20,000 leagues under the surface

So, I created my "home" village in the core of a planet, under the lava. Doing this took a lot of time, trying to move all of the items from my previous "home" village (on the surface spawn point of a lvl 1 jungle planet) to the new lvl 10 planet's core.

Here's a few observations that I've made in the time it took to do this.

1) Until two-way warp gates are added, don't do what I did and create the village halfway around a GIGANTIC planet. It takes 4 full cycles of using of bubble boost (can't tap since the underlava tunnel is too small) and fully regaining energy to get from the hellevator near the spawn point to the entrance to the village. It took over 7 cycles of butterfly boost. Yes, I checked.

2) When building the tunnel, it was very inconvenient (but not a dealbreaker) that I can only mind 1 or 3 blocks at a time, when I need 4 blocks to travel horizantally and 2 blocks to travel vertically. This is unfortunately not matched up for easy digging. Perhaps consider a change from 3 x 3 to 4x4?

3) I like that we can place blocks in 2x2 or 1x1 squares. This made it possible for me to place a 4 block rectangle of snow/tar/dirt and then use blastrock or meteorstone or magmarock for the ceiling and floor. When I ran out of the materials that require more than 1 tap of a drill for the floor and ceiling, I started to really suffer from accidental tunnel collapses.

4) This could be a _really_ fun PVP protection mechanism on public servers. At the bottom of your hellevator, just put the activate-able blocks. Someone coming down after you? SPLAT. Yep, that was someone. Someone chasing you down the tunnel? Place a few "floodable" sections and collapse them behind you. Feeling really mean? Put some wooden spikes in the tunnel behind you.

5) There are wayyyy too many block types that look very close to identical, perhaps off by a single shade. Consider only separating blocks if they are different by a noticeable amount? I had 4 different "dark green" dirt blocks, 2 different "light green" moondusts, and 5 different "standard gray" blastrock stacks. I don't need that many, I just need to have 4000 blocks to make my tunnel.

6) Hivestone is really cool, and I _will_ find this after the next character wipe. Plantmatter blocks are also neat. Too bad I only found them in the layer just above the planet's core, and hadn't seen them in the other 4 planets I browsed through when looking for valuable real estate.

7) If Titanium were easier to get, or I spent as much time gathering materials as I did planning this village, I would have built skyrails in the underlava tunnel, for easier access. This would be on a protected/private server, and not public, as I would _really_ not want to trap a skyrail or flood it with lava.

8) I found good uses for techs I had previously ignored.

Targetted blink is awesome for accidental lava-flooding emergencies. Block yourself in, teleport to a safe part of the tunnel, and you only lose a minute's worth of lava-quenching and tunneling.

Gravity Neutralization is awesome when clearing blastrock backgrounds and setting up clouds and a "sun" in the sky.

Morphball would be neat if I wanted to pretend I'm Samus, Hand of Fate, and have a 30-minute driving scene in a shortened tunnel (3 blocks tall instead of 4, and morphball can't accelerate like bubble boost).

9) Already mentioned in the bug thread, but it seems odd that I can jump into the planet's core and only suffer the Burning! debuff (3 damage per tick, ramps up to 12 damage per tick), but flooding my tunnel with that very same lava causes the Melting! debuff, which is 100 damage per tick. Hopefully not intended to punish tunnelers, but maybe it was intended to reward Polar Bear?

10) I hadn't spent a ton of time deconstructing existing buildings, so I had to make do with random materials and whatever I could craft using the Portable Pixel Sinkhole. AKA light metal. I feel it's a great inconvenience to require that builders first destroy someone else's civilization before they can build their own. I suspect this is to make sure that rare building blocks/backgrounds stay rare, but this is really discouraging the creation of sophisticated (non-cobblestone/wood panel) villages until endgame.

11) Is it possible to add in some light sources (preferably ones that are on fire) that do not require a 1x2 (2 vertical) space to place, yet only have fire for the top block? I don't feel that my artificial solar mass adequately captures the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns.

