Playing Nightly makes me worried

I highly doubt this will be the case as environments will be based on the difficulty tiers and by the time you begin navigating to other planets you can see the weather you are going to.

A lvl. 0 garden planet with meteors seems unlikely to match with the design of progression the devs are suggesting.

 

The idea of WH40K enthusiasts being discouraged by this game making them drop ores on death is almost as funny as the notion of them being attracted to this game as a WH40K replication in the first place. Hooking a gameplay mechanic's viability on wildly fanciful scenarios seems kind of... silly.

Also, speaking of wildly implausible scenarios... who the hell is strip-mining entire planets and keeping all of it on their person at all times? You know you got a ship with a locker you can safely store things in, right? Or can make a base on the surface and use storage devices? As a rule I tried to keep my personal inventory light.

And...

Well hey, you're in luck! You might not have noticed, but they've had several huge blogposts about how they're completely reworking combat to be less insta-deathy, what with the nerfed birds and no contact damage and reworked shields and all that. As well as how dangerous the planets themselves are in early-game, thus, during the time you're more death-prone, the game throws less-deadly things at you.

I'm also confused by the idea that we supposedly know what the devs are and aren't "considering" when they make these decisions. How'd we determine that again?

Dying at the bottom of the map? Call me nuts, but I'd think tunneling to a planet's core should probably involve some risk.

Playing on a multiplayer server that allows player kills might involve people killing you to be asses? Uh... well, to be honest, that's largely why I avoid PK games in the first place unless it's short-form "round combat"... and even those I touch maybe with a 10-foot barge pole. And I don't think we know what plans CF has in mind for tweaking mulitplayer's rules right now anyway. I mean, seems like it wouldn't be real hard for me to wander into someone's home and steal all their crap just with a drill right now.

And again... the game is still in development, and a lot of elements are being tweaked, and none of it exists in a vacuum. With the other changes in place, ore-dropping could be minor. Or they may find it isn't and revise the plan one way or another. It's a tad early to rail the the heavens how this ruins the game.

 

Explosive weapons, and even certain modded weapons can kill other players regardless of 'pvp enabled' or not. What server you play on has absolutely NOTHING to do with pvp being enabled or disabled. And in case you haven't been paying attention, drilling to the core of a planet is flat out a requirement for the first planet at least. It's not about 'risk' it's about unfair punishments resulting in potentially the loss of hours of work. You want to make the game more risky, you play on hardcore, or permadeath. I personally play on normal because I like to keep my stuff if I die. Having my progress dumped suddenly because the developers suddenly decide to change an existing difficulty rather than adding a new one is not only annoying, it's enough to ruin the game experience for people like me. And as I said before... The point of this thread is to vent worries about the path things are going based upon nightly builds. To come into this thread and complain about the people who are actually following the topic of this thread is pretty much being a troll. We are worried about the future of the game based upon the progression in nightly. And this is perfectly legitimate considering we spent money. If you don't like the fact we are worried? Well, why are you even following this thread then?

 

Which is a thing that can (and likely will) get hashed out as they continue to work on and balance the game. Which is still where development is and will be for a while, as per Chucklefish's own statements.

And bluntly, if you're using player-made mods, then you automatically assume extra risks, and CF is under no obligation to account for every potential mod-based hazard/flaw people might develop. Sorry.

In.
The.
BROKEN.
Nightlies.

Stop using the crash-happy, untested, unbalanced nightlies as hard evidence as to how the final game will be 100% for sure, since, again, CF has stated that there's still a rebalancing stage to get through once the big mechanics are implemented.

It's perfectly fine to raise the point that ore distribution is off in a bad way right now. It's not to act like that's how it's unquestionably going to stay.

No. No, it is not.

You are equating "providing counterpoints/taking a contrary position" with "complaining about people" and "trolling", which is at best a grievous misunderstanding as to what "trolling" actually is (it's not "something that I don't like"). It's also proclaiming that this thread can be nothing but an echo chamber, any voice that doesn't cry doom in lockstep is verboten.

Well, sorry, but that's not how it works. People can take a contrary position that is fully within the topic of the thread (which was done in post #2 by a mod, I should point out), which is simply the existence of nightly-based concerns. People are allowed to assuage/debate said concerns with evidence and counterpoints. That's what discussion forums are for.

If you want to air grievances without the possibility of counterpoint, then make a blog post somewhere and lock comments.

Until then, best get used to the idea that when people raise concerns about how things are in a broken, unfinished iteration of a game, other people are going to come along and point out ways those concerns may not be as big as they may seem to some.

 

It's not that simple. At all. I don't use mods. I go on a server that doesn't use mods. People still have modded weapons that can bypass pvp stuff that function in pure vanilla servers. This isn't something chucklefish can fix without removing the ability to mod the game in the first place.

No. I'm equating people complaining about people who are worried, as trolling, in a thread that is even labeled as a thread regarding worrying. Trolling is a post specifically designed to upset people. No one knows what the future holds, and people have a right to be worried about their money spent on this game being completely wasted if the changes that the developers claim are going to happen, ruin their game experience. Coming in and basically insulting and/or making fun of them, either directly or subtly, to me seems like trolling. Since it's kind of like going into a bar, and then complaining about people drinking alcohol.

