Analysis of Current Unstable

I’d like to start out by saying that the game is a vast improvement over the old stable. Chucklefish is awful at time estimates (as I’m sure they’ve learned by now, and I’ve noticed their behavior improving). They also seem to have a habit of scrapping work and starting over instead of just polishing what they have. That’s a dangerous habit, to be sure, but at least this time it seems as though their work as paid off. The current unstable build is significantly better in (almost) all areas. To clear up any confusion: as of writing this, I’ve currently killed the mech boss, obtained Rubium armor, and have completed the first ship upgrade. Should my opinions change, I’ll add onto this post.

I’ll start out by talking about combat, since it forms the basis for a large part of subsequent analysis of the game. Combat in the previous version of Starbound was basic and naive. Still, it was serviceable. It got the job done, but it wasn’t interesting. Even with techs, combat wound up being little more than Minecraft or Terraria. Take your sword and hit the thing until it stops attacking you. Move occasionally. There was no depth to the combat. You either attacked, or you moved out of the way. Shields did exist, but their mechanics were just barely implemented, and the player was given absolutely no insight as to how they worked. Flash forward to now. Combat now has substantially more depth. Guarding has defined mechanics that are fairly intuitive for the player to understand. By the time the player has had their guard broken for the first time, they’re probably figured out the bulk of it. Perfect guarding is also a great mechanic that adds an element of skill.

Combat still isn’t without it’s blemishes, however. Shields add depth and skill to melee combat, and two-handed swords have a blocking mechanic, but the rest of the melee weapons in the game just have… nothing. Sure, maybe they have greater damage output, but that’s not fun. A mechanical advantage is always more fun than a numerical one. Axes, hammers, dual-wielding, these all need to be given something special to set them apart. As it stands, they just feel terribly bland in comparison. But if there will be no mechanics added for weapons like hammers and axes, then they need a more significant damage boost over their smaller brethren. DPS on one-handed swords honestly isn’t that much lower than on larger weapons. Why would anyone ever choose a small DPS boost over the ability to completely negate large amounts of damage by perfect guarding? A sword and shield can do pretty much anything any other melee weapon can do, but it can also guard. Techs do little to alleviate this problem.

As far as ranged combat goes, there’s not much to say. Heavy-hitters feel good. Weapons with a high rate of fire aren’t usable, but Chucklefish is aware of the problem and they’re working to fix it.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about progression. It’ll start out with tools. The matter manipulator is amazing now, and I love what’s been done with it. It starts out fairly strong, just under the speed of equivalent-level pickaxes. The glow makes it possible to scan nearby walls to find ore instead of digging totally at random, while the limited range means you can’t scan the entire screen, which I see as a very handy intended mechanic (I hope I’m not wrong, it’s a good thing to have in the game!). The ability to pick up liquids just makes this versatile gem even more amazing.

However, pickaxes are stupid. In Starbound, nothing really limits your ability to mine. This isn’t Minecraft where you need iron tools to mine diamond. Back in the old stable, pickaxes were, of course, the standard method of mining. It was a simple matter of speed. But now, there’s little point in using a pickaxe or a drill. Sure, equivalent-level pickaxes are slightly faster than the matter manipulator, but who cares? Honestly, I’d rather just mine softer materials than go through the trouble of filling my inventory with pickaxes that are going to break in a couple of swings. Even at the beginning of the game, getting the copper necessary to upgrading the initial matter manipulator is a fairly simple task, even without the aid of pickaxes. And when you get the 3x3 range upgrade shortly after, pickaxes become almost entire obsolete. Now, I’m not arguing that pickaxes need a buff. Rather, I think pickaxes should be removed. They’re not necessary. In my opinion, they’re little more than useless bloat at this point. The matter manipulator is a much more versatile and elegant solution.

I have few words to give about weapon progression. Crafted weapons are okay. Weapons you find in the field tend to be a little better, and of course the generated guns you find in the field outclass anything you could make yourself. I’m not sure how to fix this problem. You could nerf generated weapons, making crafted weapons stronger in comparison, but that would mean you have a large amount of superfluous garbage weapons filling your inventory. You’d have to remove most of the randomly generated weapons, but that’s not very fun either. What I think Starbound really needs is a more complex weapon crafting system. I want weapons to support multiple, varied effects. I want a way to strip effects off of weapons and add them to others. It would give a purpose to many of the generated throw-aways you currently find, and it would make me excited to find a weapon I might not even use on its own. I’m sure something like this is already planned, so it’s not that big of a deal.