12) I was very sad that none of my saplings would grow. I thought there would be plenty of warmth at the bottom of the planetary lavapit, and I had light sources... Did I do this wrong? (I've never planted saplings before)
If the game lets me plant a sapling in ground that's been prepared for farming (hit with a hoe), I was hoping the sapling would do more than disappear.

13) Oh no, it's Lu Bu! Wait, I mean, unlucky number 13? Anyways, in the interest of building habitable domes in other atmospheres (such as moons, asteroids, lavapools, and Beijing-level smog), is it possible to add a "Clear Blue Sky" block, specially for backgrounds? This would have been really nice instead of the blue Ice that I used.

Anyway, here's a few major takeaways for anyone that didn't want to read my essay:

- We drill a 1x1 or 3 x 3 area, but require 2 blocks across to fall and 4 blocks high to walk. Bad mojo.
- Warp gates would be awesome.
- Protected warp gates would be better.
- Tapping bubble boost is good for surface exploration, bad for cramped tunnels.
- If I make a lava village on a public server, expect to die 3-5 times from "fun" traps I set before you make it to my village.
- I would like an easier way to get "standard" construction materials for building houses. I'm not Wreck-It Ralph, so don't make me break someone else's home just to make my own. I don't need fancy things, keep those rare, but something other than wood panels and unrefined wood would be nice.
- I have way too much time on my hands.

 

Sounds fun, and thanks for taking the time to post this up! (btw, pictures are broken to me) Sounds like you went through a bit of an ordeal xD But it's nice to see these kinds of things, and it's a nice change of pace from all the "this is why everything is bad" posts we see so often (not that those can't be useful). It's especially nice to see how someone else's experience with the game went, and it's also a nice tidbit of insight into how other people play.

Actually, with the addition of Skyrails, this may change. Skyrails are currently built for horizontal travel, cost no energy to use, and are easy to make with a 1 - 3 ratio of durasteel to rail, so setting up a base that isn't at spawn isn't too difficult anymore. Efficient vertical travel has yet to be implemented though (least not upwards).

Hm, actually, now that I think about it Minecraft and Terraria both did something similar (I can't remember if Terraria was one block at a time, or multiple blocks). Digging straight downwards was always easier than digging horizontally. I know that the size of the player is something to take into account, but I can't help but wonder if horizontal digging is intentionally more difficult. Maybe it's a good idea to make one direction of mining easier than another?

Have you tried using the paint tool? I haven't tested it enough, but it'd be convenient if builders could treat four different shades of dirt blocks as the same color with just a few swipes of paint.

Der, okay, so you know about skyrails already, woops. But I found Titanium common enough on the first sector they showed up in. My method was to quickly scour the surface of planets with weak blocks; it's way quicker to mine titanium from sand and snow than it is to mine it out of magmarock or blaststone.

Hm, by contrast, I did deconstruct rather a lot. I figured they'd just go to waste since I didn't plan to revisit planets anyway. I got a lot of wall panels and pressurized steel from a crystal facility, for one thing. I also found that I had enough titanium to let me use Titanium Panels as my main building material, accented by pressurized steel and wall panels. Maybe it would be nice to allow for printing of large quantities of, say, Light Metal, however. I agree 50p is far too much for one block.

Ah, incidentally, I feel a lot less guilty about looting a facility after it's inhabitants have tried to kill me.

hokayyyyy, I was going to respond to more, but I'm out typed. Anyway, nice read, and hope to see those screenshots!

edit: hokayyyyyy I don't know formatting apparently.[/quote]

 

Great post. Regarding your comment #10, I think 50 pixels per tile is an outrageous price. It can easily cost 3-4K just to tile a small room. What I'd really like to see is a Creative Mode implementation a-la Minecraft. Someone made a pretty nice Creative Mode mod for SB already, but you have to use crafting tables and search the current (overly small) interface to find the item you want. I think a Creative Mode with a built-in (and well organized) item selection interface would neatly many impediments to building. Additionally, a full "normal mode" crafting system for the other building items only makes sense. I want to be able to craft ornate wood, steel beams, junk tech, pipes, barrels, light bulbs, and other cool building items out of the raw materials I find.

