Ren's Big Long Impassioned Rant About Everything Wrong With Starbound (and how to fix it)

Just want to add something little to this thread. I noticed that I won't even play the game lately without mods like "Madtulips spaceship mod" (which is outdated now, another version is being worked at under a different name), S3r1ous modpack and so on.
I think that there are some key-features like building your own spaceship that is very fun & should be in the main-game. The templates for the default ships and the way obtaining them is very dull.

 

If CF sees them as important to their game, then they will be added, otherwise, they will remain as mods, which is good. Mods let us customize our game experience even more, and personally, I dislike a good 90% of mods.

 

Perhaps that might go for most other mods - but how can a "build your own spaceship"-mod be a bad thing for any one? In a game where you build everything else?

If a person would be against a feature like that, then they should probably ask Chucklefish to remove building houses/colonies/interior decorations too - just have everything in complete templates you can buy off vendors.

 

Please don't give them ideas of that nature.

 

Because I like the ships as they are? You are asserting a fallacy.

 

This game has SO much potential it would be so horrible to see it fail or just never be as fun as it should be.

 

For exactly that reason. If you can build your ship exactly to what you want, tile by tile, that what's the point of building on a planet? People already complain enough that there's no reason to build on planets,(*cough*Colonization*cough) and those kind of mods, at least in the game's current phase, only brings that point further.

 

This. Exactly this.

All the random-ass procedurally generated planets are nice and all. Great. Wonderful.

This is a space exploration game. Let me happen upon a human settlement, and take quests there. A big-ass city with neon and bars. Or a mining complex on a moon. Or an archaeological dig site. All with their own semi-procedural quests. Add some flavor. Some people. Some life, more than just the one space station.

Fairytale houses, no. Scifi settlements that I can decide I really like, buy an "apartment" in the city, build in that apartment, etc. Yes.

 

It's easier to sprite a couch and edit a json gile than create the necessities for a new randomly generated village to spawn. And this update WAS the colonization update, not the "make new dungeons" update, so interesting furniture for the player to use is relevant to the update.

 

I would still focus on my ship and not on some planet (I don't know how you play, but I do travel alot between planets exploring - for me it's kind of redundant to settle down somewhere static).

Creating incentive to build on a planet by denying the possibility of building your own ship is not the right way to go. You could instead create other incentives for building on planets, for example colonies generating somekind of "tax"-income by its inhabitants if you own it. Create political factions, go to war against other colonies etcetera. But that would require to overhaul the economy in the game among other things.

 

How are you going to design the ship without being able to land/dock/getoutofspace with it?

Currently ships are now a part of progression, and well, im kinda attached to mine what with all the storage. . I'd like to make a ship, but I'd bet the majority of space designs would be more utilitarian than spaceworthy.

 

I like the premade ships. A lot. People flying around in dirt cubes doesn't sound really cool.

I wouldn't mind if the ships weren't necessarily that big though. Smaller, more cozy ship would be fine by me. Like the human ship that has cargo hold and a few extra rooms. Can't remember it's tier.

 

If I had the skill, Id make a mod to make ship upgrades branch out after tier 3, to offer different styles.

 

A summary for those who don't have the time to read this,
"Make Starbound more like Terraria"

 

There's a reason mods like Clef (http://community.playstarbound.com/resources/clef-things-to-do-in-starbound.2622/) are so popular.

 

Making Starbound into Terraria-lite isn't going to make Starbound better. In fact, people will likely be brought away from it, as it would have nothing to distinguish it. Currently, while it is still in progress, it does have different features and a different approach to the sandbox: the colony system offers a way to customize npc tenants to live at your bases/structures. A larger food buff system with survival mechanics that will return, and a way to make Instanced content which, with block protection, allows objectives and fights to be had without construction trivializing it.

 

I don't think they'll go that far in the game, but I really want this as an expansion!

 

What was the point of pointing out that mod and calling it "so popular"?

The people using it is a tiny minority and not only that they are even a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

The most popular mods have 20 times as many downloads as that one, making people using it a minority within the group of players that use mods and the players using mods is to begin with a minority of the playerbase.

 

It may have a lot of total downloads, but each version has ~100. Hard to call it popular.

 

It has downloads on Nexus too & is included in different modpacks (with Clefs permission) with decent amounts of downloads. The "top mods" that you speak of is mostly old stuff that was popular when this game had a lot more players. A lot of the playerbase seems to have moved on which explains newer mods not being able to de-rank the old ones so far.

I have barely played Terraria. I'm trying to figure out why more content is a bad thing (that's what a lot of posts in this thread look like to me). Clefs modpack is basically lots of content, some that was taken out previously. I also still don't understand why exactly you don't want to be able to customize your own ship Lazarus78? Any rational arguments other than "I don't like it"?