedback because i think i covered it all But its always great to have a million other eyes on an idea. so lets hear it fellas.

 

I personally feel that Starbound should be a game of AND's rather than OR's. (But ores are okay, do-ho-ho)
So I can't really cast a vote one way or the other. While I think the Matter Manipulator should be a much more important tool (and I believe it will be, eventually), I think pickaxes are fine as well. It would be best to simply have a large variety of tools at our disposal, rather than a straight-line progression system.

So you can choose to upgrade to better and better models of Manipulators, upgrading pickaxes and drills, or even branch out into other more exotic forms of resource extraction! Lasers, fusion cutters, plasma hammers, BARE HANDS?! The possibilities are endless! (And potentially ridiculous)

 

Well, when you start the game, your character is basically a 1st grader in high school. He/she had no idea what he's doing (and neither do you, when you begin), so if you could upgrade the matter manipulator, he/she wouldn't know how. Even the Apex probably wouldn't know how, actually. They're very modernized, but not exactly futuristic. A pickaxe, which is apparently so old, everyone knows how to build one, is really the only thing your character can consider and upgrade.

 

This is the future.
You know not enough back story to even make that call about the upgrades. tech upgrades?
and yeah you start with it, grats. i never said the upgrades would be free or avaliable, you dont get to see many of the things you can make until you eat an Mk ship upgrade and ore tech upgrades? really?

 

Well, excuuuuuse me. I was trying to be logical, but apparently I don't know enough about everything. My bad.

 

That isn't the same thing, and either way any moron can change the processor on a computer without knowing any of that (not that you are a moron). Disconnect power supply, remove heatsink, disconnect cpu, line up new cpu, insert, apply thermal paste, reattach heatsink, plug back in. A child could do it if it is explained to him.

This could be similar to that. You don't need to be an expert to install a bigger battery or exchange a part for a better one. You need a screwdriver. Besides, the character is already a space pilot, master craftsman, electrician, robotic expert, and dragon slayer. Why couldn't he upgrade a tool that only needs a couple of those at most to work on?

 

I agree that Pickaxes should be removed.

You character can pilot a spaceship, and is obviously not an infant, the things that kids know today in 2014 puts them at an intellectual level well above what most educated adults even 100 years ago had. In a Sci-Fi world several years in the future the things that would be common knowledge that even kids would learn could be well above anything our top minds may know today. It's not unreasonable to assume our characters would know enough about technology...

Pick axes detract from the Sci-Fi feeling of the game and I feel like they make it too similar to Terraria, a parallel I would like to see this game move away from as much as possible.

Upgradable MM
Hand drills
Lasers

These are things that would work better than the axe>drill formula this game brought over from Terraria.

Hell, I would love to see a 'programmable' robot that could flatten terrain and store the blocks it dug for you to collect, you could have it auto mine in rudimentary paths.

 

how about blasting caps? a directional explosion that takes out a good chunk of blocks....

 

Great idea. +1

 

Just feel like I should point out a few things:

1- I wouldn't exactly say my character knows how to pilot a spaceship. Sure he may know how to search for planets and input the coordinates into his navigation system; but once that's ready he'll set the ship to auto-pilot and go smelt some copper into ingots (which he likely won't ever use again during the length of his adventure).

2- In any day-and-age, there will always be geniuses and incompetents. what's unreasonable is to assume that just because the game takes place in a futuristic setting means that everyone is at the same intellectual level. Furthermore: just because something is "common knowledge" doesn't necessarily mean everyone knows it; OR knows how it works. After all, I'm fairly certain that I don't know how to build a combustion engine from scratch, even though it's common knowledge that those are what make cars move.

3- Personally: I like pickaxes. They're familiar and reliable (until their durability runs out). It isn't uncommon to see pickaxes as well as drills, and possibly lasers, being used at the same time in a lot of futuristic Sci-Fi games or movies. Knowing that, it doesn't detract from the feeling at all for me.

4- upgrading your digging tool from pickaxe to drill is a somewhat common practice in games I'm pretty sure; it didn't just come from Terraria.

5- It's a game, not reality. not everything needs to make sense and be perfectly logical.

 

I think pickaxes should stay. Here's a good reason.

Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.

• Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"

 

I do want to see more things in the game that replace your iron age tools like pick and lumber axes with things like fusion cutters and gravity guns (for handling hazardous materials of course), but i think that the pick axes and all your other pre-iron age equipment are needed as you're stranded and out of fuel in the beginning and need to make basic tools to scrape by. Would be step one in a rapid age advancement, later being replaced by tools like the mater manipulator.

 

I guess I feel like going from a Sci-Fi tool like the matter manipulator to a medieval tool like a Pickaxes is back-tracking.

I don't disagree with a lot of the counter-points that Sora Ultima makes to a certain point, but I feel like there is a lot of semantic argument there that is dealing with specific things I said but forgoing a lot of the message of what I was trying to express.

This game has so much room for coming up with new and creative ways to not use the same old formulas for this type of progression I think it is a shame if they don't explore it more. I don't think many people would miss the 6 or so tiers of pickaxes.

