RELEASED FrackinUniverse 6.4.22

Poured over the patch notes for the last few tons of hotfixes... did something change with ship fuel? I'm currently stuck unable to actually reach my wife because where she is over our home world is apparently capped at 7,000 fuel away. My ship however can only hold 1,000. I attempted to solve this by placing fuel in the six empty spaces to equal 1,000+6,000 fuel... but that did nothing.

Did I miss something?

EDIT: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/729480149/133260909498112241/

This alone makes it impossible for me to actually group up and keep our ships in a general location around one another. There HAS to be another way without completely breaking the game to fix this. Admin commands of some sort?

 

That's what I wound up having to do to fix it which required me to bring the server down just to accomplish five minutes of work from an hours worth of headaches. I honestly don't even understand the reason behind the change.... immersion? It just makes traveling and grouping up completely impossible and rather unplayable. The old limits were perfectly fine before. With a cap that astronomically high... you may as well give up running into anyone else on your server unless you teleport to them directly, and even then you're waiting for that mechanic to upgrade your fuel capacity to a point to where you even CAN travel that far. Oddly enough though, every time we play the game, we never have to actually travel around THAT far to find all the planets we need to to beat the FU content. My vote goes to reverting the change to fuel costs. From a gameplay and immersive standpoint, it makes no sense at all.

A note though that might help for future tweaking (if any), my coordinates were somewhere in the -590,000,000s where-as my wife's was in the -800,000,000s from east to west if you were to travel the galaxy map like an overhead compass. Now, a small jump of about 2000 - 5000 units b-lining towards that point would see me with a fuel cost of well over 4k.. and with a fuel tank of just a meager 1,000, I'd have to fill the tank at LEAST 4 - 5 times making little baby jumps. Now imagine how long it'd take to cross just 100,000 units of distance.... if any of that makes any sense. It's just too much when most people simply want to group their ships together to have a flotilla of sorts. I LOVE FU and all of its awesome features as you know... but insane fuel costs should NOT be one of those. :S

 

You grouping up is exactly 0 importance to the mod. FU is not about multiplayer, and never has been. Much like starbound, the focus is on singleplayer. Multiplayer is merely there to use, but not in any way the main focus (especially given that balancing is nearly impossible when people use nonsense like the Augment Combiner mod)

Your opinion on the change is noted, but it won't be changing much (if at all). Fuel costs increased because a max fuel cost for cross-galaxy travel is stupid. You could cross the *entire map* on 500 fuel. Screw that noise. FU offers 20 or so fuel types. Fuel is not scarce. Crew can upgrade your limit. Otherwise, "short" 1000 fuel jumps are your answer, which facilitates more exploration to obtain more fuel, etc. And since exploring biomes is what I am trying to encourage...well, the change makes perfect sense. Even if you don't like it

 

Perhaps you didn't quite understand my findings.... lemme try to rephrase; You CAN'T... because you'd literally have to perform this task over a few hundred thousand if not million times, and would need equally millions of fuel to accomplish the task. NOBODY in their right mind is going to sit for weeks attempting to accomplish this task. Trouble is real world analogies do not work here considering that this is a space ship... in space. If you wanted to use a realistic analogy of majority-accepted space-flight mechanics, I could just as easily turn off coupled flight on a ship (IE: disable retro thrusters and coast through space, something vanilla Starbound does already... hence why you can travel to oblivion for the cost of 500 fuel ((Items it space do NOT stop moving)) in pre-update and vanilla starbound) and reach my destination using the inertia set forth by my ship during the jump.

Realistically a cost of 7,000 fuel which bricks your entire ship from getting anywhere makes no sense considering the many work-arounds that'd see the ship using NO fuel after it reaches the correct velocity, and technically it makes group-play impossible rendering the game unplayable for multiplayer servers.

End of the day, it's feedback. I can only really hope it gets reverted... or at the least heavily tweaked so it doesn't break gameplay.

I see. That's really unfortunate. Wish you didn't come off as side just now, but you're right. It IS YOUR mod... and you're in your right to do what you like with it.... but you know anyone who is anyone who plays Starbound uses this mod for their multiplayer servers. See what I replied above to Iris before quoting you. It is NOT stupid IMHO, as that is NOT how space travel works. For your reference, see the many man-made telescopes and satellites floating about in space. Sure they float through space reeeeeeal slow-like, but they also never stopped going. Same with a spacecraft. If you sent something at a certain speed, it will retain that speed without stopping for any reason (bar celestial bodies being in the wrong place at the wrong time).