 

I think I'm in a small minority here when I say I actually like ore dropping on death. Pixels are used for almost nothing at the beginning of the game, and I'd rather people not get into the "suicide teleportation" that is often used in sandbox games with little consequence on death. I get that there are harder difficulty settings, but currently "Easy" feels like it doesn't have any consequences for death since pixels are so easy to amass in large.

 

I actually have no problem with the ore dropping on death. It's been very rare that I've failed to recollect them. Also, I could be mistaken, but I believe ore distribution is something the devs have said they are going to be working on heavily, making ores much more common than they currently are. I know the lack of surface caves was a bug in worldgen that has been addressed (I haven't played in a while, but I've seen posts showing that they're back), which should also help a lot with the mining/exploring aspect of the game.

I would think that even with the current poor rate of ore generation, it would be extremely difficult for even a new player to "mine out" the entire starting planet without developing some sort of cautious playstyle and risk-mitigating technique, no matter how little they have played sandbox/crafting games in the past. They would either have to be dying an absolutely absurd number of times, or gathering absolutely absurd quantities of ore/materials without returning to the surface to use them (and still probably have to be dying a lot), as well as fail to collect the dropped ore every single time. I really don't see it being feasible or likely that any player would find themselves exhausting the entire starting planet without being able to repair their ship enough to leave. And if a player should somehow run into this situation, being forced to start a new character and getting a new world is not that big of a punishment. Granted, I don't know if it's a bug that currently all characters end up on the same starting planet, though I hope that changes.

PvP can definitely be an issue, especially with item drops. I would think this would be more of a per-server thing, though, with servers either allowing or disallowing PvP activity. If allowed, then a player joining that server knows that being killed is a possibility, and it's their responsibility to plan accordingly. I also expect that servers will likely implement some sort of mod that removes the drops on death, if that's what the people running the servers prefer. I can see instances of both PvP and non-PvP servers choosing this option, for various reasons.

The only thing that has been introduced in the Nightly builds that I've been able to test that has actually annoyed me is the destruction of ore when mined with an inappropriate tool. The planned disambiguation of, say, Silver/Platinum will help with that a bit, but I would prefer if too-high ore either couldn't be mined at all, or there was some sort of warning that you were about to destroy it. But even this is a pretty minor gripe. I'll have to see more on how progression/questline stuff pans out before I can make a judgement on it, but overall I'm pretty excited for the new content.

 

It's not rocket science to make only "server allowed" mods to work on a server, they just haven't done so yet since they have bigger fish to fry.

 

Probably not a bug so much as a testing measure. Auto-spawning on a single world would let CF have a reliable "test subject" to tweak how the starter world works without worrying about random variables.

Hm? This I had not heard about... and sounds more like a bug. How does that "work" specifically? What's the gap between tool and ore? Can copper mine silver but not gold? Lil confused.

Of course, this might also be tied in with an ore distribution/planet tiering matter.

Or a straight-up bug.

 

That's similar to Minecraft's very early builds, I think. A wooden/stone (I think) pickaxe would be destroyed trying to mine Iron, but if you managed it somehow, then the iron would simply not spawn upon the block being destroyed. A friend of mine played Minecraft for a while and I vaguely recall that being a complaint of his. So it's either a bug or Tiy is trying to lift a few mechanics from Minecraft, not sure which.

 

Yeah, that's pretty dumb. Now I'll have to waste even more inventory spaces for a bunch of different pickaxes instead of straight upgrades.

 

Yes, and if you read my first post, i was also worried. That is, until i actually read what the developers had actually written about the next update, then found these claims to be a bit ridiculous. You're making this way too personal, you keep bringing up the word i used to describe your worry as if it was an insult, which is also ridiculous. I'm just trying to apply a bit of logic to this whole thing, reading into both sides of the story helped me to do that, and also put your claims into perspective. The multitude of other changes appear to have been added to help balance out the game, so applying the same rationale to the features you're worried about based on the current state of the game isn't going to help you really see how they'll work in the final version of the game.

In the end, if these two issues really do ruin the game for you, then that's a shame, it probably wouldn't bother most people, since most games like this have similar features, so it was a bit odd that they were excluded from the original concept of the game anyways.

 

It's much more than just two issues. Pets got nerfed to hell. That was a very large portion of enjoyment of the game for me. The temperature thing is equally annoying. the pickaxe progression also sucks, plus the permanent breakage. And also making desert planets almost completely useless for mining because of fine sand deleting ores. Along with the ore and bar dropping when you die, which means now I'd have to be paranoid in public servers because I tend to carry around 1k of each kind of bar. And, last but not least, their hunger 'rebalance' simply makes you starve faster. All of my friends play on a mod-free server, so modding away these BS changes isn't an option either. So, sure, they added new dungeons, new race, new quests, and new 'stuff' but made a ton of the core mechanics of the game obnoxious as hell, and completely destroyed the pet system which I enjoyed. I might as well go back to Terraria if these issues aren't fixed by the next patch. At least in their next update, they'll just be adding new stuff, not completely breaking existing stuff and adding in more frustrating mechanics that ultimately piss me off.

