Can we please stop calling it Colonization when it's really not?

One small tweak I wouldn't mind for colonization(in the future) would perhaps be deeds "categories".

Right now all "Colonists" are seen as of the same catefgory whatsoever of their profession: as "tenants".

In this regard, they all owe you rather than you owing any of them anything beyond their lodging.
What I wouldn't mind to see would perhaps see then divided in potentially three(and potentially a fourth...) categories:

First: villagers/tenants "house".
Basically the conventional non-merchants types of tenants/villagers we can recruit with no abilities whatsoever for now.Their uses is as their names implies as nothing else than a source of income from rent or taxes.

Second: Merchants "house"
Basically these are the merchants as currently implemented, however they come with their own specific deed. They bring you less rent or taxes, but offer their wares. Or alternatively their rent is based on their sales(though that would be useful only in a multplayer game where other players could stop by your merchants).

Third: Guardsmen
This particular category would basically need itès own "deed" for one particular reason: Guardsmen are not generated, but hired at a -cost- to the player.
Their job being to protect the colony, the player is the one in charge of hiring and paying them. I would particularly like in their case a system where once hired you could also talk to them to outfit them with your own gears if you so wanted too.

And potentially a fourth category:

Craftsmen.
Basically a variant of merchants who needs crafting tables as a requisite for their homes. However the main twist is that like guardsmen they are hired rather than generated, and paid for by the player. And unlike merchants, rather than selling wares, they actually function like a very specialized crafting table when you speak to them, crafting objects and furnitures uniue to them:
Avian Craftsman: allow to craft all the materials found in avian villages
Apex Craftsman: allow to craft all the materials in apex villages
...
And so on, the idea being that right now the only means to get some of materials used in, say, avian ruins or houses is to actually go out and loot avian ruins or houses. With such craftsmen NPC, a player could thus be able to crafts all of these materials without neccesarily cluttering his or her own crafting menu with all these objects. And it would add one special role for which players might decide
to -seek- out such NPCs. Alternatively, racial villages might even now have some of these as part of their own population(to take away from some of that looting temptation).


It could also bring back the concept of the player forming a crew to join his spaceship(rather than space station they were originally meant for) where he could thus build "lab rooms" for such specialized "craftmen NPC" that could even use the random weapon generator concepts to allow the player to, say, find a "weapons scientist" actually allowing him to crafts weapon made with the random generator.
Such crew could even be managed from a "crew station" object on the ship serving as a sort of "crew storage" for active NPCs on the ship(the count of which might goes up with ship upgrades), and when building a village with a deed, the player could thus interact with the deed to "beam in" one of his own crew rather than a random NPC.

 

I don't suppose any mod makers would be willing to sit down and discuss just how hard it would be to implement a city functionality? I mean we have the autogen cities already, with shopkeeps etc, how hard would it be to put the player in the shoes of a Colonization Leader?

Talking full shebang, not just the Apartment Simulator we're stuck with for probably another year, but more or less what this thread has defined as being wanted. Finances, research, guards, advancement, etc.

 

It would be a hell of a lot of work. By the time anyone really figured out what was needed and actually implimented it, CF will likely have expanded more on their end.

 

I'm curious how hard cities are to make in the first place. The current set can feels a bit limited. Often it seems all you find(at least last time I had the chance to FIND a town) are random villagers... and then you have multiples of either weapons shops or food shops and.... nothing else.

Ever since outposts(or rather, THE outpost since it's singular) got added, I feel like most of the point villages had for being has been most overtaken by the outpost which took it up to eleven with it's variety of shops.

Personally I'd like a bit more of a functionality to them. Like the addition of "craftsmen shops" where talking to the crasftman bring up a crafting table like interface but, instead of your usual wood recipes all the blocks and furniture use the designs of his races despite similar crafting costs in materials.

Stuff like maybe general stores setling not only bandages and some food, but also specialized tools like pickaxes or explosives(for mining or otherwise) as well as odd and ends oddities. Stuff that could add a bit more personality to villages.