Would a reasonable compromise be a single Pickaxe, I would say steel to appeal to the realism truists, and then expanding with proper Sci-Fi ideas beyond that?

 

I think the main problem arises from the fact that you get the super-futuristic multi-tool from the beginning, and only use it for about 2 minutes throughout the entirety of the game (that is, using it as a useful tool, aside from when placing things). I feel like that was overlooked on the devs' part; but now it's already too much of a core element of the game for anyone to do anything about it. I argee with you on that, it is a serious downgrade.

I would also just like to say, my first two points from before were directed towards specific things you said, however the other three points were more general (or rather, #3 & #5 were really the main purpose of that post).

I think the devs went with pickaxes because, again, they're the safe route to go, at least in the beginning. They're a familiar mechanic that seem to work (even if a lot of people seem to hate them for not fitting in with the whole Sci-Fi theme). the problem I see with a single pick being made of steel, is the balancing of the other tools. The M.M. would have to be buffed (which we all agree it should be anyway) and the drills would have to be nerfed in order to compensate for the somewhat substantial shift in mining power. If the drills are nerfed, then it would definitely leave some space for an additional mining-tool-tier afterwards. that's how I see it anyway.

I would like to point out though that there is a mining laser within the game's files (which I found through the Creative Mode mod. actually I'm not sure if it's just a part of the mod or not); but its durability is garbage, as it's clearly not ready for usage yet and I have no clue if its intended to be implemented later on in development.

 

Something that also needs to be pointed out is that matter manipulators have a far longer range of breaking objects than what pick-axes or even drills do, which has always irked me because even with the diamond drill, a tool that's supposed to be vastly superior than what you've worked with ever before, is still inferior in that you can barely reach higher places without jumping constantly. Matter manipulators have a very subtle finesse that your best tool doesn't, and that makes it feel inferior to it, even when it's not supposed to be.

That being said, I like pick-axes and drills, because they're pretty cool and harken to concepts that we, as players, are familiar with. We look at a pick-axe and a drill and we automatically know what it does and what it's meant to do. The most I could suggest revamping the designs of the pick-axe so they fit the theme of the setting they're in, and then as a final construction apparatus, have the final craftable tool be an enhanced matter manipulator that is worth a damn. You end at the beginning, and you even get to feel how far you've gotten; from broken matter manipulator to ultimate! (I also feel they should do the same thing with the sword, but that's another topic for another day.)

Back to the pick-axes, modifying how they're crafted along with their appearance would be a decent solution. Something the equivalent of a pick-axe lightsaber, which would mean adjusting it's crafting recipe slightly to include laser diodes, which in turn would mean having the laser diode available from the get go. It would also mean having to tweak it slightly from steel to iron, though this is relatively minor; steel is made of iron and coal, both of which are available materials in Alpha planets. Here's an image on how it would appear, roughly.

Pick-axe of the FUUUUTUUUUURE!​

 

I'm torn between the two.

I hate having to have a matter manipulator and pick-axe. But I feel that needing a pick-axe is a last resort only for survival kind of thing. I like the idea of upgrading the matter manipulator and ditching the pick-axe later in the game. Having 1 very expensive tool is better than 3 cheap tools.

 

10 block placement and breaking doesnt seem very legit also matter manipulator has already quite a long range, so that wouldn't need upgrades, and making it a weapon would just make it an all-in-one tool. weapons and guns would be useless with a matter manipulator that has maxed upgrades.

 

Sora Ultima, I agree that the devs probably included pickaxes because they were familiar and safe and they already had the foundation from the work they did on Terraria, but our guy can smelt complex alloys, create weapons and armor with a simple workbench and create clothing on a spinning wheel (let's assume the robotics table and wiring table do all of the work for him once they get those, benefit of the doubt.) I'm fairly sure he has a remotely above average intelligence, and average intelligence for a human society that has mastered space flight and teleportation, or 'beaming', has got to be fairly high. There is no expectation that every one is at the same intellectual level, but I think there is a safe assumption that there is a higher average and that if a character has his own ship and the know how to design and build a lot of the things our characters can that they are probably not an incompetent.

Pickaxes still feel too mundane for the fantastic setting to me, it's hard not to let that break the fourth wall. They could have lasers, inorganic molecular destabilizers, focused sonic drills, arc tools and gas powered cutting torches, hell a water pressure cutter would even be kindof cool. Let them figure out the balance, that's what they get paid to do, and we help them, that's why we paid for a beta of the game. I don't feel like anything at this point is too much of a core mechanic to change, that's the beautiful thing about games is that a couple of image files and a few animations and something like this is an easy rewrite.

I also know that everything doesn't need to fit into a nice intellectually justified box, things can be silly and rediculous and completely nonsensical, but I think there is also a balance to that, where if there is a way to take things, such as core mechanics, and make them a little more realistic, a little easier for the pragmatics to digest, there will be more leeway on the things that aren't.

The only reason I keep drawing the parallel to Terraria and how I wish to see this game move away from it is the primary developers connection to Terraria, and the plethora of things that were directly copied from that game as a result.