I might've said it above but every time we play the game, never ONCE have we skipped over any planets contained within FU... we have to go a small ways out sure, but we did it perfectly fine on the old system (which while vanilla cost 500s since we always ALWAYS run FU, it used to cost 1000 flat. This was fine). I understand where you're coming from... but I feel one should not have to break immersion by "cheating" around to get to other people within a universe. If this system is gonna be kept, I feel it should be tweaked so the costs don't act as literal "artificial brick walls". If we're talking singleplayer, I don't see how one can explore many biomes/planets/worlds with such a heavy cost... and that's assuming you hit the "Goldilocks" of the game which would be getting a couple engineers/mechanics from RNG, good moon/planet with great fuel sources (the ghosts are evil), and a good cropping of biomes to explore and gear up from the start. It just seems counter-productive to those end-goals.

End of the day though.... it's just how I feel. I appreciate the effort that goes into the mod though. It takes a lot to do this as often as it is updated and newer features get added. One good method of alleviating the nightmarish fuel costs that I could think of would perhaps be by making mechanics/engineers perform better? One is already capped as to how many crew members total you can have.... and in order to solve the problem, I'd literally have to pray to RNGesus as I run monotonous NPC quest after NPC quest to get a whole crew's worth of Engineers and Mechanics further preventing progression further until one can acquire the 7k - 10k fuel capacity to travel outbound. I think the fuel changes can be done better. You'd know more than I... but I know it can be done, and in a way that keeps everything balanced and fair.

 

LegendXCarisso, maybe you can simply build a nice base on one of the starter planets together, then use warp pads (not flags) to warp over to get close to each other for outside missions. The ships physically being close together doesn't actually make much of a difference if you team up and can warp to each other and your base easily with warp pads.
Let's say one of you finds a nice planet, you or your wife goes there first, then the other person warps to the teammate. This is how me and my fiancé have always done it, never really needed the ships together. in fact, ships being apart lets you cover more space to search for rarer planets individually. Then you simply warp to your teammate.
Our ships are mostly there to look pretty. Stuff some furniture, collectibles, plants, etc.

 

LegendXCarisso, you should note that this is fuel FOR THE FTL DRIVE, not fuel for sub-light travel. we can do as much sub-light travel(which in this game, is between planets for the most part) as we want for NO COST at all. the only thing that costs fuel is FTL.
the fuel cost is actually not as ridiculous as it seems from our current sub-light standpoint, the fuel is being spent on keeping the ship in FTL mode, not on the actual movement.

 

Awesome.... not how we do it though. We use OUR ships to act as markers for planets we don't wish to throw teleporters on, but want to temporarily explore so we can acquire all the resources we need. 3k pixels and a teleporter core is expensive just for marking temporary planets. I mean... would YOU try to build a house on an infernal world? Or perhaps on a "planet where no light exists"? This is why when my wife and I play, we keep our ships together as a flotilla. It's efficient, it allows us to feel like we're exploring the universe together as a "fleet", and it allows us to go back and forth when we need to.

I'm... not sure if you read anything, but I never once mentioned anything about sub-flight. All this is based upon FTL and FTL only. Even in FTL, you'd only need enough to propel the ship forward fast enough to enter FTL in the first place. You'd break out of this by activating a reverse thrust to stop yourself once you approach your destination, y'know?

Anyway, I've said about everything I could. The rest is up to Sayter I guess. Either he does something with it, or he does not. Really do not wanna have to break immersion just to make the game the way we want it to be every time but if that's how it has to be, then so it is.

Though after sleeping on things I do have to wonder.... are there any plans to expand on the mechs when that update drops? It seemed as though there were quite a few options to use from the gifs and screenshots on the blog. Would be interesting to see what FU might do to enhance them.

 

i just had the strangest thought pop into my head. the florains are a plant race so what if they could somehow enhance there selfs with diffrent plants? i would think an florain mixed with some of frackens unvirse's plants would look funny or cool.

 

Maybe you should do some research before stating something like that. FTL travel is not achieved by 'propeling the ship forward fast enough', you don't just increase your velocity until you reach the speed of light and then 'cross it'. The speed of light is the maximum speed reachable, and even in this case the energy required to increase your velocity when you approach this speed will reach infinity. If you want an exemple search for the alcubierre drive. FTL travel is achieved by the manipulation of spacetime itself, the result is 'apparent faster-than-light travel but your 'real speed' can still be null.

 

To Sayter or anyone else who is knowledgeable enough to answer:

How do you upgrade the Frackin Universe mod from an older version to the new version?
Is it difficult? Do I need to worry about data loss?
Is it as simple as removing the old mod files and replace with the new??

I appreciate any help greatly! Thank you thank you thank you!

P.S. Don't mind the avatar, it found it's way on my account somehow when I registered.

 

How do I unpack this mod? I want to use the resources in this mod as a learning resource. Am I allowed to?

 

Yep, it's that simple. Delete old mod version. Unpack new to same folder. Done.

@ Sayter Is the Spacesuit AIRtank supposed to not give us oxygen supply? If yes, what exactly is it's purpose, 5% resist is the most worthless bonus compared to any other EPP.