Because right now it's mostly either food and clothes we can craft ourselves, or randomly generated racial-inspired weapons the like of which can be found in treasure chests or minibosses loot.
Heck, maybe just variants of the shops you can find in the Outposts might be very nice(unless that is done already? Though I've not heard signs it was the case yet)/

 

Dude this is a great idea and could be a complete game changer and if it happens and news spreads they could sell a lot more which would help the game along quite nicely.Starbound could easily beat out Terraria because there is way much more to explore, upgrade, collect, and more Quests as well. So with colonization......you get the point

 

It's precisely because of that reason that I hope the outpost would be made less central to the game overall when 1.0 comes out. I'm very much in agreement with your suggestion to make the villages have their own craftsmen from which you can get racial furniture and other stuff. The outpost may then be just limited to selling basic racial stuff; the full range would have to be found at the appropriate village.

Might even be great to have the outpost's ship dealer placed on larger settlements (running full shipyards, with different ship upgrades available at different cities) and capable of doing other stuff (ship repairs, for example, if ship damage is ever implemented. They might even give you the opportunity to ditch your current race's ship for another's.)

In (somewhat) relation to the topic, these points of differentiation between settlements would be needed if we're to avoid having a player-built colony becoming the only place worth getting anything from in the entire universe, essentially Outpost 2.0. You can still have craftsmen brought in and trained to manufacture the more exotic stuff if you really want to, but none of that 'everything available from the start' should be there.

 

Well this picture got posted on the Subreddit and it's exactly what I was afraid of:


Granted this is minimal but honestly I could get away with this.... This isn't colonization

 

Yeah, I have thought about it for a while, it's kinda limiting having to put specific objects to have specific NPCs spawn. It could be better if you place out the colony deed and then click on it to choose what NPC is going to live there, and then they'd be happy with whatever they got in their room even if it was empty. The other problem is that the colony deed itself can be in the way of placing another object, and it doesn't fit with all the different decorations you want to use and looks out of place etc.

Maybe have the option to make the colony deed invisible by clicking on it and selecting from different options in the menu, where you could as well choose what NPC is going to spawn and what the NPC will wear, and what type of NPC it's going to be, what the NPC is going to sell if it's a shopkeeper, etc etc.

 

Your idea could make Starbound a great thing indeed, not that run off the mill game I play for 30 minutes when taking a break of the book im reading. In all honesty, its not like this couldnt be done, I just think they are not putting it on the top priority (whatever their top priority is, this isnt it) Altho putting such a strong focus on the system makes starbound go from exploration to a Space Clash-esque game of planet travelling, source gathering, colonization and politics. I think things need to be reworked still for sure, and the... contextless-space hub-thing-in-the-middle-of-literally-nowhere needs to go, seriously its just a "we got here using some weird arse portal with eyes carved on it, so now we live here" and thats pretty much it.

With all those varied npcs and their new interactions, I think an expansion and rework of the colony system would make Starbound a great game indeed, given they really put effort into it... Idk, maybe you can colonize more than one planet, make it a network (good use for those portals) in various biomes, using the dungeons like the space marines HQ (after you mercilessly smashed everyone of them) it could become hugely ambitious from there on, hard to say how much of a challenge it could actually be.

Lets just hope they do it right (=´ω｀=)♪[DOUBLEPOST=1440713320][/DOUBLEPOST]

thats horrible

 

It's still a colony of people living in an artificial cave system.

I mean, I kind of agree that this is more of a slumlord system, but bringing people to come live on a new world is colonizing it.

 

Any system is going to have people cheesing it. And given how tremendously noncompetitive this game is, to the point where the pixels earned from this method have a fairly limited usage, I guess I don't see what the supposedly big damn deal with this person's go is, other than being pretty boring, imagination-wise.

 

This is how I feel.

 

i really wouldn't come on a new planet if my living space was limited to a 2m² room with enough space for a chair on top of a small table.

It's seems it's not the direction the devs are going but i would have loved if there was some minor management involved with the colonists. For instance give them food and jobs to do.

