What is the point of the Beam-Up restriction?

This post makes me wish that there was either a mod for this, or that this would be added in the next update.

 

What if save and quit didn't take you back to your ship, but there was a one-time use item that the player could find in chests from time to time that warped them back to the surface, kind of like the escape rope in Pokemon? Perhaps even a tech that allows you to do the same thing? I'm in the "remove the save and quit one way ticket" boat, but only if there is another way for the player to quickly get back to their ship, kind of like what I just described. Instantly getting back to your ship can be beneficial, but so can returning to the last location you logged out at. Why not both?

Something else that people might want would be alongside the three difficulty options, there could be a new mode called "Custom". Instead of having predefined settings like the other difficulties, Custom would give the player the option to select from a wide assortment of settings from a list, such as what is dropped on death, the percentage of pixels dropped, whether hunger will be a threat and a bunch of other stuff. This way, new players who don't want to delve into a bunch of settings can simply choose one of the predefined difficulties if they wish and more experienced players who know more about the ins and outs of the game can alter it to their liking. This could work on servers since all the settings that the server owner uses would apply to every player. This would even lead to more diverse servers since different servers would use different settings.

 

How about everyone start taking my posts on optional settings available only at character creation at bit more seriously? I mean my god, a lot of ideas for the more 'hardcore' (if Starbound could be called such at all) fans would be doable under the optional, one-time-choice-only check boxes. You want to come across more ore veins more often on every newly seeded (never visited by any other character on your computer) planet you visit? Fine, I hope you like greatly increased spawn rates for monsters, demon birds, and mini-bosses, and every enemy that spawns is flagged for night-time strength ( I recall enemies at night being stronger). You want meteor showers (not the planet killer big ones, the smaller showers) to drop ores upon impact? Okay, there'll just be more dense showers to compensate and all the extra meteors make it that much harder, and the ores vanish very shortly after impact, so no waiting in a cozy place to snatch up easy ores, no, go brave the death-from-above-minefield. You could have the hunger system put back in while retaining slightly stronger-than-current Nightly food buffs, but aside from a few kinds of food, the food would spoil after a while and provide minimal/negative hunger and a miniscule buff or even a debuff, so no hoarding piles of food to stuff your face with, as even the buffs would take a bit to kick in. Even the temperature system too! Bring back freezing and create overheating, so you can't just go walking around a lava biome/magma planet and stand right next to a pool of lava. Without a specific upgrade that you can get around tech level 3 or 4 and upgrade from there, you'd immediately be hit with burning upon getting too close to a lava sub-biome, and too close to a pool of lava itself would create a nasty version of burning that isn't quite melting, but dangerous enough you'd wanna haul ass away; and lava itself? You die to that stuff and you'll drop your ores and some tools and when they hit the lava, they will actually melt, and no using improvised dirt bridges over a pool of lava, they'd disintegrate under the heat and fall in, being destroyed in the process. Also, every enemy and mini-boss would be affected by this change too, so they'd try to avoid the areas of lava too, which might either drive them away from you, or towards you; like in Super Metroid, the upgrade would at the final tier level, make the heat from the lava biome harmless and falling into lava would then only inflict you with the minor burning damage debuff.

The idea for an item you can use to warp back does have merit, but being a one-time use like the escape rope in Pokemon would be a bad idea, as the chest contents in Pokemon are not only static, but their locations are, but chests in starbound are purely RNG (yay, another green flashlight and 30 pixels on a Tier X planet...). Instead of being heavily RNG based, make it an item that you can upgrade over time and you start out with it, but it runs on charges that are maybe 2-4 charges when you first grab it from your ship, and if you use up the charges too quickly (like all 2-4 charges in 30 minutes), then you have to wait however long the normal lifespan for each charge is before using it again. Say the lifespan of a charge is 30 minutes, if you use it every half hour, you should always have a charge on hand, but it would take a few seconds to use, and getting hit or moving would cancel it, so use in combat would be risky. If you used up all 2-4 charges in the span of 10 minutes, then you'd have to wait 1-2 hours before the device was fully powered up again, and it'd have to be 1-2 hours on the planet, not sitting safely in your ship. As you upgrade it, you get more charges, they recharge faster (but never too fast) and slowly speed up the time it takes to activate (6 seconds for Tier 1, 2.5 or so seconds at Tier 7, and 1.5 seconds at the last tier, so there'd be some danger even then). That way the option would always be there, but you couldn't abuse it, and you wouldn't be subjected to the whims of RNG (hello Xom!) which is more luck-based than skill-based.

