What is the point of the Beam-Up restriction?

Realistically the game should try and save your position because the most annoying thing ever is when someone crashes and is teleported above ground. It isn't about the work around of saving and exiting, it's about the fact that it's stupid in general that you have to jump back in your hole after dcing or crashing.

 

It does need to be fixed. It's a cheap way of getting out of a hostile situation. It's cheesy. Scary dungeon? Low on supplies? Hard mobs? Don't fret. You can just jam that beam-up button and get out of any dangerous situation instantly.

No, that's lame. Imagine how dumb that would be in a PVP situation. You get ballsy and try to attack a rival base. They fairly defend their hold and are about to finish you off after a difficult battle and many supplies used up... then, poof. You're gone. All that fighting for nothing. That's insanely imbalanced. There have to be restrictions on things like the power to just warp back to your ship. It can't be overpowered. And if it saved your position, then you could raid an enemy player, warp out then warp back. Imagine how annoying that would be coming from the defending player's perspective.

 

I haven't read the thread but one of my standard moves is to dig to the core then quit out so I have a quick escape... while useful, I think there should be a limited number of those escapes. I do like something I read earlier... be able to beam out from any depth at the cost of pixels/debuff/something.

 

There's also my suggested option from earlier in the thread, using an item that recharged it's charges over time that, in every tier, left you vulnerable while being used. It's a big-ass post near the very top of Page 3.

Oh look, there's the damn solution, an item that gets upgraded as you progress through the tiers that ensures warping out anywhere isn't an automatic 'I WIN' button that carries some risks and isn't dependent on RNG either. You also can't go balancing everything around PvP because hey, let's face it, this kind of game is like Warframe in that regard: PvP will be an after-thought utilized by so few that it may very well end up being detrimental to the balance of the game.

 

Never expected to get this many people responding.

There have been a lot of cool ideas in this thread so far, and I highlighted a few of them in the OP in an abbreviated form. Zuvaii, I couldn't make out what your idea was, but I included yours anyway. I didn't consider when I made the thread in the first place that "fixing" the problem might not be good at all. Lemme break it down.

The primary reason I want to get rid of the save-and-quit mechanic is not to make the game harder, but to make exploration easier without having to retread old ground every time your game crashes or you have to turn off your computer for any one of a thousand reasons. It's not gaining the ability to jump out of any situation that's the main problem, it's losing your progress at the drop of a hat. For this reason alone the S&Q teleport needs to go, and we need a way to move around the surface with teleports more easily.

That said, as it is I do still find the teleportation-when-quitting still a major problem. I've seen some fairly convincing arguments that say that getting rid of, though, would make getting back to the surface a lot more tedious, and I think I can agree with that...mostly. In Minecraft you don't actually have an option to S&Q to get back to your spawn point. You have to go ALLLLL the way back, spending resources as you go. And if you are already low on them, then you run the risk of death.

Is it really that tedious in Minecraft? If yes, then yeah, sure, keep some form of TP in Starbound. If no, and you don't mind that extra travel time in Minecraft, then why are you complaining about the possibility here? IIRC the S&Q function was put in because of coding parameters not allowing a "stay put" function when quitting(please tell me if I'm wrong and it was specifically designed that way), so it wasn't a conscious choice.

Anyway, Beaming-as-Panic-Button is also still a problem. Fixing that and S&Qing making you lose your place is more of a problem than being or not being able to Teleport at any time. If anything, I'd like it to be an option to make it impossible to TP any time or almost never make it possible to Teleport at any time, or never be able to Teleport when underground(got my words mixed up, sorry) but it's more important to fix issues than to rebalance the game's pacing.

