Feedback What's the point of Teleporters when I can use flags?

Once you place down a flag, you can mark it as a teleport destination. However, what I found strange about this feature is that you can teleport to any of your flags from not only your ship while it's in orbit above the planet that you planted the flag(s), but also when your ship is orbiting another planet, or from a teleporter from another planet. With this in mind, instead of saving up my Pixels and Teleporter Cores to purchase expensive teleporters that break when picked up, I could plant down a bunch of flags that I can make for 1 Copper Bar and 20 Fabric, and I can reuse them should I need to move them.

People could argue that you can't teleport off-world while underground, which should, in theory, make teleporters more useful than flags. Well then, I'll just build a path to the surface, where I can teleport off-world. Or perhaps I don't care to go underground (such as if I'm building a base on the surface)?

Edit: Apparently, I should've been more clear about what I'm asking in the poll, but I don't know of any way to change the question or remove the poll. I don't want the Flags to be removed at all, just nerfed so that you can't warp to them unless your ship is directly in orbit above the planet where the flag is, instead of from any teleporter that you've already bookmarked.

 

Let's have an example;

You're on Planet A. You set up a colony, plant a flag, and teleport up. You head over to Planet B, and do the same thing. Instead of a flag, you put a teleporter down. From this teleporter, you can teleport to Planet A or your Ship. When you return to Planet A, you can only beam up to your ship.

The teleporter makes it easier to move between multiple locations quicker without the need to go to your ship just to go to the next planet. Flags are good for bookmarking, but you have to use the ship as a middle man to get between two points.

 

Flag = Set a beam location. Cheap to make.
Teleporter = Set a beam location. Transport to other beam locations. Varies in appearance. Relatively expensive to make.

 

Not just all this, but pretty sure in some modes beaming from underground will be re-disabled, meaning if you want to get back to your ship from deep underground a teleporter will be your best option.

 

I really want this, i think it makes sense that if ur quite deep underground you shouldnt be able to just beam out, its annoying, its one of the many things that make the game too easy, at least late in the game.

 

It would be quite cool if you could beam out up to a certain depth.

 

Wait, so are you saying that a teleporter only saves you like 1 second of time? You can beam anywhere from your ship?

 

If you place a flag there, yes, currently.
In 1.0 I'm pretty sure the higher difficulty settings (probably anything over casual) are going to have the old system where you cannot beam to your ship from underground, thereby making teleporters useful.

 

Loading screens and FPS drops.

If I teleport from my Teleporter on my Base to another planet, that's one loading screen.

If I beam up from my base to my ship and then telepor t from my ship to my destination, that's two loading screens and the shipworld in-between.

It shaves off at least 10, maybe 15-20 seconds depending on the speed of your computer. And it's just plain easier.

And besides, a teleporter core (I have 20+ of them) and 3,000 pixels is... nothing. You only really need 1 teleporter for each base you build (I usually only build 1 base anyways).

 

I don't know...this seems to almost completely invalidate teleporters.

 

I agree to OP but I don't think one or the other should be removed but the difference should be more fleshed out. Currently flags work a lot like teleporters. You just have to beam to your ship between locations. My suggestion would be to only to able to beam to flags while orbiting the planet they are on. This would also establish a in-world logic how teleporters work. Long-distance beaming would be only possible if two teleporters are linked while short-distance beaming from your ship is possible to any space on an orbited planet.

 

That would make flags almost useless, though. You'd be forced to stop and grind 3k pixels each time you wanted to mark a planet for fast-travel. This would kill people who play Frackin'Universe.

While 3k pixels isn't much late game, it IS early-game and in FU, you need lots of different travel points because of how many different ores and how many unique types of planets FU gives you... Penumbrite, Protocyte, Lunari Crystals, Triangilum, Bloodstone/Quietus, all of these are usually found on specific planet types (though sometimes you can get lucky and find them mashed up on other biomes, but usually late-game planets where you require stuff like Radiation Immunity armor as the nanosuit isn't strong enough), etc.

 

The modder could change the mod to adjust for that. They could even make the cost of teleporters cheaper or something. I don't think one mod should have that much power over gameplay decisions in the real game.

 

Well, it isn't JUST FU, but I'm sure there might be other mods coming along the line where people might want to bookmark/flag multiple planets.

And to be real honest... is it THAT big of a deal that you think we MUST change the way it is now? Don't fix it if ain't broke. Teleporters DO have their uses, even if they seem somewhat limited.