 

THe problem with that is the fact that Starbound already has more items and variations than MInecraft so making an easily accessible interface for it is not an easy task

 

Agreed, there is an absurd amount of different items. There is a search function, which I've found helps tremendously, but I definitely found myself scrolling when I first saw the interface, and I'm not surprised to see people wanting more.

 

ha I made a room under the lava, I had to line the bottom so I did not touch the void and die, but yes it would be a great place to put a beam down spot down, under the lava if you dig way to the side away from your down shaft then it would be very hard to find very hard indeed, and if you removed the tunnel behind you then a pvp hunter might never find your home and also the incoming asteroids wont ever reach you or even spawn, I was thinking of making a base in one of the asteroid fields since there is old jail bases up there, and you need the breathing back pack to stay there for long, so it might make a good hide out or even a good stashing spot for all your items, and I cant wait for the huge ships that are coming to explore I wonder what goodies there will be in them, and man I cant wait for the bigger player ship at least ill have extra room for my stuff any way that was a good rant thanks mate

 

Oops, let me go through and try to fix that, when I tried to upload the pictures it failed a few times, so I'm still getting the hang of this forum stuff...

Yeah, I know that they exist, but I "raced" from T5 to T10, so I don't have spare titanium. I should have gone back, but I kinda did this on a spur of the weekend moment, so I didn't have enough prepared materials, just whatever random stuff I had looted in my travels.

Once I thought about it (by about the fifth stack of 1000 tar used to create my tunnel) I realized that it was going to be a makeshift village (notice the very conveniently-missing screenshots of the rest of the lab, or the actual tunnels), but I figured it was a good idea to post this anyway. I then used it as an excuse to build my village AND explain that without some serious preparation, building a cosmetically-appealing village is very, very difficult. And you still have to loot old planets like a swarm of locusts.

That's a very good thought, and one I also had. I don't know if they WANT it to be easier to dig tunnels. If timesinks don't exist, then everyone will be at the endgame very quickly, with tons of similarity. It's very possible the devs wanted tunneling to be difficult, so that tunneled/underground bases are actually rare, and noteworthy.

Also, Terraria only lets you mine a single block at a time, and it takes 3 vertical blocks to travel horizantally, and 2 blocks to dig down. I duo'd Terraria with my brother, and we would both use pickaxes centered one spot below our feet, and hellevators were very, very quick!

I have enough materials for it, I just haven't used it. This goes back into the "Good idea, poor preparation" segment of my plan.

It almost felt like cheating (and yet fun) to mine the gravel/fine sand planets and then see where the roller coaster took me, although I didn't search out these planets intentionally. I just went to whatever planets had the tier I wanted at some random coordinates, and decided I'd just make do with what I was given. I found a lot of different environments this way, and felt that it was a lot more fun than taking the easy path each time. After all, it's beta, and feedback is better if more people try different things. Maybe?

Yeah, I didn't want to use the time to dismantle huge facilities section by section. I just took the background items and left... It felt kinda wrong to me, to spend so much time getting the materials so that I could spend so much time hollowing out the lava and the background and then place all the materials...

Actually, I didn't mind the cost. I've been searching random T10 planets for awhile (I didn't want to use other peoples' coordinates) so I had a stack of 700 diamond. 1 diamond = 100g = 2 light metal. I built myself an extra refinery (one for the ship, one for the village) so I had plenty of cash.

What I did mind was the lack of semi-basic building materials. I didn't want to just have all wood panels, I wanted some semi-primitive stuff (thatch roofs/huts, log cabin walls, concrete or brick walls, etc). None of that is available unless you break someone else's home, and I don't consider myself a homebreaker (despite what the ghosts of the locals say). I don't mind the "common hi-tech" materials being available for a price, since that's endgame stuff anyway, but I think it would be nice if the really unique/cool materials ARE rare, and not able to be 3d printed or crafted for pixels. That would reward people that actually deconstructed the whole glitch castle, or that unique mushroom village, or the tiny little villages near the planet cores, etc.

