Please Implement A Warp Beacon, Doing Anything Underground Is Tedious Without It

I dont have a problem with changing the teleport location you land from your ship, this really should be something you can set. But anything to and from deep underground is just going to make the game smaller to where you only actually play in a tiny area of a planet due to popping from point to point. ATM there is already a way to get back to your ship quickly. Suicide for 20% of your pixils (or whatever the death penalty will end up at).

About your underground base - If we had to build the mechanism to quickly get to and from the base and THEN it worked that would be ok. IE how in Terraria you had to do the wiring for teleporters and then you could warp to where you set them up at. Doing this was time consuming and could be dangerous, thus the payoff of teleporting to the base.

 

perhaps elevator tech at higher levels allow you to place a platform that when activated goes down or up untill it hits block or maybe the other part of the device and that way its only on that planet and you also have to manually get to it but this should be a later tier item maybe at durasteel at the robotics bench or something

 

Like Daos said, teleporter networks could function like this. Heck, we could even go so far as to link the network with the ship, so you can choose where to teleport onto the planet like people were suggesting, albeit only with certain upgrades.

And yeah, I'm pretty diehard on the spelunking because that's where the adventure is at getting your food, construction materials, some bandages and grab a tent to go exploring! Danger is supposed to be inherent in exploration, you take that away and it becomes a monotonous grind. Rather than worrying about and fighting for survival, people are just digging holes for ore and leaving whenever things get a little difficult.

Some of the most fun I had so far as surviving on a moon, moving from fire to fire (or setting it quickly) while fighting nasty critters above my level in some kind of abandoned camp.
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As mentioned earlier, a couple of ideas:

"The only way to be sure...":
Nuke it from orbit! Requires tech and fuel, but fires a shot from your cannon onto the planet, drilling X distance into the ground and potentially exploding based on the shot type. A crude method of terraforming, it can easily create a way for you to escape in a hurry, but has dangers of its own.
May also have a range of accuracy, and you may have to wait for ship to orbit overhead.

Autodrill
A drill you can set on the ground and let do its thing. It will dig a 2x2 hole directly down and keep going until it runs out of energy, hits a liquid or falls too far in open air (Bounces off the ground and loses its digging angle). If so arsed, you can ride on top of the drill and direct it slightly, speed it up or slow it down. But it can only head downward.

And heck yeah, why not an elevator as Tollz mentioned? The ropes added in terraria are basically that and then some.

 

I disagree with being able to set up a teleporting network that allows you to easily get out of deep mineshafts, it will just make it too easy to avoid any danger and will feel a lot less rewarding. If you want to make an underground base then they could just implement a simple elevator (as someone else mentioned before) so you can't use this to easily get out of danger but with time and effort then you can build yourself a convenient way to get back down and out of your underground base. Not exactly high tech but it avoids making the game too easy. Plus you could make a batcave.

 

What about having teleport pads On the SURFACE Only, but once you dig a tunnel straight down to where you want to go, you can install an elevator? ;D
You could connect the teleport pads like so

ST____________T[E]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx| |
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx| |

S-spawn, T-teleport pad, E-elevator

 

Still don't think it's a good idea if you can instantly warp from the underground to this teleport pad, it will just make it too easy to get out of danger. I felt the same way about the magic mirror in Terraria, if you can instantly get out of any fight by just using an item then you have no reason to be tense while digging the depths of a planet. The only way I see it working is if they put some kind of "In combat" system where you can't use the device while being attacked by a monster and maybe put a long CD on the device too (at least 1 hour) to make it more of a handy convenience but very limited.

 

Oh not instantly. Elevators can be pretty slow when going down/up. Only shortcut would be between the 2 teleport pads.

 

I think a teleporter to a home base and one to a town or something would be nice, at the very least we should have an option on WHERE to land at on the planet. But yeah I don't think teleporters around the surface will be such a big deal once we get vehicles.

 

well, there's already one-way teleport by saving and quitting, but i agree, two-way is no-way

 

The problem is that danger and excitement and 99% of the fun of the game comes from the unknown. Once you're more than about two screen length's back into your tunnel towards the surface, there's no longer any danger, no longer any excitement, no longer any fun of exploration -- from then on it's pure tedium to get back to the ship, with almost no risk or interesting choices on the way.

It's easy enough to make teleporter or recall options that don't work when there are monsters nearby. But I think it's important to find a solution to that tedium, to avoid a situation where players are forced to constantly retread the same ground in order to explore. And I don't think there's really any way to make repeatedly retreading the same ground into something interesting -- even with monsters randomly spawning there, it's still just the same boring cavern I've seen before, so yeah, the game should totally provide a way to teleport past it. Tedium isn't a very fun game mechanic, which means that on some level reliable, free fast travel mechanics between the depths and the surface are badly needed.

And it absolutely must be free -- that's by far the most important part. Consumable ones are a terrible idea, because the whole idea is to make something that bypasses boring areas (places you've already explored, which present relatively little danger to you and have nothing interesting in them.) Obviously it shouldn't cost a significant amount or have any price to use, because it's not providing you with a mechanical benefit beyond avoiding tedium, and because giving players a choice to sacrifice resources or be bored is not good design -- boredom shouldn't be a game mechanic.

