Playing Nightly makes me worried

I just hope the no drop mod would work on any server. That's what has me worried. If I can mod it out? Fine. But if it only works in singleplayer? That's going to suck. And also... As pointed out in the past regarding ore 'dropping' No. it can't always be recovered. End of map deaths in asteroid fields are one primary example of this. And even if they can be recovered, the game has no minimap. Finding your way back especially in a large world if you were just exploring around to retrieve your stuff could be nearly impossible.

 

I could just say that you are trying to talk yourself out of it but...in the end it just serves no purpose if you talk about the nightly and allready "worry" about them at this point. And if you worry about a part of something you should allready stated it appropriate in the title. But maybe it was your purpose to sound more dramatic....I really don't know what benefit you thought you would gain.

If i have suggestions i suggest them in the suggestions thread but your logic seems to deviate in every way from any form of reason if you start your thread like this and in the wrong place...but suite yourself if it helps you.

Regarding the ores..why not just keep it at this rather than inflate a thread with useless stuff?

 

pixels are no longer used as much for crafting in the nightly (almost never)!!!

So this is not really valid criticism (at least in the current state of the nightly).

Also seriously another thread?

The last one devolved into an argument between like 6 people about ore drop (3 on each side) then 2 people, then it got locked, do we really need another one?

Really.. I mean really, the devs have heard the opinions of the various people... why do we need MORE arguing.

..seriously..




Also for those saying "oh all the people who have characters in normal will be upset", I doubt anyone would keep their current character for this update, it changes EVERYTHING, and removes the sectors, so keeping a character would be completely, utterly, pointless (except maybe for multiplayer shenanigans, in which case it isn't as big of a deal).


edit:
after reading, it seems this thread has actually stayed civil, surprising.

 

Arguing is a good thing, provided it remains civil. It's technically another word for debate. We're also trying to provide feedback because it seems a lot of people (not every last one of them, obviously) aren't cool with losing ores or bars at all. Yes you can recover them now, but we have no mini-map nor tool to locate them. On small biomes with only a few places to go, this isn't a terribly huge concern, but on some planets big enough for a day and night cycle to happen at least once when going across the entire surface, then you've got a problem.

Yes you lost all your souls and humanity in Dark Souls and had to find your bloodstain, but due to the bonfire system (usually, provided you used one recently), the static design of the world and the mini-map, you often knew exactly where it was. If you have to recover dropped equipment on death, doing so blindly is only going to cause frustration.

 

That, is actually a brilliant idea.


We should have a beacon that leads to the last place we died, (i mean it is the future right)

I used a mod for that in minecraft.

 

I hadn't really thought about the locating the dropped ore thing. I tend to do a lot of bread-crumb, trail leaving kinda stuff to find my way back.

 

The reason it's a good idea in minecraft is because of how huge the worlds are, and like in Minecraft, you lack anything resembling a mini-map or beacon-type object in vanilla. My preferred option, for if it had to go in, would be an object you craft in the beginning (or salvage from the broken ship) that you slowly upgrade through optional quests. It would start out providing a very basic mini-map as well as areas where there's ore (but only basic stuff, like the general area and not what exact ore or how much there is) while also showing where you died with a large red X (unoriginal, but it works) with a line showing the past you took prior to dying. As you upgrade it, it starts being more precise in both showing where the ores are, and what types they are (starts of as Basic category covering coal, copper, iron, the advanced setting would be silver, gold, platinum, etc) like an upgraded version would be able to tell copper apart from iron, silver from gold but not platinum, etc. Much like in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, you get better detectors as you progress (the final detector showed you where all anamolies, or hazards were, with the exact location of every artifact in the game, even revealing ones that wouldn't show up without it). It gave you a sense of progression from starting out as someone very new to The Zone (crappy armor, weapons, dirt cheap detector that doesn't even point to the general direction of artifacts) all the way to exo-skeleton wearing soldier using top-tier assault rifles and a detector that shows you the exact path for best profit while showing you where to avoid.