Armor progression is a bit more interesting. The three tired armors give much-needed specialization to late-game content. However, I think the three paths need to be a bit more distinct. Currently, the difference between armor sets isn’t all that pronounced. I think Terraria’s late-game armors are a good case study for how to deal with this issue. These armor sets did not simply convey more health, defense and mana unto the player, but they gave the player more concrete advantages. Of particular interest, Terraria had armor sets that reduced spell cost, or even gave the players significant chances to not use ammunition when firing a weapon. This kind of thinking could easily be applied to Starbound’s armor progression. Perhaps reduced energy cost on weapons, reduced cool down, or perhaps even more specific builds that reduce energy usage on specific types of weapons (e.g., grenade launchers). There’s the potential for armor that reduces cool down on melee swings, increases in shield health, or a larger perfect guard window. There’s absolutely massive potential here. I think Chucklefish realizes that, though, and they’ve probably already got some things mapped out. If not? Well, start working on it, Tiy. I have expectations, here. Don’t you dare let this fall flat. Don’t you dare let armor simply be about the amount of green bar I have. The game deserves better, and I know you can do better. Oh, and one other thing. Can someone please explain to me why impervium armor has the lowest defence? It appears this has been corrected since I read about it in a dev blog

EDIT [2014-12-22]: About armor progression: There's a big problem with armor progression that relates to weapon and shield mechanics in a lot of ways. A complex system should add depth, such that there is no one optimal solution. The moment players find a clear optimal solution, the game becomes boring. The illusion of depth is gone. Currently, this is how branching armors work. The optimal choice is clearly Rubium+ armor. These give the player a huge boost to energy at the cost of lower HP and defence, but why would I care about HP and defence when, with a little skill, I can just guard through everything the game throws at me? And the things I can't guard, I can dodge. There's absolutely no reason to tank hits in this game, which makes armor designed for taking hits suboptimal.

Let’s talk about techs. Now, I’ve only upgraded my ship once (I’ll get to this later). I’ve heard that more techs unlock with ship upgrades, so I haven’t had the chance to check them out, nor can I confirm that wisdom. I will say that the primary techs I’ve seen so far are okay. Bouncy seems a little out of place for a level 1 tech. You can totally negate fall damage by holding F. At least with Pulse Jump it takes some small measure of skill to negate the damage. But, that’s a minor thing.

What are not minor things are nano skins. I find it kind of crazy that water-breathing is something you get very shortly after starting the game. Water is a consistent hazard that the player has to deal with, and getting water breathing just kind of negates it entirely. But, it’s not entirely the O2 system’s fault. Even without that, you could still suck up all the water with a matter manipulator fairly early on. This is only a problem due to the way you collect liquids. Once you pick them up, they’re treated as any other item. I feel as though the matter manipulator needs some small inventory dedicated to liquids. But, O2 aside, the rest of the suit upgrades are nice and give a good Metriodvania feel to the universe.

Oh, and let's not forget about Erchius. It's an interesting source of fuel, and it's novel that it's a liquid, but it's possible for me to get literally thousands of it in the span of only a few minutes. At that point, why even bother requiring fuel for ships? It just seems wildly unbalanced to me.

Now we’ve come to quest progression. Before I get into missions and bosses, I’d like to get ship upgrades out of the way. Legal Goods/Penguin Bay is, currently, very poorly designed. There is no real causal relationship between doing all the quests available, and then unlocking the quests from the Legal Goods guy. Now, I know, I know, it’s about being helpful and all that, but from what I remember, the play was given no real indication that this is what they had to do. Hell, I had assumed the shop was just broken and not implemented yet. I would have never thought that giving some guy a jacket and making another guy a cake would let me upgrade my ship. These kinds of quests would have been throw-away fetch quests in any other game. This is easily fixed however. All it would take is for the Legal Goods shop to say something to the effect of, “I don’t really know you, traveller. Maybe if you helped out some of the folks around the outpost, I’d be more willing to do business with you.” Simple change, big effect.

But that’s the only huge problem I had. I understand that not all the progression quests for the adventurer path are exposed yet, and I’m willing to reserve judgement. The quests that were there were on fucking point. Floran Party was pretty cool, but the mining colony was absolutely spectacular. The atmosphere and music were spot on. The monsters were spooky. I loved it. I couldn’t have done it better myself.