 

The main difference in minecraft is that you are exploring one world, and so investing effort into making that world traversal pays off. Also, the 3d nature tends to mean exploration branches more, so you can get quite a bit of exploration done and still not be all that far from returning, and then more exploration is fairly easy to get too. Having a single world to work with also makes investing to time for a proper vertical shift in place, whether its just building a real staircase down to the bottom of the map, or a water elevator, or whatever else, the ability to stay in one place and reuse it for the entire game makes it worthwhile. That isn't present in star bound where you are likely to make no investment in any given planet you care to explore. Minecraft also introduces the nether as a 8x speed travel between distant points, which can easily cut down on the tedium of long distance travel. There is still some tedium, but overall these factors all work to reduce it.

 

I like getting out of large caves with the grappling hook and a combination of some Tech abilities.

Wheee!

 

I was browsing this thread whilst at work and decided to post in on it, I think a solution that might fit everyone's benefit would be to set up a formula for Beaming out, if you are at or above surface level, it is free (As it is currently) for every X tiles underground you are, there is a cost in pixels to beam out, do not make this a flat number, make it a scaling percentage of your remaining pixels, and say you are at the core of a large planet, it'd take at most the same amount of pixels as it costs when you die, this way you keep your ore, but lose the pixels if you want to be lazy and not walk out, That might be a bit high and harsh, it's an idea the devs might be able to use though in conjunction with saving where you are, when you log out.

 

I just posted the question to a pick-up AMA Tiy's doing over in r/Starbound but he didn't say anything about it.

 

Just put a charge time for beaming up to your ship. Increase the charge time the deeper underground you are. Disable beaming up while in-combat.

Save + Quit exploits would still be possible but at least we'd have a legitimate and balanced alternative that doesn't involve hardcore metagaming.

 

What constitutes surface level though? It can't just be the point where you warp down to, as that may be the highest physical point on the map.

 

underground is the point where the the background changes from surface looking to cave looking
also currently the point where mining out the background no longer allows you to beam up

 

The problem is that then you have to rely purely on the background or seeing a valley suddenly go pitch black because under what Regal Kain suggested, you'd be able to beam out even when underground. So one of the cues we use in the current stable would become unreliable if that idea was implemented.

 

I think you should be able to beam out from underground by using some sort of mechanism with your Energy. For instance, once your energy is full you can hit the beam out button and you won't be able to use energy for 5 or so seconds while your suit or whatever (just an example) burns through your energy and finally warps you back up.

Basically:
-Find a safe spot
-Burn through your energy
-Warp back to surface

 

I am somehow disappointed in terms of this issue.. back after nearly 1 year, and the only way to get up from the core is to quit the game. Dear devs, you have played terraria, you must have noticed that this was always a problem. And you dont have a magic mirror in Starbound However, that mirror didnt fix the "how do I get back down there?" problem and felt pretty strange - for me it killed a lot of the atmosphere.

We need an elevator.

 

If they added in real working elevators (that you can put boxes and stuff on too) i would be so happy. Especially if you put the tracks in the background yourself and make it able to pass horizontal blast doors (when open off course).

 

The thing is that one fo the first quests sends you to the core.. and an elevator at the very beginning? On the starting planet? Feels strange. So please Chucklefish, add some elevators in an "evolutive" manner like: rope-based hoist, steam-driven elevator, electrified elevator, point to point teleport. Or something like that?

I mean, seriously.. it's a digging game. Make it more comfortable - who woudl dig a hole where he/she will never come out again?

 

^ This could be a ver very very cool solution for ''i can go down, but i cant go up''

 

I think the restriction is just another unintended outcome of the early access, incomplete game model. The devs have talked a few times about a really elaborate buildable teleporter system that they're building for the game. So what I imagine is that will be the solution... eventually. You won't be able to beam up directly from underground, but you will be able to build and place teleporters that can teleport you from one to another, so the current restriction will be alright.

Until then, it would be a waste of time for them to work on some kind of placeholder teleportation system. You can save & quit and that works well enough as a clumsy stopgap measure for now.

 

That still leaves the basic problem of being unable to quit the game and keep your current location.

I suppose so, but for now there's still a pretty cool mod that lets you get around those restrictions. I still find that it's more "clumsy" than "works well enough" at this point, though.