I do bread-crumb stuff myself as well. Usually it's in the form of torches in a specific pattern, or packed dirt/stone blocks that have a distinct look to let me know where the important stuff is, but the locator thing that I mentioned would be useful to everyone. Besides, as it stands now, a meteor strike could wipe out the trail of breadcrumbs (not sure you can see the weather types available to each world in the current Nightly build).

 

I think that currently the start of the game is pretty bland... It takes a while to set up the necessities and get started.
Then again, you have to start somewhere if you want to progress.

 

I don't care if they're recoverable or not. I don't want to drop them in the first place. I'm not a hardcore gamer and mining already takes too long to begin with. If this stays in the game (or is not easily removed) I just won't play. They've already got my money so I guess it doesn't matter one way or the other.

 

Why is this all of the sudden a make or break thing for so many people? Is it really that much of a chore to be careful and not die?

 

Mining has also been made easier, with as many worlds as there are in Star bound, it's not like there's a shortage of places to mine out.

Also, crates and bases.

 

This is a sandbox game based heavily on exploration with upgrades, do keep in mind that some deaths could qualify as cheap. Demon birds coming in pairs to keep you stun-locked with their vicious ranged attacks, the occasional meteor shower out of the blue/planet buster hitting you with such speed you can't really react, somehow starting on a Tier 2 or Tier 3 planet when starting out on a Nightly build (I hope that's been fixed). Sometimes, no matter how careful you are, the game will run up and blindside you with a sucker punch.

Crates and bases make sense for single player characters, but not at all for multi-player characters. The meteor shows/planet buster can easily ruin bases if we have no way of telling they can happen on a planet just by checking something on the ship available from the start. In a MP game, the crates are much less useful because other players could easily steal the contents when no one else is around, spreading animosity and distrust among the players.

 

you can check it in the nightly from the start . It seems some people are making assumptions based on the current stable version of the game. Note that the nightly build version is MUCH different. And therefore only those who have played it for awhile should be complaining because they have an actual idea about how it feels.


in response to the whole sandbox game thing, In my experience starbound is a "sandbox action adventure RPG game with building elements", not a sandbox "lol, i'm safe/ everythings easy i can do what i want whenever I want without working up to it game."
You must distinguish between sandbox and easy
sandbox and easy are not the same.

A game can be sandbox, but it is not usually a sandbox from the start ( and this is true for starbound, it is not meant to be easy at the start, and it being that way is meant to be a choice, there is a difference between "sandbox" and "Sandbox RPG" as-well, a sandbox rpg is game where you can be whoever you want (in starbound we will have multiple very different progression paths )

You must work up to being a god slowly over hours upon hours of playing, you do not start as a god (and clearly this is what the devs want)

Also just cause it might help to put the whole action adventure sandbox rpg thing i said earlier in perspective, the new dungeons are challenging and fun, and, there is alot, and, progression will be based on them. Combat needs much more player interaction and is challenging, gone are the days of combat being just "slash slash dead", and dungeons will usually be unbreakable until beaten as-well.

The current stable is basically a tech demo in compared to what they want it to be in the end.

 

There has been no evidence that the AI's weather system is going to be a progression feature that needs to be unlocked. As far as multiplayer theft, that is something that needs to be addressed as a whole with multiplayer controls/use of the ship, or possibly tile protections, because right now the only "safe" activity to do would be to mine and kill mobs while not in a party, and that's hardly where CF should keep interaction anyway. Only judgement and moderation is going to truly prevent trolling.

 

Those worried about pixels and ore... ore drops can be picked up when you return to the planet. You only "lose" bars and ores if you fail to retrieve them (a dark soulsish way of doing things).

I think I've only seen one block that requires pixels to craft. It's an exception now, not the rule. Everything requires proper mats.

 

Like in Dark Souls, sometimes you just can't reach those pixels/ores/bloodstain. If you got knocked deep into lava from a hit, there goes your pixels/ores, same for the core of a planet/asteroid field, which is a straight-up kill-zone. It's like dying to The Iron Golem where you get knocked out of the arena and die on impact against the ground below, leaving your bloodstain in an unreachable place. It's rare, but it can happen, and with how often deep lava pools exist in this game, I see it happening more. I'd rather the devs implement an item that you can craft later that can allow you to survive inside lava, like a Varia Suit type of item.

