Feedback Opinions on Unique Monsters/Procgen Monsters?

So what exactly is the community's real thoughts on the Unique monsters and the Procedurally generated monsters? Are they well liked, do they think that unique are mistake, or something more inbetween those lines? Was taking Procedural Monster attacks a mistake or not?

Personally I dislike them and think they're a step in completely the wrong direction, but I'm curious to see if that's just me.

Note: By unique monster, I mean the normal enemies (poptops, gleaps, etc), not minibosses/bosses.

 

Unique monster is not a mistake, I want mini boss, where are they

 

Unique Monsters

The idea is good, but the implementation quite frankly sucks. They're not very unique if they're on every single planet in the universe of a specific type. They should be found in micro dungeons, such as how the flying robots only appear in Apex labs. Then, the similar biomes with little to no variation per planet need overhauls to be unique, too. I'll avoid going into that topic since it's off topic, but the monsters are ALWAYS out of place outside of dungeons.

There were unique monsters, specifically robots and Apex mutations, that were in suitable locations; Po were only found in Glitch-made sewers, the green Apex Mutants were only found in Apex labs and Cultist cages, and so on. They weren't just thrown in as a filler creature for the planet, but as part of a pre-built area that randomly spawned. Those were good. The Moontants on the Lunar mission also fit this niche; they only appear there because the miners screwed up and became Moontants. Shame that the Moontants were, by a poor and stupid decision, changed to not be eligible as pets. Same with the Po, which were once capturable, but now are not. The other uniques, excluding the green Apex Mutant, were removed too. The stuff that was good was taken out, and replaced with mostly lackluster doodles. I mean no offense, but most unique monsters now are pretty trash; not only in location and rarity, but also design and behavior. I especially hate Sporgus because they replaced my favorite unique/random monster; the small biped with the mushroom heads.

Seriously, most monsters just ram you. That's all they do, other than one or two minor variations (Spit or charge).

Procedural Generation:

This is one of the biggest draws that the game advertised way back when; randomly generated everything. Once upon a time, random monsters had attacks that made fighting them more difficult. Early beta was obviously unrefined, but many attacks had annoying effects; Big monsters could hold you still, some could spit exploding projectiles, some had flame breath that was more lethal than lava, and so on. You pick a fight, and you expected to die if you made a mistake. Most attacks were similar, but they were unexpected at times; imagine a monster that looks like a turtle + squid, and it spits eyeballs at you, then realize how bland the monsters are now. Now, they're so lacking in threat that there's no challenge nor fear unless you make a dumb mistake.

Once upon a time, there were more monster parts as well. Take the popular Derrick thread for example; the head used to create Derrick was removed for no reason. Not many parts were removed, but because of the removal, the random generation is MUCH more limited. Even more atrocious is that in early development, there was a blog post every week with a randomly generated monster using parts we never got, even in early betas. There was a really good T-Rex head, a cat driver, a plague masked cobra, tons of robots, a fish head, and so much more. There were even flying monsters with parts that didn't even look like stuff we got today, like an octopus fairy and a flying rabbit. There were so many things shown that we never got that never saw the light of day for goodness knows what reasons.

As mentioned earlier, my favorite random monster was removed in favor of Sporgus. The monster, while random, was unique to mushroom biomes. It had a mushroom cap for a head, two small arms, and four legs. The mushroom cap and body never shared a color, and my favorite little freak had a red cap and white body. They were generic random monsters with no abilities (when abilities were a thing), but they were unique enough to be special. My second favorite random monster are centaurs, using the small quadrupedal centaur head. I'm surprised those stayed, but I'm glad they did. They just almost never show up, and I really want one again, even though pets are 100% worthless if they can't fly and spit projectiles.


TL : DR;

Procedural is best, since it was the main appeal, while uniques are not so good despite having more work put into them. Unique should not be synonymous with common. I am also extremely salty about my favorite stuff (Moontant pets, Po pets, Small Mushroom pets) being taken away without reason. I'm also upset that Fatal Circuit got replaced by a stupid penguin robot. That made me really mad, since Fatal Circuit was so much better in design than some stupid meme-induced penguin trash.

I hate penguins. Starbound made me hate penguins.


Got a bit long-winded there, but that's my honest opinion as a player who bought into this during its earliest beta versions and stayed in the hopes of seeing major improvements.

 

I'm just confused why the whole monster leveling system was removed

 

I think it was a case of them giving up on it since it was never completed.

I agree completely with what you said. I feel like Chucklefish has a very bad habit of taking two steps forward and two steps back.

Back in the early days of starbound, it was quite frankly, a mess. But a good kind. There were half built systems all over the place, which when put together, made for a good game. When I say that Chuckledish takes two steps forward and two back, I'm referring to the fact that they add something good, but change other things that counteract whatever happiness the change would've brought about.

The first example is planets and sectors. They removed sectors, opting for different star types instead. I was a fan of this, it made it a lot simpler to share coordinates. But then they covered each planet with bland unique monsters, replacing the procedurally generated monsters that many loved. Hell, I'm sure many people bought the game BECAUSE of the pregens, because that was a selling point.

Second example is how pets worked in koala. They had all manner of magical abilities, but the big problem was that they were buggy and extremely poorly done. First, there was a wipe when capture pods were added, and people who were excited to finally catch the monsters on their home planets were sorely disappointed when they were scraped from existence. The monsters couldn't be retrieved once sent out, and many had to bring sawtraps around to slaughter their own pets. Flying monsters, for whatever reason, couldn't be captured. Then came 1.0, and the new way they handled pets was amazing. Sure, they were missing some things like the promised evolution and leveling, but you could retrieve them with the item now, instead of having to kill them. It was great. And you could capture almost anything now, not just small creatures!

All my excitement at that died when I realized that they didn't have abilities anymore. Why? For what reason? To make space for unique monsters?

I feel that Cf has a terrible habit of removing perfectly good things with zero reasoning behind it. Removing the monster abilities has no purpose, neither did removing mechs or certain clothing items. It may not have been so bad If they'd addressed it, like adding to the patch notes: "Mechs were removed in this update, but don't worry, they'll be reworked and sent out again!" Instead we have so much content taken out, likely with the intent to improve them, and then we never see it again. Things like special weapons, mobs, monster parts (I'm not just annoyed with this because of the removal of Derrick's head, I really think it was bad in general to remove monster parts.), racial weapons (some of those were really cool, but they were scrapped in favor of a universal set. What gives?) and it feels like they've removed so much of what they initially drew us into starbound with.

I don't even think they look at feedback anymore, so it's unlikely any of this will even be seen by the devs, and more unlikely for us to get back any of it.