Having a functional farm is useless atm because you hoard food much much quicker that you can possibly consume it (with that weird cooldown and the hunger system gone).

But if i could 1) Assign colonists to tend to the crops in my place (i like setting up the farm, but tending to them is a chore) and 2) use that food to feed colonists, and attract better ones with better/more diverse foodstuff. Then you'd have several features coming together to form a consistent game mechanism.

Also It'd be great if your colony was periodically attacked. Then the guards etc. would have a purpose that is greater than just fending off the odd aggressive bird

 

Colonization is only in its earliest phase. More is coming to it in later stable phase updates if you read the updates from the AMA on reddit last week.

 

I completely agree with you.
I agree about the food. I agree about protecting them from dangers.

I just keep in mind that the game is in Beta. The Colony system is brand new. Most things we've gotten in this game that were once brand new have been reworked and changed up pretty severely so to think that this is exemplary of the final product seems premature. I don't like hiding behind this excuse, but it is true, right?

My only point (in this entire thread) is that bringing people to live on a new planet is a form of colonization.

I'm not sure why we would call it anything else? We can go on and on about what "colonization" system should entail, but it doesn't change the fact that this is a bare bones colonization system better than any previous options we had about populating worlds or building empires. If someone built caves on the moon that were 2m² and for some reason people wanted to live in these Lunar Apartments, I'd call that a colony (and I'd assume they have food, water and air - or they would die).

I know we like mechanics to guide us, but you can use your imagination (or create mods) to fill in the blanks for you. You want your colonists to have access to fresh water? Then build them wells. It doesn't bother me that they will never once go to the well and drink the water, because they're imaginary people. I can imagine that's what they use the well for.

Honestly, I'd love to be able to 1) recruit NPCs - actual pre-existing NPCs - from other villages or the outpost and invite them to live on my world. 2) I'd love to be able to assign them tasks like farming and mining and building and crafting. That's just not what we have right now.

 

At this point i'm not even sure anymore. It is true the devs have reworked tons of stuff since the beginning, the combat and the way monsters behave now, compared to the begginning is great for instance. But so far it seems most of their efforts have been directed in adding more content (i'm not saying it's bad, new content is always good) and improving the linear progression. But not really adding more depth to the existing systems. Excepted combats i mentionned befre, the biggest rework I can remember is how they removed the survival aspect of the game (heat etc) to shoe-horn it into the linear progression (once you complete a certain quest you never have to worry about oxygen, anymore and the rest is just there to block you from reaching advanced worlds) and obviously how they reworked the planets so that each type of climate corresponds to a difficulty tier.

Those were imo steps into the wrong direction that removed depth from the game, so i'm not really hopeful anymore and certainly won't think it will all come up together somehow when they decide to use 1.0 instead of "adjective + animal".

If you look at other successful early access like KSP or Prison Archtect, you could really see updates after updates, the game mechanics coming together and supporting each other in a consistent, intelligent and deep game. I simply still don't get that feeling here.

 

This is my opinion but I think colonization is meant for people to build a base on a planet whereas before pretty much everyone was just living of of there ship. With colonization it gets people out of the ship doing something which is nice and gives them a reason to build and come up with unique designs for villages.

 

I still agree with you.

I'm often baffled by the development of Starbound. I have been since before Early Access.
Systems I thought were fundamentally good have been removed. They needed work, but instead they were removed.
Systems that I think are fundamentally poor have been added. They need a lot of work to even begin to entertain me.

I agree with everything you've said.
Mostly, I wish the "linear progression" wasn't so strictly forced upon me.
I don't want to upgrade my ship. I don't even want to visit the Outpost half the time.

The thing about Starbound (for me) is that I enjoy it - despite its flaws and unfinished state.
I've enjoyed it since Early Access began and even things have changed for better or worse, I still enjoy it.
I have fun playing it.

I want the colonization system to be much more in depth.
Maybe it never will be, but I like it better than the nothing we had before.
Well, by "nothing" I guess we had NPC Spawners that were glitchy and the NPCs died or disappeared when I wasn't babysitting them.

 

Fingers crossed!