 

There's a workaround for this, [un]fortunately. You can place a bunch of dirt blocks in lava, placing them wide enough to create a tunnel and still have walls between them and the lava pool. When you mine the inside dirt blocks, the lava is gone, allowing you to create tunnels to retrieve your lost items.

The reason it's fortunate? I like creating underlava towns, and this allows me to do so. The unfortunate part? I hope that the existence of a workaround does not convince the dev team to not try and find a better solution (your idea of lava suits, or something else?). Having to retrieve items in lava pits isn't fun at all, so hopefully there is some way to prevent that from happening.

 

I know all about placing dirt blocks in lava pits, but as you said, it's a work around that neither of us want the devs saying people can use. Creating items to allow survival in areas you couldn't before is a key to exploring and really makes you feel like your character is growing. Super Metroid is a prime example of that.

Big lava biome planet in the beginning? "Sorry skipper, you can't survive there, but try taking on this boss, I hear he's got a component to something I've been researching!" (from the voice of the ship's AI or whatever)
Kill the boss, get the core component, craft the item that takes up a second back slot or something and bam! You can now survive on lava biome planets (mostly magma and such all around, not sub-biomes on the surface of say, a forest planet) and even in lava without fear of melting. You know, actual progression without a rather weak work around.

 

From my recent play experience on Nightly, I'd like to chime in that, as a player who previously focused mostly on exploration, the requirement now of having to mine extensively for all these materials early-game, with such low-tier equipment, feels mind-numbingly slow.

With the Sept. 7th build, I tried making a new character and playing around for a while. I could hardly get anywhere on the surface, because one of the common aggressive enemies had a ranged rock-cone attack that took about half of my health off, ran nearly as fast as me, and was quite persistent in chasing me. So, I figured, whatever, I'll try mining some ore and making some better equipment.

So I started digging. And digging. And digging. It took far too long to make even a short mine shaft, and the ores are too scattered up high to be easily found. To find anything, you have to dig several screens down, which takes tens of minutes to do with a stone pickaxe even when making something like a hellevator. And I still hadn't even seen a core fragment yet.

After about twenty to thirty minutes, I gave up using my early-game tools, and instead used the admin codes to give myself all the materials I needed to fully upgrade my Matter Manipulator. The digging went a good bit faster, but even with that and the FullBright code, it still took me a long time to find enough Core Fragments to repair the ship.


This is not a good direction from what I'm seeing; this is a multiple-hours-long slog of slow-paced mining being required just to get off of the starting planet, on a game that was advertised as being heavily about exploring a randomly-generated universe. Yes, the ores you need are plentifully available deep underground... but getting there is very time-consuming and not any fun on a new character, at least IMO. My experience might be in part because I had the bad luck of starting on a rather huge planet, but it's not like that is something I chose or that it couldn't happen to others quite frequently, and I don't think it would change the core issue that new characters are being forced to dig deep with such very slow tools.

 

Ores need some redistribution. I find the requirement to mine higher materials mostly silly, passing up silver/gold/diamond is counterintuitive. Maybe make mining these ores do more damage to your pick instead? But if you REALLY want them (we do) you can still get them, as opposed to coming back later once you have the right pickaxe.

I still think the progression of materials needs some tweaking (silver/gold pickaxes still don't make sense). Copper, copper/tin alloy, Bronze, Iron? Idk. Maybe silver/gold as alloys for pretty armors. Just thoughts.[DOUBLEPOST=1410326178][/DOUBLEPOST]I like that the furnace is now a proper crafting station. Iron crafting table is nice too, and ability to get lantern stick/metalworx earlier is nice. There is still a lot of improvements here. I LOVE the balance for the bows. Also the alien ai is so much better. With how much they're doing right I have ever confidence they'll resolve these issues.