Bookmarks | Warping Redux

Objective​

To reduce the tedium and awkwardness of exploring multiple planets without annulling the difficulty, cost, and risk of exploration.

Bookmarks​

Players can no longer set Home Worlds. Instead, they can register multiple planets as Bookmarks and give them names. Players can access the Bookmark list from their ship navigation to return to any Bookmarked planet's coordinates quickly.

Players cannot instantly Warp To Bookmark from the ship. They must expend fuel to travel to a Bookmarked location. Because of this, the cost to move to a "far away" planet is reduced from 200 fuel to 100 fuel.

The Bookmark list is not retained between single- and multi-player. Bookmarks can be obtained as items and are not consumed on use.

Warping Redux
Emergency Exit​

Players can now teleport back to the ship from anywhere in the planet, regardless of background walls. However, the player must remain standing still for a period of time (that means no getting knocked around by monsters) so the ship can lock on, depending on elevation. The warp icon's color will change to indicate how long it will take:

No background wall: Cyan icon, instant
Background wall, "near surface": Lime icon, 1 second
Mid-Low Elevation: Orange icon, 3 seconds
Low Elevation / Near Core: Dark red icon, 5 seconds

New status effect: The player's digital watch or whatever it is can be frazzled by electric attacks, preventing teleporting out for about a minute.

Quitting Midgame​

Quitting the game while not on a ship AND while the warp icon is not Lime or better will now kill your character. If the character was created with Permadeath on, the player will receive a confirmatory warning when Quit is selected.

I have an idea to prevent people from simply axing the program to bypass this, but I don't want to publish it as it will hasten the ability to bypass that too.

Warp Points​

When orbiting a planet, you can now select different spots on that planet to warp to.

Random: Selects a random spot on the planet surface (determined by starting from the sky and going straight down until a solid tile is hit.) Potential to discover floating islands when applicable.
At Point: Shows a list of specific warp points. On a fresh planet this has one value - the same spot you would teleport to in the current build. Players will be able to use Warp Pads and Warp Beacons to change this spot, and the first Warp Pad built will replace the default warp point.

Warp Pads & Beacons​

Furniture-type items built to allow players easier far-reaching access to their planet. These items' recipes are both obtained at maybe Tier 3 or 4.

Warp Pads resemble the ship's teleporter pad (possibly using the same sprite) and require enough clearance above them for the player to stand on + 1 tile headroom. When standing in that clearance area, the player may teleport out instantly.

Warp Beacons are tripod-mounted radio discs (sort of like the Distress Beacon). Activating one will show a 3x4 glow on the player. They can then move up to 1 screen away and Activate again. That Warp Beacon will then allow players to warp into (but not out of) that 3x4 area from the ship. The reason for having to walk there is to prevent exploits / warping to unreachable locations.

 

Very good post !

 

Love the idea , would like to see it in the game ! That could add some imertion and fun in my opinion.
Nice job

 

The warping from ship to planet ideas are great. I posted them in another thread without realising that you'd already posted this.

After 10 hours gameplay I decided to go to another planet last night.

I touched down and walked to my right for about 15 minutes of real-life earth minutes and finally came upon a settlement that was quite spread out. My backpack was full so I beamed up to my ship to empty my sac!

Deciding to beam back again I realised what would happen. I beamed back to the original spawn point! Not wanting to walk for another 15 earth minutes to get back to where I was previously I left the planet.

Therefore Fibriel, I thoroughly approve of your suggestions. Great minds think alike!!

I bet if I had walked to the left there would have been a large civilisation full of naked Hyotl beauties!!!

 

Excellent idea, and excellent delivery!

I like how warp times are non-instant (but possible) for places that have background walls or are underneath the surface. I also like the warp pads, and being able to set new spawn points (without finding floating islands).

 

Also what about a crafting bacon ? So when you visiting a big planet and discover a nice spot like settlement or a village , you could turn on the bacon on the ground and now you can warp from your ship to him when you are in orbit !

Place as many beacon as you want for as many spot as you want

Of course it's a consomable and the crafting would be tier 3 or 4


You could add this to your post if you like the idea ( not an order just a suggestion, don't take this sentence in the egocentric way )

 

mmmm.... Bacon

 

I rather like having a homeworld, a place I can go back to from anywhere. However, I do like the other ideas. But so long as you can only set a homeworld FROM the new location, having both bookmarks and homeworlds wouldn't bee too unbalancing. Then again, at some point, fuel becomes readily available enough that the extra fuel usage isn't too much of an issue.

Some form of being able to change your beam-down location would definitely be a great boon, and the changes to beam up sound good.

 

Under this system your Home World is nothing more than a Bookmark you go to particularly often.

