The Difficulty of Nightly Builds.

The nightly builds are too hard. I have made a character, and put about 2 hours of progress into that character. I had made little to no progress into those hours. I had a quest where i had to collect plant fibers to make a bandage, But my spawning planet (which i could not escape from) seem to lack caves. Not a single cave. Making the gathering of plant fibers impossible.

So i pondered, If i fix the ship, i could go to a different planet. But the cost was 1000 pixels, and 20 Core material something.
What is core material? And why so many pixels? Its impossible to make money like that because monsters only drop on average 8 pixels each, And the monsters are tough enough as it is. Dying makes you lose 30% pixels and all your ore. You can go and pick the ore back up, but not the pixels. I cant even get a copper pickaxe because i get pwned and lose all the ingots required.

Friendly developers, I think its awesome to add progression where you would need to visit Outposts and other planets to complete quests, but that's all wasted effort if a Player cant even get off the first planet. I plead you. Tilt the difficulty into our favor.

This is Starbound, Not Dark Souls. (Is it Star Souls? Dark Stars?)

 

ugh.... i think caves being removed is a bug..isnt it?


Also it is confirmed that we will have more ways to make pixels later on, remember the nightly build is incomplete

 

i know right, i dont know what the devs were smoking when they came up with that idea x-x

 

I think the devs want to get closer to something like Minecraft. Where you actually really care about not dying, because you drop everything. And you really want to concern yourself with survival first and foremost.

But Minecraft is a different game. Combat isnt its main focus and you dont run into mobs all the time. Neither do mobs, typically atleast, kill you in just two hits. Something that with the scaling in Starbound does certainly happen.
As a result, when you die and drop your ore, you are resetting a pretty lenghty mining session but this is something that could very well happen quite a bit more often then in Minecraft. So you run a greater risk, afterall combat is a core part of the game.

Another game people often compare with is Terraria for obvious reasons. But Terraria actually had a very generous penalty, in the sense that death didnt have to much of a consequence. Losing half your gold sounds severe, but i rarely used gold. Losing half of something i dont really need, or only for a few very specific things, is not a big drawback. The biggest drawback was dying on a boss as you had to resummon it.
But other then that, dying in Terraria was not a big deal.

Truth is, this isnt an easy subject. And honestly i wish the devs would just pick a stance and say "this is it, deal with it. If you want something else get a mod".
This constant flopping around the subject (half your pixels, no wait 30%... no, no... 40%.. ow and you can store pixels. hmm, but... now your ores drop aswell) isnt helping.
It invites far to much discussion, and you will never please everyone. No matter what system they go with, there will always be a significant group who is upset about it. And having set a presedence of changing, a group will constantly push their own interest to get this changed to fit their own preference.
Which then upsets another group who picks up the discussion again to try and force it into their preference. All the while the game is still undergoing heavy development and balancing. What is now a very lethal environment on your starter planet, might be tweaked to be much easier. As a result you die less or if you die its not unfair, and its really your own fault.

These difficulty tweaks affect how balanced a penalty upon dying is. And untill we get to a finalized version, or close to it, and we get a clear idea on how difficult and punishing the game is going to be, i dont think there is much point in trying to lobby one way or another.
Any feedback other than wether or not its balanced and/or fair in the current itteration/build is pure speculation and not all that constructive.

 

idk about you but i been looking for hours in the assets for a way to remove the awful ore lost idea but i cant find anything
i think it might be hardcoded into the gamefiles in witch case, we are screwed

 

The best way to deal with this issue is too let the player set his own difficulty. Let's say easy mode would be 20% pixel lose and no items dropped and med would be 30% pixel lose and you lose you're ore and hard 40% pixel lose and you're whole inv is dropped and hardcore is well you know perma death

This give the player control on what he/she picks on difficulty and they can't cry about it because it's thier own fault for not only dying but setting that difficulty themselfs thus making everyone happy

 

Well ill let you know about me, i am a louzy modder so i cant help you there.

It does strike me as a bit odd that something like this wouldnt be moddable.

 

A common problem with developers is since they're so used to their own game and know the ins and outs it can seem almost too easy. Difficulty is hard for us to gauge because we're just too good ( ). Come next patch (when it happens in the unspecified future) I imagine we'll seriously look at the difficulty again. I might bring it up at work too. Seems to be a common complaint.

 

thank god,
this ore thing honestly was gonna ruin the game for me
i been looks for hours on a way to mod it out with no luck
and thought i would just have to cheat for the rest of the game inorder to have any fun

 

The feels are passing around. I can feel the feels!

 

I've honestly seen many a game designer fall into the trap of making games that would be a challenge for themselves to beat. Some intend it that way; but without guidance, they turn out problematic, with either a viciously hard early game, or difficulty all over the place (Some areas easy, others unbeatable)

Be sure to take a look at some of the suggestions, or consider how a difficulty curve in AI may be approached. I'm sure no one wants the same monster reactions from tier 1 to tier 10 either.

 

You should check out the death penalty thread, lots of neat suggestions there for replacing it..


Again its easy to fall into the whole "too easy" and then the whole "too hard" trap, and it is hard to balance. I have faith you guys will figure something out.

 

Not finding it too difficult, I'm glad death isn't just a short cut to your ship anymore.

 

Regarding plant fibers, you can also get them off growing wheat, although not in very large numbers (depending on the size of your farm). Not sure if the other starter crops also drop plant fibers though.

 

Spawning high tier items and playing invicible isn't too good GeorgeV, we've all seen how devs play in the streams

 

people like you need to be more loud on the forums it seems the only real loud ones disagree with you on that. The devs must see people like you.

 

I'm also playing nightlies and happened to come across a starter world with no natural caves or plant fibre at all near the surface. Starving to death three times in a row before a monster's kind enough to drop its meat while getting no materials to make a hunting bow from is a really frustrating way to welcome a new character into the universe.

Perhaps creating additional sources of plant fibre or making a variant of the hunting bow that doesn't require plant fibre (what about, say, animal hair?) could alleviate some of the tedium of getting such a starter world.
For the record, the planet name was Epsilon Mu Vel 8024 IV a (x: 6309739, y: -31350585).

 

Also going to bring up the ore drop thing, seems like an artificial difficulty thing, i.e. it's there for the sake of trying to make the game more difficulty. Artificial difficulty is not fun. I do like how all of the craftable tools have have more of a use now though (I've never used a hunting bow before, but because of the change in combat, I've found it and farming necessary for survival).

One last thing, please bring back ores dropping from fine sand/gravel deposits, that was my favorite aspect about mining... now ores just vanish which doesn't make any sense.