Following the suggestion of Drithyl in the thread regarding Procedurally Generated Materials... ...Durability. It will be present at Starbound, or not? And if it does, how it's gonna be? Not necessarily must be as Minecraft, so, some examples: No durability = Needs repairing, NOT destroyed. (Idea of sandwiches + T-Bone Biggins) With this, you keep your stuff, but using it gets progressively worse, and so repairing is needed. Hopefully the repairing won't need the same amount of material necessary to create a new item in first place. No durability = Destruction. (As seen in Minecraft, Fire Emblem and Diablo) Items have a number of uses. When the items reach their total number of uses, they are destroyed without chances of repairing. The results are different according to the other mechanics surrounding this one. In Minecraft, this means you have to periodically go after more resources to create more tools and items. Since not all resources are renewable, that means mining and exploring new lands to find what you need, or sticking to sub-par materials. In Fire Emblem, strategy turn-based game of Nintendo, as better the item, LESS uses it has. With 5 spaces in the inventory of each character and permadeath of any soldier in yout team and only shops usually being in battle maps, it all means you must consider carefully what you take for battle and how you will renew your supplies("Okay, i can't go in the shop yet, there are two archers and a catapult in range of it. And my Silver Lance only has one more strike, so i can't take them down this turn...") In Diablo, durability only works to force your character to go back to the town hub and repair your equipment. Considering that the race for better procedurally generated stuff is a constant through the whole game, what makes you to sell lots of things you find in your fights, and since your Inventory is very small, and since the Scroll of Town Portal exists and makes a trip back take only one second... durability could very well be taken away of the game, except in case of the Ethereal Items, that are stronger but can't be repaired. Without Durability. (As seen in Terraria) Durability des not exists, so items can't be destroyed. They can still be "lost", since if your character dies and your items stay in the same spot, you have a time limit to go back there before everything just vanishes. The results here, with more materials needed to create the items in Terraria, comparing to Minecraft, are some sort of permanence of what you create, so weaker items become useless or in the best possibility, plan B items to recover the usually used sets of equipment.
Tiy has explicitly stated that there will not be durability. Period. And I agree with him. Now, on 'the more you use it, the less useful it becomes': Dead Island tried to do this. You know how many people in the forums liked it? Less than five percent! Unless an item was completely fresh, you would have to repair it to have the best efficiency; now, if say, you use a gun 10,000 times and it suddenly becomes bad and you have to repair it-I'm fine with that. Just so long as I don't have to go and re-get the parts for my very expensive gun and recraft it, or I have to repair it each time I use it. The reason Durability was bearable in Minecraft was because it was so easy to get Diamonds; you can get Diamonds in the first 5 minutes of the game, and that's the highest tier there is. In Starbound, I'm pretty sure there will be more ores, thus a higher 'best thing'. Also, if they make a 'THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER FOR ALL THIGNS' in Starbound, I'd be surprised. It seems more of a sideways-progression game.
I would like to see a durability system similar to that of Fallout, where an item wears down eventually (although maybe not as quickly as they do in Fallout) and you have to repair it with the materials the item was made out of, or other, similar items. Additionally, you can perhaps only repair an item to a certain level of effectiveness if your supplies are limited, but given ideal conditions you can actually improve it.
I think there should be an option to turn durability on or off for SP and make it so MP servers can be toggled to have it or not. If there's gonna be like a server browser (not sure if there is one planned or not) make it so you can filter out servers with/without durability on. An idea occurred to me recently to better work in the turning on or off the durability. Instead of it being a toggle option, let be kind of like what terraria did, have different difficulty settings for the character. Softcore: No Durability MediumCore: Degrades, but doesn't get destroyed Hardcore: Destroyed if not repaired before it's used up I'm just trying to find and suggest ways of making the game appealing to everyone, seeing as how from what I've read so far is that the community is kinda 50/50 on the issue of durability.
I don't want durability for items, but vehicles and possible buildings, or buildings could work for me. It might be neat to see bad guys try to break through walls using certain weapons or assault vehicles of some sort. Give different materials different durabilities, and allow for players(or NPCs) to repair durability. Might be neat for assaulting(or defending) bases, though it might be tricky if there are items like TO's hamaxes. It's hard to tell, though, since we really don't know just how building is handled.
In a game like Minecraft, nothing is too hard to get. Even diamonds are much easier and quicker to get than, say, and Adamantite Sword in Terraria. Imagine constantly having to return to the Jungle to get a new Blade of Grass every time you used it too much... ugghh. Im guessing that with Starbound, many items will be pretty hard to get your hands on, so I say no to Minecraft-style durability.
I couldn't agree more. If they wan't to lower spamming of a specific item or similar then it's a better idea to make ammo/charges/consumables harder to come by.
Terraria items were also ungodly expensive to make, contraty to Minecraft's '2 ingots and a stick.' And when faced with repair, I have a little story to tell. I love Fallout 3. It's one of my favorite games. However, I was getting tired of repairing my combat shotgun every 50 shots or so. Really, that's madness. Then I got Skyrim. I was excited that my gear would no longer degrade, and I would always have good quality gear. Then I started playing. After my fifth battle, I already missed repairing my armor and weapons. In the end, I had tons of gold and nothing to spend it on. That was before I really did my first mission. Maxing out my inventory was no longer a concern for me. The most efficient stuff to take didn't matter- I didn't have to buy replacements, so who cared? In the end, I wound up wanting to have a repair function that degraded at a more realistic rate, say, 1% every 30th use or so. That would be lovely. Thank you for your time if you read this far.