I think being able to label Bookmarks (including setting one as "Homeworld" and that one always appears at the top of the list) would be fine, though.

 

I...like this idea!

I'm a bit scattered about the universe, so a system of bookmarks would help keep my places intact.

 

This seems excellent to me, although I would add that the fuel cost to reaching a planet should be reduced for very "close" stars; this would give the galaxy more of a sense of place, and would make random generation a bit more interesting because you'd have to think about how useful the stars near a particular world are.

However, I do think you're maybe missing the point of the current homeworld system; the devs put it in because they realized that some people like to focus on improving one world, and without some cheap / easy way to get back to that world, those players are relatively locked out from exploring the rest of the game. Reducing the travel cost to 100 would help with that, but I'm not sure it would solve the problem.

Fuel costs for distance would help here (provided the costs for very close stars were very low), because you could simply explore the "neighborhood" around your favored homeworld so it's always cheap to get back. Another option might be to have late-game constructable stargates or the like, allowing players to expand while retaining a link to where they were before.

(Essentially, the genre Starbound draws on has two main features that draw people to it -- exploration and construction -- and Starbound needs to find a way to satisfy both. The current homeworld system is obviously a temporary kludge, but it's a temporary kludge that serves an important purpose in letting those two features coexist, so before you can take it out you need some way to let players -- especially in the early game when fuel is scarce -- continue to explore without completely abandoning what they've constructed. Ships are intended to serve a lot of this purpose, but I suspect the devs found that, at least as they are now, they don't give enough freedom. Lower fuel costs for traveling short distances would help with that.)

 

Once I'm sure there won't be a Universe wipe, I want to build up a world as a homeworld, and I like being able to go there anytime without fuel worry.

 

I have always thought beaming was slightly op and this is a great way to fix that

 

Beaming to the ship is as easy as escape/quit. Until that changes the rest doesn't matter too much.

Teleporting to the ship from anywhere is a very powerful ability. Teleportation makes the world smaller and limits the risk/adventure involved with deep exploration. The idea of using some sort of escape item can help limit abuse. But when you're deep down, feeling that you won't make it out again is just part of the adventure.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

See this? This is an overly complicated way to say "doing something makes it harder or impossible to do other things at the same time". It's one form of consequence.

Consequences such as this are results of every decision that someone ever makes, by definition of being a decision, and are a basic fact of life. It's a concept that today's youth aren't able to cope with because social media and video games have spoiled us by unrealistically removing consequences (the ability to instantly and completely block anyone who mildly annoys you, for instance.)

Video games, like any other medium of entertainment, are integral to our global culture. If you don't want to be part of the downfall of that culture, and thus the downfall of humanity, brave up and accept consequence. 100 fuel ain't hardly nothing anyhow.

I for one am tired of seeing the humanity removed from humanity. I'm sorry if others can't say the same.

I will adjust the opening post accordingly.

 

I utterly disagree with this line of thinking.

To me, the purpose of technology (and a huge theme in any sci-fi, technology-based game) should be to make life better. Starbound is a game about exploring a high-tech world, and part of that should be accumulating technology that makes things easier for you. That means that things that were once painful and difficult can become trivial -- which opens the player up to face new and completely different sorts of challenges. I want the way the game plays to change as I progress; I don't want to continuously grind the same things while just increasing meaningless numbers. To me, teleportation is a vital part of that.

I also completely disagree with your assertions about modern culture; all I'm reading from your post is a lazy, specious set of assumptions about the modern world. In fact, people today work harder than any generation in the past, spending more hours working and accomplishing more in the process. People today hold more jobs and get more done while also being more engaged with their culture; and that culture is better, morally and practically, than any culture has been in human history -- with less racism and prejudice, more openness to new ideas, more widespread engagement by the population and greater opportunities. The internet, including social media, has made people more intelligent, more aware, and more hardworking -- today's youth are vastly better than, for instance, the baby boomers were.

There have always been people whining about the "downfall" of culture (famously, Socrates bemoaned writing, believing it hurt people's memories); but they have been proven wrong time and again. Oh no, someone ignored you on the internet, clearly this is the downfall of BLUH BLUH. It sounds to me like the only one unable to brave up to how much better we are today is you. Our culture is awesome and has been getting more awesome for decades and is going to keep getting absolutely awesomer; this generation is better than the last one by almost every metric, and the next one will be better still.

That, at least, is the kind of thinking I want to see in a sci-fi game. Things are awesome and (while there's still problems, and will still be problems in the future) they're only gonna get better. I want to play a game about things getting better, about that raygun gothic view of the future where we weren't afraid to accept change and to credit the next generation for doing better than us.