Basically, something like Terraria's magic mirror is badly needed. I get some of what you're saying, but on a practical level 99% of the time traveling back and forth is just boring tedium, with no interesting gameplay, no interesting choices, and nothing fun in it at all. That's not worth preserving -- the fun things about sometimes being trapped can be preserved in other, more limited areas (eg. by making dungeons no-teleport while they're undiggable.)

And of course you can always choose to not carry a teleporter if you want to challenge yourself -- but I don't think most people would want to go without one for long, because, again, tedium.

 

I agree fully, having a beacon that you throw down and poof your back to you're ship would not only eliminate the risk/reward of deep mining entirely but it would also nullify any sort of difficulty the planet or environment may have. Like others and yourself have already said, the beacon should be some sort of wire contraption that costs a lot of mats to make, and imo it should also be a 1 time use but only IF it can be used underground, sort of like an emergency get away. The price should reflect the luxury in this case.

 

i wast thinking to myself why not allow you to "uncover" the surface of a planet and it be mapped as you scour the planet to then go back to your ship in your cockpit if you click on a planet you can see the overveiw of the planet, this could serve for many purposes the first being able to get a better view of you planet because come on your orbiting you should be able to and then you can also see how far you have gone respectively around the planet. once this is implemented you could then have a cursor over the map and could teleport down and it would drop you directly on the first viable block you have discovered. this would negate the OH SHIT BUTTON because you would have to have a straight view up to the surface for a clean beam but also allow you to get down to the previous spot faster because you put the effort into making a clear path down. this would also allow you to meet back up with friends on the surface if you die. Then you would also be limited to only being able to warp where you have been and also negate you being able to warp to the bottom of a black pit you found because you havent been there.

I thought of this while pondering the many suggestions in this thread and i feel like this would ad alot more to the warping down on planets aspect while not losing the danger because theres no way to tell if you port down you wont just get mobbed instantly but you still have to put the leg work into exploring and digging in the first place. this should also be an upgrade to your ship i.e. "Surface mapping upgrade" and a second part "Directed beaming tech" and perhaps a cooldown aswell or pixel cost or something so there is a trade off. and of course it should be crafted and feel like an unlocked progression.

 

You have to remember how limited the content of the game is, the cave systems aren't always going to be boring and tedious to navigate and when they add more items like grappling hooks and such, it will be a lot easier to get around. Always keep the mineset that the game is very far from complete, our main purpose for now is bug tracking, don't get too caught up in the dull aspects!

 

Right now you can just save and exit, then reload and you are right back on your ship

 

ofcourse but the thread was also about the concept of getting around the planet in better ways i.e. teleporters but the game needs suggestions to what feels stagnant or of putting if all we do is report bugs and the like then well just end up non buggy generic sidescroller in space, beta is a time for improvement, suggestions and wild ideas but just cleaning up a game will not urge progress get a little wild with the content and then BETA TEST it if it doesnt fit or doesnt work fix it or remove it thats what we have this time for think about all the things that Tiy and the team are doing in just a few days and we are only at stage ONE of the beta dont put a damper on the ideas for sake of focusing on bugs.

 

I got an idea. Why not have some planets come with PRE-set teleportation spots that have to be re-built/repaired to be used. Give some of them the impression that they had advanced civilizations living there at some point, but abandoned it to go explore the rest of the universe like the player does. Maybe have them left in some ruins?

Or require some sort of "Radar" to determine where to build a teleport pad, and not be able to build it anywhere, only at certain spots?

 

unfortunately lucky this idea is subject to alot of griefing because of the way you theorized for it to work destruction of the original spot may destroy things permanently especially with ranged and explosive weaponry's ability to destroy block it leaves itself open to accidental mostly but also intentional interference

 

If you dig too deep and don't have a way back, you can simply save and quit. In fact, I think it would be pretty awful if every spelunking expedition forced you to spend half of your time backtracking to the surface.

By the same token, if you have time to safely wall yourself in, then you've essentially already won. At the very least, you have enough time to save and quit, block the enemy in, or tunnel away in some other direction. Why would anyone ever use an expensive consumable instead of just doing one of those? Even dying would be preferable, considering that the punishment for it is pretty much a slap on the wrist. A teleporter - which would need to be placed, and perhaps require a charge-up time and some infrastructure, such as power generation - would change nothing in this regard, and certainly wouldn't be any more of a "panic button" than the currently available options.

What it would do is make base-building significantly more practical, allowing you to create interesting homes in the locations of your choice. Considering how much of the game's current assets consist of various kinds of base decoration, that's something I at least would very much like to see. Having a home planet should be meaningful, with buildings and homes at various points of interest, not simply a way to store a planet location on your ship. It would also allow other interesting ideas, such as investing some resources to create a "base camp" from which to tackle a nearby difficult area.

 

Such a thing would be nice. But it shall only work if it is placed on the surface of the planet

 

Well it would be nice if you could set up a surface "Long range" teleporting device or some kind of stargate that allows you to move between a home world and your ship and allow people to build a homebase. And I'd prefer it to save your exact location when you save and quit instead of loading you back on your ship, means you can properly explore a planet over time in case you have other things to do and can't do it all in one sitting.