Randomly generated things are great and its cool how many different creatures are in the game. However, all of them are boring and useless. In the current patch creatures are only useful for pixels and they can hardly be used for anything, but having them drop useful items is an entirely different issue. Random Mob Generation, this idea sounds cool, but its not. unfortunately this makes every planet have random boring monsters with maybe 4-6 swapped out parts. Q: Why does that make it bad and or boring? A: Every planet you go to will have different mobs, but each of those mobs have lackluster abilitys that can easily be avoided and exploited. This is because of the random Mob generation. It means that the Mobs were not fine tuned or have their AI specifically coded to be fun and or challenging. Games with Mobs that are good and not boring. Example: Terraria, Dark Souls - pick any Mob from these games. each one has its own ability's, its own challenge. When the player sees Mobs in these games they recognize what it can do and can learn from that. Changing their play-style or strategy around what that Mob can do. This creates interesting and memorable encounters. Randomly generated Mobs also leave out another problem. Classification, I don't know what to call any Mob in Starbound. "There goes a blue rock throwing dinosaur" I might try and describe to a friend while we explore a new planet, but in reality the Mobs graphic/body parts was just identical to one on a previous planet and this one instead now vomits lava or something. The players should not have to rediscover how to fight Mobs that look exactly the same or at least VERY similar. Suggestion: Throw away the RNG Mobs and make a actual Creature list with unique abiliys that can be remembered and named. As a player I should be able to describe a Mob to another player and we should have either fond or hated memory's tied to that Mob similar to other games IE: Terraria, Dark Souls.
Removing the random monster generation would make planets way less interesting. Wondering what freakish creatures you might encounter is part of the fun when you go into a new planet! That would be like removing the random tree generation! The fun part of Starbound (in my opinion) is wondering what new and exiting things you will see, not wondering if a tiger or a seagull will be there.
Yes, it's boring, but in my honest opinion, having to meet the exact same monster would also be boring. What's better to do is to improve the random generation such as making more unique parts, and skills based from parts.
I do believe we need some reason other than farm pixels – that by itself is not very useful right now – to kill monsters. Maybe a monster with a set of parts and in a specific biome would drop X, Y and Z items. And those items would be used to craft, or to progress on something. By the end of the day Starbound is about getting upgrades from mining and then it is over, we wait for the next update and repeat all the process. That or you can build, and building in Starbound is very cool, we have a lot o parts with different themes and materials. The point I am trying to make is that we need to invest more on a way to make progression more interesting, that includes making the mob system more deep – not by adding more species, but by giving them some meaning, some more identity other than different looks and skills, give them important loot and equips – and adding some interesting mechanics, like Terraria have bosses, invasions, transition to hard mode and challenging events, Starbound must find its way to keep us entertained other than mining over and over on different planets. Edit: Grammar and cohesion, even tough I am pretty sure my text still has a lot of flaws
Simply have a range of monsters that could spawn on each planet type. A-F can spawn on a lush planet. G-L on an Arid planet. L-P on a Lava planet, etc. This way, there is uniformity but it's still semi-random. This way, the player can modify their strategy. Another thing that would add some variety is enemies based on depth. Finding bat-like enemies in surface caves and enemies based more on heat and lava towards the core. Things like that would make it more challenging while keeping it RNG.