TL;DR summary: Sure, they added new content, but they broke the very core mechanics of the game and made it frustrating, and screwed an existing system that I spent hours of enjoyment leveling up pets to make them awesome for combat. This ruins the game. It isn't JUST ore dropping.

 

You're talking about the nightly builds, correct? I'm sure there are a ton of really badly balanced features in the nightly builds, that was part of the deal with that, but if every badly executed feature remains the way you describe it to be in the next stable build, then that would be more telling, and i would continue to stay away from the game as i already have been for the past 6+ months. When the final game releases and there are still these same issues, most people will probably not deal with it anymore and simply move on. I just can't imagine that happening though, the devs can't be so incompetent that they would add in all of these interesting features, but then make the core mechanics a grindy, tedious mess, it would be a big shame at least.

The changelog for the next build doesn't mention anything about pets, so one could assume that it won't be the way it is currently in the nightly builds. There's only one mention of the mining tools, which says they'll break permanently but will be stronger (hopefully faster). The changes mentioned of the matter manipulator would seem to be the reason for changing the normal mining tools, it sounds like the MM can be upgraded to be much more useful and versatile than the conventional mining tools. The temperature thing sounds like it could go either way, either be annoying, or unnoticeable. I'm sure the data available to you of a planet before you land on it will tell you of the temperature range, since it's mentioned that the navigator now; "shows far more data on planet conditions", which would determine if it's worth going down there with whatever equipment you have, at least for the final game if not the next update.

That for me personally leaves only one possibly, unresolved issue which is the ore drop on death. It means you would have to play the game a bit differently, and like you said, you'd have to be more paranoid of carrying a bunch of valuable ores on you while in public servers. Which in all honesty, makes perfect sense, no one in real life carries around giant stacks of money with them everywhere they go, just so they don't have to go to the bank more often. Yes, i know debit/credit cards exist, so not the best analogy, but you get the idea. It just wouldn't be smart to be completely complacent while carrying around a massive amount of valuable materials in unknown and potentially dangerous areas.

 

Can you give me specific examples of how this works? If I had a silver pickaxe, it'd have to be able to pull out gold, right? Or would I have to rely on my Matter Manipulator to prize those nuggets from the terrain?

Like ore drops, I'm ambivalent about this potential change until I can give it a play, but I'm not going in for the nightlies given how friggin' unstable they are. It's an obstacle, but it's also (as noted many times above) in conjunction with the changes in the Matter Manipulator, which I would guess does not have that same limitation. I'm good with the idea of a tradeoff... the MM has better range, is indestructible and can mine any matter, but lacks the raw power and wider area of effect that the crafted tools offer at that same level.

It seems like this would also cut back on shortcutting... I ended up jumping up to Diamond Pickaxe and Drill pretty damn fast. Hell, I don't think I actually used a non-Diamond Drill ever, just did the crafting tree from starter drill up to Diamond in one crafting session. I wonder what this means for the drills then... would Diamond Drill be your starter, then you move up to Platinum/Titanium/etc drills rather than having them be made from the ores you should already have in abundance by that point?

 

In the Nightly builds, you need a certain level of tool to be able to mine certain ores, designed to make progression more of a thing.

The stone pickaxe can mine copper, but not iron.
When you make a Copper pickaxe, you can mine copper and iron, but not silver.
When you make an Iron pickaxe, you can mine copper, iron, and silver with it, but not gold.
I believe it goes from Silver pickaxe to Gold drill, and when you reach Diamond drill, you can dig up everything that's currently in the game, but I could be mistaken.

Improving the tool only adds to the things it can mine, it never removes the ability to mine things, so you never have to carry around "old" tools. The tooltip on the axe will tell you what it can mine, and there was a blog post a while back about changing the artwork for the ores to make them easier to distinguish (since currently silver and platinum look very similar). But the closest you get to a warning that you're going to destroy ore is that it takes longer to dig through, and doesn't seem to be that much longer than ores you can dig. In Minecraft, trying to use a pickaxe that's too low-level makes it take several times longer to break the block, like 20-30 seconds to dig through a single Iron Ore block with a wooden pickaxe.

 

I'm good with all of this. Seems like a pretty fair progression method, provided the ore distribution is balanced out (and I see no reason to assume it won't be).

About the only thing I'd tweak, aside from a longer mine-time for stuff outside the tool's range, is giving some kind of noticeable visual warning that you're about to do a bad mine... maybe make the ore you may destroy flash red as you pick/drill into it. Cut back on the odds of people accidentally continually making the mistake.

 

What this amounts to in practice is "tedious inventory micromanagement that forces you to grind more if you screw up."

I think dropping ore on death (at least in softcore mode) is obviously a terrible addition. Not everyone likes to play the game with constant worries about dying! Some people just like to relax and explore the galaxy. That's the whole reason softcore exists... isn't it?