I'm sure if you ask NASA they can tell you the specs for building in space are quite different to building something in an atmosphere, if you wanna get technical, that's one way of justifying it.
My issue isn't the lack of furniture (which is obviously available) or the background (which I already assumed was alterable, since it's made out of blocks...) but the outside hull frame. The blue/gray walls. They're ugly. I hope that the frame itself can be changed, and isn't an invincible block or something like that. I also hope that you can remove the doors and just make a custom space station wholesale, without the need to buy prefabricated boxenhaus parts to tear apart and reassemble.
I have a few questions: Since planets and moons orbit stars, will they finally move in the background now? Will there ever be a point where you can dock your ship with your space station, or even make a giant hangar to land it inside? Since you can fly ships anywhere, can you go into orbit around a gas giant planet? (but obviously not beam down into it) And finally, will teleporting a space station be something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_sink#Trade-offs "However, if not enough time sinks are implemented, players may feel the game is too short or too easy, causing them to abandon the game much sooner out of boredom." Starbound has been criticized for being too short and not enough to hold you there. This is a good way to keep people playing, and in this case, the desire to build that next section of the station. Plus, 1000 glass really isn't that hard to get.
Eh, grind for the sake of grind is not a meaningful way to extend a game's content, lol. Yes, many developers love doing this, especially with RNG mechanics, but a lot of players loathe it. And to be honest, those people who criticize Starbound for that are the very same people who refuse to download mods, because how DARE we insinuate one should download mods in a game that was built around modding at its core, lol. There are many mods out there that will add enough content that could easily give you 100 hour playthroughs by now, without the need of tedious strip-mining and standing in front of a forge watching your character do 100+ crafting batches for 5+ minutes at a time to make one small tiny room. Yes, there are time sinks, and they do have a place, but yet there is a limit to these time sinks, and there's a point where you just gotta say "c'mon, this is just ridiculous" and imo, one small room needing ~8 minutes worth of crafting alone is well beyond that line. I really don't think a mostly single-player game really needs a timesink that you know most people would rather just AFK or alt-tab. I've always felt that if you introduce a mechanic that highly encourages players to AFK/Alt-Tab then you have introduced a poorly designed mechanic. A game should keep you interested, it should keep you immersed and there is absolutely zero, zilch immersion in alt-tabbing or going AFK while you let your character perform some automated task (encouraging the player to AFK/Alt-Tab is actually immersion breaking). At least with farming, you can do something else while you wait for plants to grow, but crafting.... crafting forces you to keep the crafting window up and forces you to stay put until it is well and done. That's why I always balked at crafting timers. I liked it better before when one click of a button made all of them at once. Back then people were all "B-But we could have automation, we could have production lines!" .... except, no. You don't. Maybe you would if they had designed crafting machines like how the furnaces used to work back in Koala, where you'd drop 300 ore into a furnace and come back a few minutes later to find 150 bars waiting for you, hey sure. You could do some sort of production line like that... But you can't, at least not in the vanilla game. This is the bad sort of "Time Sink", where you're forced to just wait for the sake of waiting on the crafting timers, when you're forced to repeat the same repetitive activity over and over and over and over again. And I'm not calling for the removal of crafting materials needed, I just want to see it lowered to something reasonable... 30-50 bars and maybe 250 glass sounds more reasonable to me, for that small of a room. You could make the *big* rooms, or important rooms take more. For example, the large square 4-way room... yeah, I could see putting 200 bars and 800-1200 glass into that. Fine. That's a big room that's gonna have lots of function and it would be exciting to complete such a room, and when you do complete the room, you're probably going to stuff storage boxes into it... or furniture, or maybe even a tenant. It would surely have actual function. But the hallways? Nah. I just don't see the need for such hefty requirements for the flippin' hallways. Oh, and... Has anybody here ever played Horizons (known these days as Istaria)? It's an MMO, and one of the main features of that game, is that you can play as an actual honest-to-God dragon. An actual, four-legged, winged, firebreathing giant dragon. As a dragon, you can take up Lairshaping as a craft and you can build actual lairs that have very similar mechanics to this space station thing in Starbound. When Dragon Lairs were first released, the developers at the time (Tulga games IIRC?) did the same thing we see here: they made the costs exorbitant. Very few people even built lairs because of it; only the most dedicated 10% of the playerbase even bothered with it. They eventually lowered the requirements down to more reasonable levels, so that a player could hope to build their own lair in any sane timeframe and you know what? More players jumped in, and soon everybody that played a dragon had at least a small lair, if not a larger one eventually. Big rooms were still large projects to undertake, but the hallways you could bash one of those out in an hour or so if you were good at math and logistics. But the same principle applies: devs thinking players enjoy dumping large quantities of time into something that yields little reward in itself, like the hallways of these space stations and then later having to lower the requirement when players don't find it so fun to have to grind so much for the little connector rooms. Oh, and...... Warframe did the same freaking thing with the Clan Dojos (which is almost exactly the same freaking thing as this, only it's in 3-D!). At first, the rooms were exorbitantly priced but they eventually got slashed bigtime. I predict the same will happen here, once Chucklefish takes a look at the history of other games that did this sort of system. This is nothing new, other games have done this. It's an awesome idea, but CF... if you're reading this... other people before you tried this and they realized that requiring tons of materials is not fun for the small connector rooms. If you don't lower it, modders will.