 

Awesome... even at LIGHT-speed, you are NOT. GOING. TO. STOP. MOVING. FORWARD... so my point still stands. Space has no gravity, thus no friction, thus no drag, thus no slow-down. You would NOT need to be constantly propelling yourself forward with thrusters (let alone your FTL drive) to maintain such speeds to reach your destination.

Now if everyone is done "white knighting", I said my piece. I've nothing more to add. I stated I don't like the change. I stated why. I don't wish to continue this debate further. If Sayter decides to tweak it? Awesome. If not, that's also fine.

 

try flags? they're cheap one-way teleporters. what did you think they were for?

uhhh.... no it isn't? you're using twice as much fuel per trip.

yeah, but not at FTL speed'll drop to local max(lightspeed) the moment you stop breaking the laws of physics enough to get away with FTL. it's not a question of lightspeed movement, it's a matter of VIOLATING OR BYPASSING PHYSICAL LAW to get to planets that are lightyears away in a span of time not measured in years.

Tempus, if you have the steam version of Starbound, you can subscribe to various mods, FU included, in the Starbound workshop. makes it easier to deal with mods you aren't actively working on.

 

thanks for the reminder! forgot to change that. doing that now

and 5% resist is most certainly NOT worthless once you realize how useful it is.

case in point: i have 45% physical resist, cant yet craft an Acid augment and REALLY need some goods off that there Sulphuric world. That extra 5%? yea...now i can survive down there *without* needing an acid augment. all thanks to that "measly" 5%.

don't write off small bonuses as worthless based solely on the value of the number It's not meant to be a substantial boost, because its not part of a set.

 

You still need tons of fuel to REACH the level of thrust require in order to create enough inertia for it to be worth a damn. Plus...if there is no drag and no slow down...you need to SLOW the ship at some point. Guess what will be needed for that? Yea. Fuel. And considering the speed you are going at, you effectively need to start slowing down at the 50% mark of your trip, or you risk overshooting your target by a very, very large distance and won't have the momentum to just "zip back" properly with adequate time to slow down.

This also means the various effects of relatively will play a part on any and all passengers on the ship. This includes the fact that hundreds of years have passed for everyone else while you are not aging much at all. So your mom and dad died while you were on route, and your brothers and sisters grandchildren will be dead by the time you get back home. If a ship is using 1g constant acceleration, the general math rule is that it will take (Distance + 1 year) to reach your target destination. So that means a planet 200 light years away takes 201 years to reach (more or less) since you need to accelerate to a rate *fast* enough to reach FTL speeds and that's going to take about a year or so.


You're also ignoring various other theorized means of propulsion such as the constant-acceleration drive. A propulsion system which operates continuously with a steady acceleration, rather than the brief thrusts used currently. It creates its own artificial gravity for the benefit of passengers. It is not efficient, but is one idea they float around.



Even hard sci-fi using realistic and viable physics in their books (such as Greg Bear) consistently remark on the enormous amounts of power required to reach (and sustain) such velocities. Fuel doesn't necessarily mean it *only* powers the warp drive. You also need something to prevent your ship from tearing to pieces in the event of an even *minute* tap against a tiny rock in transit (let alone a meteor or other larger celestial object). So, shields. Life support. Navigation. Propulsion. To name a few. All that aside, since no one in reality has *ever gone that fast* and likely *never will*, we don't actually know for certain what exactly would happen or be required. We can theorize, at best, based on our own numbers and quantifiable data.




This is a game balance issue, and increasing fuel cost was necessary. Short jumps and getting more fuel is more than sufficient for those whose ship is not yet capable of more fuel storage. I think a more *viable* thing to argue would be "hey...can we maybe increase the MINIMUM STORAGE for our fuel tank?" . Mechanics and engineers are utterly pointless once you max out. Thus, I increased the maximum, increased the time between upgrades, reduced the amount of said upgrades, and then increased fuel costs between systems because frankly, by mid game it is almost impossible to run out of fuel in FU.


There are *many* ways in-game to connect with friends. One of which is beaming *directly to their ship* and travelling with them. At which point your friend can then bookmark and teleport-link to your planet. Problem solved forever. Fuel required? pretty much none. Thus, your argument doesn't hold much water either way. You have all you need to meet up already in-game.


Finally: if you approach every argument by calling anyone that doesn't agree with you a white knight? I have no time for that crap. You basically just gave the finger to everyone here over nothing. Uncool.


Done with this discussion now. Will not be contributing more.

Science/Math says fuel. Therefore there is fuel. End.

 

When you put it like that, you are absolutely right. Not used to the thresholds for resists yet, I guess. I guess me playing on a character where I already have all EPPs and augments makes me compare it to stuff that is later in progression.

 

and thats the biggest issue. as an end-game character you cannot possibly weigh the benefits of t1-t3 gear