A certain "Unpopular" girl's suggestions, impressions, ideas, stuff!

First off, I have been dropping this and that line around here for a few days, nothing special. Just said hello and posted a few thoughts on simple things, like the people bemoaning the difficulty or the fact the game naturally has bugs in it's beta state. Or the fact there still is room for balancing.

All good stuff, good stuff.

Now I have come to the point I wanted to express my own thoughts, most of which more on the interesting little tidbits of lore that can be found here and there, but also about some (hopefully) interesting suggestions.

Let's take a look at the wonderful 'inspect' tool first and break it down into small bite-size chunks. After all wasn't it one of the things that the people at chucklefish were rather proud of? It's interesting, as is the fact that the character says their findings out loud. But I had somehow expected more of it. For instance, when I used the tool on myself. I was given the following rather dull message.

And even if we were to ignore the fact that my character is female (Which I have no intention of doing, fix that already!) this is still a rather disappointing use for this tool. Not to mention clicking your portrait or that of team mates will make your character say there is nothing.

I had thought this would be a great way for people to check their status, it could bring up the hunger bar, and perhaps temporarily display your heath and energy in numerical values. (Health: 90/100 Energy: 100/100) And your character could perhaps make a remark on their current 'status'... In their own dialect of course, let's take a few examples from the races I have played:

Human
100-90 health : "As fit as a fiddle."
90-70 health : "It's just a scratch."
70-50 health : "...A flesh wound."
50-25 health : "Now it's starting to hurt."
25-1 health : "If I don't get some first aid, I'm dead."

Glitch
100-90 health :"Nonchalantly: Everything in working condition."
90-70 health :"Calm: It looks like some paint came off."
70-50 health : "Agitated: Missing a few screws."
50-25 health : "Worried: Sustained substantial damage."
25-1 health : "Alarmed: 404 health not found!"

Floran
100-90 health :"Everything isss good."
90-70 health :"A few bruissesss."
70-50 health : "Floran getting ssstabbed too much."
50-25 health : "Thisss isn't looking well"
25-1 health : "Less ssstabbing more rrunning, hide, heal, ssssurvive."

Of course, those are just some wild ideas, but I'd think those would add just that little bit of 'feeling' to the game.

Another idea would be to perhaps at higher level, make it possible to 'upgrade' your ship, allowing you to have more space to store your chests full of loot in. I don't know how hard that would be, but it would give yet more feeling of progress!

And perhaps to make sure people stop complaining about the difficulty, perhaps something like a difficulty option? Allowing you to set the game to easy, normal or hard with all NPC/Monsters doing 50% less or more damage to the player, perhaps on hard unlocking another ability on monsters, with as payback, perhaps better loot or more pixel drops would probably be a way to balance things out.

Lastly, I'd want to share a little issue that I wonder if it has been mentioned before. Namely when I was running a server (Which I'd assume my PC with an I5 processor and 8 gigabytes of RAM should be capable of) the game crashed when pressing save and quit,

and then This and This popped up. Then when I looked at the server log I noticed The following going on and on for quite a while. A friend of mine reported a similar issue with her laptop but in her case it happens a lot while beaming over between ships and the surface. She also says that her memory usage is always round 80/100% when playing the game whereas it should not be the case on a game like this. What I wonder is, how far will optimization come, and will there be any settings that can be toned down for people that are struggling to play the game at any normal frame rates?

 

I like the idea of a character talking about their own health! And as for the inspection tool, it doesn't appear finished yet, as I often get descriptions that are likely the name of the object in the code! (i.e "testflower7)

 

That said the inspection tool is responsible for my favourite thing in the game so far, which is the Hylotl description of a water torture object:

"The one Floran torture device that simply won't work on Hylotl. A minor victory."

 

I think the inspect should show more. I like that idea. The devs plan to have ships upgrade able and I don't personsly think a difficulty tool should be put in because someone will play easy single player. Get "end game" gear and the. Join a server. This is just me though.

 

I agree with the other ideas though

 

Okay, Another thing I thought felt off and deserves to be added to my list of little quirks, this one is with digging deeper, because face it, if you want to get the good stuff, you have to go deeper.

The difficulty of the game tends to be much lower the deeper you get. There are hardly any monsters down there maybe a tenth or less of what you find on the surface, and most of them can't even get to you in the tight spaces.

My suggestion, borrowers. Monsters that can travel through solid blocks and pop up from them, not breaking them, much like Terraria's eater of worlds or just with slow moving projectiles that can pass through terrain, or perhaps just dirt/sand. Teleporting monsters should also work. Just as long as something is done about this.

Of course, these should only appear underground, or perhaps in very rare cases in some biomes on the surface.

You want the better stuff, you need to work harder and risk more. That, however may just be my opinion here.