People griping about the build costs bothers me. There is a very simple reason for this- "it costs too much for -thing-". But really, you are not thinking. You look at what you see, and make an assumption on the price. This is logically unsound though. You do not see the innards of the walls unless you strip them away, and you don't see the entire exterior. This also neglects the cut out wall which remains unseen due to this game being a sidescroller. I thought the prices seemed quite fair, but again, that is impossible to say. The devs would have the best idea of what the real cost would be as they are the only ones, as the creators, with true perspective. They say it costs this much? Suck it up. They could quadruple it and say its to cover the walls we DON'T see. That the price is the cost of the massive O2 tanks mounted on the side we don't see. They could say that compressed durasteel passes electricity better than gold, or that the glass cost is to cover fiber-optic internet. Now inverse: they could say what we see is exactly whats there, and each tile is hollow with nothing inside (like a lego) and structures you build have three walls and a force field.(In which case, I agree, the cost is insane.) Then there are the timesink comments, which bother me equally, for just as many reasons. You are building a space station. In space. Placing every one of those blocks in place would certainly take you longer than 10 minutes (assuming you are quick and have good upgrades, if not, probably much longer), why gripe about the time the materials take to make? Bottom line- we can not knock the price the devs have laid out. Constructive feedback is good, but it needs to be constructive, and take into account the unseen. X should take x amount of time, and cost x resources, because y number of blocks takes y amount of material and y amount of time to craft and place each. Y is then (up to) quadrupled to cover four walls give or take for making assumptions about windows and doors, which would instead cost a or z material. These statements must be testable, or else it becomes moot point. To be fair there is also something to be said of what players are willing to tolerate. "-thing- takes hours to build and is not really useful, i will ignore it" This kind of point has merit too, and I think that is the point Xylia is trying to make. I guess what I am getting at is that this would have more merit if someone built the exact structure pictured, and reported the time and resource cost involved, for a fair comparison. Having followed chucklefish as long as I have, I have quite a bit of faith in them, and would not be too surprised if this was not already their methodology. TLDR: Griping about cost of construction is pointless unless the gripes have provable merit, and also its a video game, literally built to "sink time into". There are limits to what something should cost, and how long it should take, but as long as it takes less time than its composite components to make, at equal cost in resources, there is no real room to complain. Bear in mind we do not see full structures. Chucklefish Rocks. Bleh, internet died and I didn't get notified there were other comments. Will read through, though it looks like Xylia may have addressed some of this. Edit: I stand by my comments.
It makes sense anyways since it costs a whole lot to add a new room to the space station in real life
Expanded ship, vast planets. I'm not sure what to put in those stations. Why we need all these empty space?
The argument for innards of the walls is meaningless.....does nothing and means nothing to anyone's game....we could say there's nothing but diamonds or nothing but poop.....but neither means anything....it's still a dull looking small room. What DOES have meaning and substance is the amount of space we get for the amount of work needed. And given how easy and cheap to build are planetary bases and their rooms and their windows are they are implementing a useless feature.....because few to none will choose to pay the time and resource cost to make use of space stations while many more will simply cheat or mod away most if not all of the cost.....which is something that CF should consider a failure on their part.....the point where players are refusing to put up with the unreasonable resource prices and saying **** that.
You just made a simply, outright, false statement. I happily would use the requested materials to build the space they did, and like it or not, I am somebody. Clearly the devs are considering there to be things inside the walls, else there would be no need for copper wire. I would not cheat, nor mod. From your statement you clearly just read the TLDR line, and therefore are probably just a waste of space to reply to. I, however tolerant I tend to be, cannot abide falsehood though.
- And now do this for ships too? - And tell us when we get this at least in the Nighty Version to test it out? - Oh and how do we get with out mech outof out spacehsip? Will it get a hangar? - And will there be "Dangers" for the spacestations? (spaceenemys?, Spaceweather?)
Wow that sounds cool. Think of an endgame Object that allows you to create own Planets or Stars + solarsystem. Like in titan AE. (In main an even bigger Thing like the Plant Terraformers). That would be real *beeb* awsome.
Considering we can beam ourselves around the place and somehow transmat other vehicles like the hoverbikes, I'd assume mechs function in a similar manner.
Why, though? Sounds immensely annoying, especially since the mechanic's looking like a resource sink.
Most of what you said is covered (In a lot fewer words) on the wiki page I linked. But it boils down to, time sinks are necessary in any game. to some extent. Multiplayer games especially. Every update to Guild Wars 2 is a time sink because they need to maintain players till they can make the next update, which will include a time sink of its own. So on and so forth. Starbound needs a time sink as well. Outside of the "scanning" portions of the main story, the game has none. Additionally, you are looking at only the raw numbers.Yeah, 1000 glass is a lot, but getting 1000 glass is not hard to do, nor very time intensive. Overall I think this will be a good time sink. Enough to make you work, but not too much that it kills much interest. This is clearly intended as an end-game feature, when we have an upgraded matter manipulator, and enough fuel to traverse the stars at our leisure. After you've crafted all the armors and found all the weapons, what do you do with the remaining materials? Dump them into a station. And you can even speed it up with the help of others in multiplayer. And my complaint about the crafting timer still stand. We can't walk away from the crafting station. And we cant line up a series of jobs. That is the only reason why I don't like the crafting timers.