The bosses were interesting. The mech boss makes for an interesting study. But first, let’s get Dreadwing out of the way. He’s easy. Stay out from under him, smack his lackeys, and hit him until he dies. There’s little surprise, but that’s okay. He’s the first boss. The mech, on the other hand, is weird.

Now, when I say he’s weird, I don’t mean he’s bad. In fact, I think he’s very good. It’s an excellent fight. It seems like an extremely difficult and punishing fight at first. I died pretty hard my first few times, and after a while, I realized why. I was fighting him wrong. You see, Starbound’s combat primarily focuses on twitch reflexes. Dreadwing is about reflexes, the missions are about reflexes, most of the minor encounters in the game are all about reflexes. But the mech is not. It’s a very different fight. This battle is a very classical boss fight. It’s a throw-back to older side-scrollers where instead of demanding reflexes from the player, bosses demanded the player show pattern recognition. And that’s all the mech really is, pattern recognition.

When he punches, dodge it. When he uses the flamethrower, double jump and dash over his head. When he shoots off missile, shoot them down with a rapid fire weapon or perfect guard against them. When he uses Overload, sit in the corner and perfect guard the sparks that hit you. When he goes off the side of the screen, follow him and jump to avoid his charge.

That’s why the fight seems so difficult for most players. Starbound, through all of its other encounters, has been training the players with a very specific skill set, and now, suddenly, the game demands a very different skill set. However, I think we can expect to see more boss fights like the mech. Chucklefish changed combat to add blocking, etc. so that it would be more deliberate. This kind of combat definitely favors pattern recognition. However, due to the current lack of bosses, and the sporadic nature of normal battles the game doesn’t seem to train pattern recognition like it should. This is a problem now, but once more bosses are added (and if the bosses fight like I believe they will), then this problem will quickly fade away as players become accustomed to the kind of combat these battles require.

EDIT [2014-12-23]: The mech fight is, of course, not perfect. I got so caught up in its differences from normal combat that I forgot to actually criticize it. While I think most of his attacks are good enough, the dash and charge could use some work. The charge needs to be telegraphed a bit better. As it stands, he goes to the side of the arena and then suddenly rockets off. Some type of revving animation would do wonders for conveyance here. The missiles also have a bit of a problem. They home in on players far too well. My initial strategy upon encountering the attack was to try and jump at the last moment so that the missiles would slam into the wall behind me. To my surprise, they almost always did a u-turn and hit me anyway. My second attempt involved abusing the perfect guard system, however even this wasn't the greatest solution. After his third missile, he comes in for a punch. Even if the player perfect guards the third missile, the boss tends to have a large enough gap in his attacks that the punch is not perfect guarded, and the player's guard will most likely be broken instantly. In the end, the only real strategy is to shoot down the missiles. There's a missed opportunity for strategy here. Instead of letting the player assess the situation and feel clever for finding an organic solution, the player is boxed into one very specific solution.

EDIT [2014-12-23]: User Image Not Available had an excellent idea down in this thread: the ability to lock the camera. Part of the frustration with the mech (and to an extent, Dreadwing) is that he spends a good portion of his time running off the screen. The player can follow him, but he tends to move a bit faster than the player can. This leads to a bit of frustration when he's suddenly doing an attack, and you couldn't see the tell because he wasn't in view. Having the camera locked to the center of the arena for this fight would have improved the experience dramatically, and you'd probably see a stark decrease in the number of people crying "unfair!". Or, even better, give the player the ability to lock the camera to a point in space, instead of locking the camera to a position relative to the player.

In closing, I’ll re-iterate that the game’s current state is promising. I’m looking forward to see where Chucklefish takes Starbound next. For sure, it’s not perfect, and they need to do many things beyond just added more quests and bosses. The game is unpolished. It needs work. This time, I hope they polish it, instead of throwing their work away and starting over. At this point, the game deserves it. There’s little fundamentally wrong with the design, and all it needs is some proper implementation. So, keep up the good work. I hope at least some one on the dev team reads this and gains a little bit of insight beyond what they already know, and I hope any one else reading this found the analysis at least a bit interesting.

Thoughts?

 

I don't think picks should be removed. For me I only use them when im in a diggy diggy dwarf mood.

 

This is a really great suggestion. It doesn't change any of the mechanics but it helps you understand that what you are doing has a point. It almost makes it feel like you're earning out faction (favor) with the colony, even though there's no properly developed system for that. Maybe you could even make Legal Goods guy be the one who gives you all of the big quest rewards.