 

Smaller form factors would probably help with the "HELP I'M STUCK" monster problem, too. But if they become too hard to hit, you'd have to change their hitboxes, too.

 

Ya. I have up agree, the deaper I go the easier it is. I agree there should be some borrowers and maybe rarer teleporting ones. But projectiles in my opinion should not go through blocks. Maybe ai could get upgraded so it knows were to teleport?

 

And here I am again to add more to my list of rants, oh how I love ranting, don't you? I know you love my rants too!♥

Shotguns Is it just me or are they terribly broken? Ranged weapons in general really, but especially the shotgun. I just bought one on an Avian airship for a friend who wanted one of those, but it only does 4 damage (Much less than my bow) and takes over half my energy.
In other words, it's pretty much useless. I also deducted the reason WHY it does this, or rather, the reasons. It looks like the shotgun fires multiple projectiles per shot. But the moment the first bullet hits, monsters gain temporary immunity, making all other projectiles miss.

"Wicked Deathshotty?" You must be wicked to walk around with it, the only death you'll cause is your own!

Also it seems that some times, projectiles are randomly destroyed before they even hit, with the sniper it doesn't feel so bad, but with the starting weapon, the hunting bow, it can get you in some pretty nasty situations if your arrow hits the mark but fails to damage or knock your target back because it is destroyed before doing either. I'd say this would need some fixing, or am I completely off the mark here?

Fuel Ah well, we hit another point here, didn't we? I don't particularly mind that trees are no longer a source of fuel, but I do believe it would be nice to have some sort of replenishable, albeit perhaps inefficient fuel source, like, how about being able to make organic fuel out of those excess wheat seeds we keep obtaining when we have a big farm? Or the melon seeds, or even corn! (Corny, I know) nothing sucks as much as the idea you can get stuck on a barren planet though.

Trees Now wood can no longer be used as a fuel source it's about time it's possible to re-plant them. I for one love building and shaping the planets I'm on, having a planet completely devoid of trees because I needed torches, crafting tables, and wood to build my house is sad. And even if you manage to avoid that, there's always other players. Now I know what you will say "If you don't like that, don't play online." NO, that's no excuse. I want to re-plant my bloody trees already, saplings, nuts, acorns, bloody apples, I don't care! Gimme my re-plantable trees.

 

I like the fact other players can see what our characters say about things we inspect. To code that in but leave so many things so generic (Avian say all monsters are "Some indescribable horror".

There are quite a few tiny glitches, graphical abnormalities and incorrect sex references. My Avians snow trooper hat only has goggles and a hat but it makes her beak disappear for some reason.

I suspect those are the kind of things (including this topic, like health identifying) are things that won't be really done until phase 3.

 

Tree's are more or less the organic fuel here! Last update allows you to 'burn' 10 wood for 1 coal, which means that's already implemented

 

Ah, but trees can't be re-planted, can they? And it's rather important to have wood too! No torches without 'em! And even with lanterns and flashlights that's still pretty bad!

 

The inspect tool is also responsible for my favorite thing, too.
You inspect signs, doors, and basic barriers. You get things like "The Floran is danger." when you check a danger sign. "Floran obey no door" "Floran kick down door." "Floran kick open cage." "Floran go where Floran pleases. Ssilly sign."

And then you inspect a chain link fence.

"Fence no stop Floran! .... Fence stop Floran."
And it's even funnier because it's a back wall item, so it really does stop you.

 

The trick with torches is to be as efficient about reclaiming them as soon as they're not being immediately useful. Then craft a lantern on a stick as soon as physically possible and tape that to your back rendering torches obsolete for exploration. With coal being absolutely vital for every other tier of gear, it's rarely worth it to make torches anyway. You're basically presented the choice of being able to see or not dying in one hit.

 

Floran say the same thing about monsters. I wish they'd be like 'not so scary' or something since they're supposed to be bloodthirsty warriors.

 

Well it is beta, so stuff like this is expected. I like your ideas, and think the overall community would agree with your statements. You are also good at your "rants", and should continue to do them, because I believe people will enjoy reading them as much as me.

 

Yes they currently can't, but they said that they were working on it! And my answer was a reply to your fuel section, not the replanting section (okay, currently not fully unlimited fuel, but very close to)

 

I really think they should assign tags to different body parts and let it build their descriptions that way. What I mean is, since the monsters are dynamically generated using 'pieces', some pieces are obviously much 'cuter' or 'meaner' than others. I'd think florran would be like "Not sssssooo scary" against horrible abominations.

Floran seem like the only sentient race that would have no reaction at all to the terrible things we find in the verse.

 

I've also noticed that they haven't even put in correct inspeciton statements for certain items, for example, flowers vines and trees. "tesflower6"? "tentaclewithteary"? Really?

 

You should rant more, coming up with great suggestions!