Those are just a few ideas of mine, and as you can tell, my ideas of optional risk vs reward settings can be either a little extra risk for a little extra reward, to a LOT of extra risk for some situational reward. Really, it's not that I'm against the challenging ideas you guys put forth, it's that I oppose the ham-handedness that they would likely be implemented. Oh, and these ideas would have to be coded for 1.1 and not the 1.0 Stable release because I know the amount of work needed would really delay the release of the long-awaited stable build and that would just drive more people away.

Oh, and each setting when moused over during the character creation process would show a quick pop-up window detailing the effects, so you know what you're getting yourself into; no one gets to claim ignorance in my view, not without being laughed at anyway.

 

Digging down=Exploration=Fun=Finding new territory. Walking back through the tunnels=Seen it, been there, boring. Y'know, just for starters as far as why backtracking and stuff is annoying. Most games nowadays have some sort of fast travel system. And know why? Because walking down the same roads 9001 times is boring, tedious, and doesn't add anything to the actual game but time that is completely wasted.
I'm with Zuvaii at this point though, if you guys don't get it after people show all kinds of examples why people use the save and exit and want a fast teleport to ship type thing by now, then you never will get it, so it's not worth wasting any more effort in trying to explain it to you.

 

Broconut has a good idea. like the medkits; I'd store stuff like this all the time for a rainy day.

Tymon, Nothing is keeping you from making new, quicker roads into areas you have already visited. And even on large planets, getting to where you left off underground is just a matter of a few minutes, which makes saving the player's location after quitting still a handy feature. In addition, this gets even easier and more expansive with the MM upgrades and limited use items, so the player is encouraged to progress.
This is not only for one crowd of players, as it not only resolves underground quitting back to the ship(which the devs were concerned with) but it can also help massive building projects or trips resume their work, both above and below ground. Items to move the spawn point, if not already in the works, are likely suggested; but I don't see the underground restrictions simply being lifted for all warping.

And I note that you failed to mention digging up, which would have wrecked your premise as it is also exploration.

 

@Zuvaii I really like your idea about the teleport charges. You know how when the beam up button is disabled, it's replaced with an 'X'? Well instead of that 'X', it would be replaced with a different icon with 'X/X' charges underneath. That kind of mechanic would work really well with the different difficulties. What I'm thinking is casual would have no charge limit (unlimited uses), normal would have 2-4 that replenish over time like you described, and hardcore would just have the 'X' (no uses at all, ever). This mechanic tied in with the save and quit button actually saving your location would be awesome!

The beam up button would take you back to your ship as always and the indoor/underground teleport would return you to the planet's surface (spawn point possibly?), which you can then beam up from.

EDIT: I still think that a rare, one-time use item that returns the player to the surface would be handy, especially on hardcore. They would also make a great item for selling to merchants if you don't want or need them since they would have a decent value, being rare and whatnot.

 

I have never found leaving a cave to be particularly challenging. Just time consuming and tedious. Its very unrewarding, has minimal risk, and discourages you from exploring deep underground because you have to put up with leaving again. Most of the time its just forcing backtracking on you.
Its main contribution to making the game more interesting is ensuring you have to leave a way back out of the mine, so digging a single featureless shaft straight down isn't a great idea.
Sometimes the trek back matters, if you accidentally fall through the ceiling for instance, or if your path gets cut off by an enemy. But for every time the trek back matters and enriches the experience, there are a dozen times it only adds tedium. This is not a great dynamic.

 

i hope this thread isn't too old to respond to. xD

anyway, a work-around for this would be the teleporter spools up for about 3 seconds to teleport the player up to the surface, then it spools up twice the amount of time (around 6 seconds) to beam up to the ship if you're above that invisible line where you can tp up if you dig a 2x1 hole on the wall at chest height.

i always thought it was stupid that you have to leave the game running if you absolutely have to go AFK for whatever reason if you don't want to start over..