 

Yeah, I ran into that a couple times in earlier planets (and while swimming in the lava to see how big I could make the village). I decided here that I wanted the true "immersion" feel, so I left plenty of lava above and below the ceiling and the floor. It's no fun having an under-lava town if it actually soaked up all the lava... Then it's just a Moses village, parting the red sea.

I was also thinking of villages in inhospitable places, like moons and stuff, and would like a "blue sky" tile, or such, so that you could create a "dome" for the village, and pretend that inside the village is regular, Earth-like atmosphere. Lava, moon, asteroid field, they're all not suitable for life right now, so it would be nice to have some background tiles that can create the image of regular environments.

 

There we go, pictures should be working... I think.

I also think I remember that you can't actually view the attachments unless you're logged in, so for all the lurkers out there, here's some links:

Sun!
The Swedish Chef
The Hive

 

ha I made a room under the lava, I had to line the bottom so I did not touch the void and die, but yes it would be a great place to put a beam down spot down, under the lava if you dig way to the side away from your down shaft then it would be very hard to find very hard indeed, and if you removed the tunnel behind you then a pvp hunter might never find your home and also the incoming asteroids wont ever reach you or even spawn, I was thinking of making a base in one of the asteroid fields since there is old jail bases up there, and you need the breathing back pack to stay there for long, so it might make a good hide out or even a good stashing spot for all your items, and I cant wait for the huge ships that are coming to explore I wonder what goodies there will be in them, and man I cant wait for the bigger player ship at least ill have extra room for my stuff any way that was a good rant thanks mate

that town if you had sky rail very close to the roof you would collect any loot on the roof, I tested this type of room, as a natural mob trap. I had only 1 layer thick roof like that and only enuff room to walk under the roof ie a walk way but since your town is actually an open space I think sky rail might work ( the reason I tested a mob trap is I was watching when I was making the hide out and seen that mobs will drop down into the lava and die and there loot dropped in to the void and on the roof of the tunnel ) I would say they spawn in the cavern above and drop or even like the fish do, and spawn in the lava. I still look at that and i think where they meant to spawn in the lava, or is it that the fish, just did not get, the lava proof scales. and I also have seen fish in poison water but not in that black oil ( yet ) but dam we need buckets or even storage tanks and pumps, like in feed the beast mod, in mine craft.

 

That's true, a skyrail near the top would be useful for collecting any loot that dropped from mobs that fell onto the roof of my village. It would also have made the lavatunnel travel much faster.

Until they fix the bug with planetary core lava damage, though, it isn't worth collecting dropped loot. Mobs only take 3-12 damage per tick from swimming in the lava, and on a Threat Level 10 planet...that takes a lot of ticks before they die. That, and I made sure there wasn't much space over my village, in preparation for public servers. If there were tunnels over my village, it would be easier to find =P

 

I feel that the cost of blocks should be lowered to atleast 25 or less as there is no point in it being 50

 

I would like this as well, but I would also be happy if the "Hi-Tech" materials continued to cost 50 pixels per block, AND newer, more basic building materials are added for 10, 20, and 30 pixels per block.

I'm kinda thinking primitive-type materials (thatch roof or straw hut background) for 10 pixels, medieval peasant stuff (mud/mortar background, maybe rough stone walls) for 20 pixels, and then "current" basic materials (brick walls, cement background) for 30 pixels.

Then, we could have diverse bases. It seems like everyone right now has Medieval castle bases (due to deconstructing large Glitch castles) or Hi-Tech research lab bases (due to, you know, deconstructing Hi-Tech research labs and these materials being craftable).

There aren't a lot of other bases that I've seen, so I would like it if they could add some variety!