mollygos submitted a new blog post: 22 July - Grass Inspector Continue reading the Original Blog Post
Love the ore merchant idea. Sometimes, it's easier to spend pixels than go digging around for ages. Especially when you're just having the worst of luck. Also, good news! The new farming mechanics can be automated! They've made it so you can run water under, and the soil will absorb some. However, you can't just have a stagnant pool of water under some soil. The water tiles have to be updated, or something. So for automation, leave the space under the soil empty and just run some water under it every 30 seconds or so. I posted a GFY of that in /r/Starbound. Alas, this is only my third comment here, so I can't link it in this.
The Ore merchant is a great idea, but not really fond of it being in the out post. Would have been nice if it was on a desert planet with a mining building. See some miners in action in the mines - simply swinging their pick axes like skyrim. Added it for you
The ore merchant staying in the Outpost is actually an awesome idea that gives all players access to a Pixel-based shortcut for tiering, which is a very good thing.
I like what I see. Now can you make it posible to set the fields on fire? You know, incase of a nasty case of randomly mutated killer plants.
I am not certain, but going what I tested in nightly a week or so ago, it seems to me like the liquid water needs to make contact with the tilled block to dampen it. So it might be better to have the water run on top of the crops rather than underneath them. Or possibly have the tubes underneath the farmland filled completely with water, not sure if that would work though.
A week ago? A week ago, fluids lacked possible interactions with tiles so you aren't exactly operating with the same knowledge as TanzNukeTerror whose model works in the current Nightly.
We're saved! Now all we have to do is get the water to replenish itself. I posted a couple of ideas for that in yesterday's thread. (On the other hand, the idea of actually having to take care of your plants individually is growing on me - provided they make farming actually deeper and more rewarding, instead of just more time-consuming HAVE YOU SEEN MY IDEAS IN THE OTHER THREAD BECAUSE I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THEM) As for the ore merchant, I think those prices seem pretty good. The materials should be sort of expensive, so there's still an incentive to go mining. If there are too many shortcuts, you won't have any game left.
Really helpful things in todays update, gotta admit. Although I *really* hope the merchant will sell Durasteel and other alloys because those are the most iritating thing to get in the end game... adding teleporters made it much easier, since now you can deploy a mine on lower tier planets, but it still takes too much time (especially on low-end PCs like mine )