I bet when the Survival Mode comes out, and it has "Can't Beam From Underground", people are going to find Teleporters a lot more valuable. You say "Oh, I'll just make a quick exit shaft" but yet anything can happen, you can get nailed by a mob or something... Teleporters just make it fast and convenient to get out rather than spend 5 minutes climbing out.

 

I honestly found it really weird that you couldn't use a teleporter core to instantly beam out. Maybe not that easy to explain how it functions, but mechanically it would be nice to have something similar to the homeward potions/mirror in Terraria, and wasn't as inconvenient to acquire and use as a teleporter. Maybe they want getting out of your cave to be a more significant part of the experience, but it would be nice to have more uses for the cores as well.

 

To be honest, one has to draw a line between "realism" and "fun".

I don't believe crawling out of a cave is "fun" or "significant part of the experience". I rather find it boring, especially at the beginning of the game. You go down there, get enough Iron for your armor and everything you wanted to make and then you get your 20 core frags and then.... what, you gotta waste time climbing out, probably with no double jump, no grapple gun, a weak *beeep* manipulator?

Not fun. It's obnoxious and boring IMO.

Now, later in the game when you got a fully powered MM, you got Pulse Jump, and even the Grapple Gun, then it ain't so bad, you might even find some minidungeons on the way up. But dude, your first planet?

It's slow, obnoxious and boring.

And teleporter cores being used as personal teleporters isn't really going to fix the problem because you don't usually have more than 1 or 2 by that point and you probably won't want to waste them on that.

Now, what we COULD do, is make recipes for building teleporters (they all cost 3,000 pixels).

Perhaps...

Wooden Teleporter: Wood Plank x50, 3000 Pixels, Teleporter Core
Stone Teleporter: Cobblestone x50, 3000 Pixels, Teleporter Core

And etc. These could be made at a workbench so if you just bring a workbench with you, you could make and use the teleporter right there.

Of course, buying the Teleporters at the Outpost will save you some materials, so it is preferable to do that when possible.

 

Unless it's changed in Nightly (I'm waiting for 1.0), you can easily collect plenty of ropes, more than enough to get by. I would actually give the starting world a bit more leeway, you're kind of intended to play it a bit more Terraria-style, being a bit more careful about how you dig, and I think it's actually a fair mechanic to, say, expect people to dig more carefully in the early game, and maybe lategame have a Homeward Mirror type deal.

The problem I have with that take (which I will say in advance, is based only on Stable and dev blogs and what I hear on forums), is that there don't seem to be a lot of ways to make a safe descent/ascent. In Terraria you generally build a Hellevator, but that's less viable in Starbound for many reasons; mainly, your MM is incredibly slow to mine, so you're much better off just following a cave labyrinth to the bottom. Getting to hell is a pretty late-game goal for Terraria, but getting deep down in planets is standard in Starbound. Plus, it wastes a lot more time in Starbound to dig a tunnel you can jump back up, since you're only going to get half the efficiency of your 2x2 mining sqare. Maybe ladders would be the ideal solution; according to Starbound they exist but aren't implemented, so maybe that's something they're looking at for the final game. If you could easily use ladders to backtrack through whatever cave network you create, that seems a fair solution.

 

I don't get why climbing ropes can't be made permanent, or we could get some actual rope that functions like rope or, maybe, ziplines.

As for Terraria... eh, "Late Game" goal? More like... 25% of the way into the game, lol. But still. The big difference between Terraria and SB as far as going up/down is the fact you got Ropes in Terraria. Our rope is only temporary and just disappears, poof. I don't get why there isn't a version you can make that lets you climb it. You could make ladders out of platforms, but dude, that'd take forever and it'd take way too much wood....

......especially for a "Throwaway planet" that you'll probably never visit again.

 

Well, for most of Terraria's lifespan it was the final goal! ...actually, how long ago was the Wall of Flesh added? I may be having those "oh god I'm old" moments. In any case, my point was that building a Hellevator isn't exactly a short-term goal, it's going to take you a lot of time to do it, whereas getting to the bottom of a Starbound world is one of the core mechanics.

Well, I didn't mean platform-ladders, those are dreadful, I was thinking proper ladders that would let you just hold Up and climb upwards. Or maybe press a button to interact, and enter a climbing animation.

When I was describing it, I was actually thinking about the ladders that are used as scenery props - plop down a tall ladder and be able to go straight up or down. Make it expensive enough to not be able to use willy nilly, maybe have some sort of mechanic to keep you from placing them side-by-side (they should be vertical only), etc. Combine that with your limited rope uses, and in theory it should make for fun gameplay.

 

This is a large part of the reason why ropes keep piling up in my storage, they're useful, but counterintuitive.