 

I am all for saving your posistion on quit with some alternative way of beaming up.
Always ending up on the ship when you quit can get a bit tedious imo.

 

First off, im not arguing against your checkbox idea (i wouldent mind if it ended up like that to be honest. Even if it would be a bit clunky and ends up being more work for the devs).


Il just argue against this one argument of yours (quote). Since its rather flawed.

How is this problem any different from the beamdown point? People can put pools of lava underneath that too (and they have).

If the "respawn point" is blocked it would be rather easy to solve it, i think the most feasible way to deal with it would be to just copy the beamdown point code (If its blocked, search upwards until its free and spawn people there). If the want to do it a tad more fancy they could search the closest empty spot instead of the first one upwards.

 

I think the best option would be to make it so the six or so adjacent tiles from the warp down point would be both flat and hard-coded to not be removable/alterable to prevent that kind of griefing tactic.

 

That would indeed solve most of the griefing related to beamdown points and the solution is at the same time not applicable to respawn points (if they hade such).

I concede your point.

 

Pretty much, yeah. This is basically the kind of thing that you start to think up when you get bored with games like Deus Ex and want to try and see just how you can break them, like in Deus Ex, using LAMs to climb a building's outer wall to talk to a plot-important character on the roof instead of in her room. Then, after figuring out just how I can break it, I then think about how I can prevent it from happening again while utilizing a manner that is both able to blend in to not ruin the experience and be solid enough that it's effectively fool-proof. Try doing something unexpected in Starbound in a way that would cause issues for players, then think about what allows you to pull it off and how it could be prevented in a manner that wasn't intrusive or easily countered. Go ahead and think of a scenario, try to pull it off in-game, and let me know how it worked out, it really gets the creative juices flowing, it's awesome.

 

And THAT is the kind of testing we as the beta testers should be doing. Make sure to report all those exploits to the devs, to make the game better.

 

For the time being, we can't really do that, as the Nightly builds are so broken that finding out if something is an exploit or not is difficult, as is trying to replicate it, unless it's something like using a Copper Pick-ax at half-health to mine Obsidian blocks and finding out that such a combination of conditions renders the Copper Pick-ax unbreakable and mines through the Obsidian faster than a cop at a donut factory. When the stuff hits the Unstable version and then the Stable version, we'll be able to start finding all kinds of bugs, but yes, you and I are in complete agreement with how beta testers should work. I do wish the changelogs for each update went into full detail however, that way we'd know what is simply expected and what qualifies as a bug, especially if it's not super obvious.

 

always plenty of good reasons to nerf single player, people just want easy mode so they always throw this out *rolls eyes*

 

I'm curious, how does someone else's single player experience impact you? Does them having a fun time in a mode where they don't have to wander back through big-ass caves manually somehow upset you, or offend you as a gamer?

 

Actually, no. I don't want easy mode. I want the hunger mechanic back, more survival elements, durability on all items, stronger bosses, more traps, more critters that can attack from under you... But I don't want wasteful tedium on backtracking through everywhere I go, when I have a FLIPPING TELEPORTER.

 

One reason I'm opposed to more durability on all items is that CF has shown us how they can't really get a good equilibrium down when it comes to that. Before nightly, pick-axes would last so long that it was a non-issue, but in Nightly, they're good for maybe 50-200 or so uses at the absolute most, forcing you to keep spending copper and other ores to keep them repaired, all because they want to encourage use of the Matter Manipulator. That also shows they don't know how to encourage a tool's use. If they made the MM useful from the start and allowed you to improve it each tier, like with the Endgame Matter Manipulator mod, then people would be happy to use it, but by making it so the alternatives are stuck with you for so long and easily breakable, that doesn't encourage use of the MM< it's just more likely to piss players off. If anything, I would suggest removing pick-axes, chopping axes, and hos all together (which would involve changing the Glitch's racial armor bonus) and make the MM a universal tool that would get faster and affect more tiles as it's improved.

 

Hrmmm... good point Zuvali. Perhaps that wouldn't be a good thing for the devs to try and do/fail at.