You're definitely right about the mech boss being indicative of the direction Starbound's combat is heading. I asked a question about combat on the reddit AMA Tiyuri just did, and Tiy specifically singled the Mech boss out as an example of something I should look at to see what direction they're going to take things in, including being able to recognize what the enemy is going to do before he does it, things like that.

 

It took me several hours to figure out why I wasn't able to upgrade my ship and it finally clicked once I completed the first set of quests in the outpost. If some dialogue like that were added I probably wouldn't have to spend a few hours running around and clicking E at the Penguin Bay stall repeatedly.

 

I disagree on the mech boss, he is a showcase of how not to design a boss. Because for all the talk about pattern recognition this essentially boils down to trial and error. When he goes into the corner to dash at you, you have no way of knowing what is going to happen and unless you have amazing reflexes he will one-shot you. Then he switches his pattern halfway through the fight and does a double dash, again one-shot. You have to memorize his attack patterns but the only way to learn them is to die to them. This is plain bad boss design, period. There is a reason nobody makes Battletoads games anymore and every Dark Souls player hates Bed of Chaos.

Aside from that he has way too much health. Especially since you arbitrarily have to die to him several times before having a realistic chance of victory, having to whittle him down every time only to slip up and die on his last quarter gets annoying fast. And since he doesn't have anything interesting to offer once you've died enough times to learn his pattern the fight itself becomes tedious as a result. Same thing goes for Dreadwing BTW, both bosses could easily stand to have their health bars reduced by a third. Giving a bland boss a billion HP doesn't make him more interesting, just more grindy.

 

I don't understand why people keep saying these bosses have too much health. I managed to take both of them out in short order. Maybe you need better gear?

Regardless, the mech doesn't require that much trial and error. He has, what? Five attacks? So that means you'll die at most five times due to "trial and error". Of course, that's being generous, since you can see his punch and flamethrower coming a mile away. Most of his attacks have reasonable wind-up. He starts the flamethrower before he even gets near you. He slowly walks toward you for the punch. He starts sparking and flies up before Overload. The missiles are slow enough that a fast player can respond to them. He suspiciously runs off screen before doing his charge. He has plenty of tells.

All the other variations on his attacks are mere extensions of what came before. He fires more missiles. He dashes a second time. He's really not changing up the formula too much.

I'll be straight with you, I had some of the same thoughts as you at first. I thought the mech was unfair. But once I actually enumerated all his tells and changed mindsets, I realized how silly I was being. His tells are enormous. On the other hand, if you're dying because you're trying to attack him as soon as he turns hostile and you haven't learned his moveset yet, good.

It's interesting that you bring up Dark Souls in particular, since the combat in that game is based around methodical pattern recognition. You see a tell, and you learn how to respond to it. Many platformers and action games, even today, design encounters with this style of gameplay in mind. You may not like it, and that's fine, but it doesn't make it bad. You may not like or play those kinds of games, but it doesn't mean they don't exist, and it doesn't mean nobody likes it. There's a market for the games, and obviously many people do enjoy it.

 

The big problem as I see it is the dash. It is not telegraphed at all, especially since he walks of the screen* and because it does so much damage. I came into the fight first the rubium set and got killed in one hit then changed to the aegisalt and it took of "only" ~90% of my health. Even if you keep him on the screen he just sits in his corner for a second before charging with no indication of what is about to happen. The overload has lighting effects, the missiles come out relatively slow and for the punch he shuffles towards you slowly enough to figure out what he will probably do. For the dash he just moves into the corner and suddenly your health bar is gone and the only way to avoid it is to know what he is about to do in advance. Same thing for when he switches to the double dash, you dodge the first charge and the second comes completely out of nowhere. He should have some kind of visual indicator hinting at what is about to happen so a first time player gets a realistic chance of avoiding the attack, have him spin his tracks with some smoke along with an audio cue in case he leaves the screen.

Since we're already at the Dark Souls comparison, in that game attacks are usually telegraphed in a manner proportional to their severance. Low damage attacks come with relatively little fanfare while the massive explosions are telegraphed heavily e.g. against Ornstein&Smough they have a lightning explosion that can oneshot most player characters but before they do it they charge up with lots of lightning appearing around them so any player paying attention can figure to get some distance. They don't just shuffle around for a second before detonating in your face. Bed of Chaos on the other hand just suddenly made the floor break away under you with no indication and no way of avoiding it other than having died to it before and memorizing where the death pits are. There is a big difference between methodical play and requiring players to pay attention and arbitrary trial and error.

For the record the first time I fought the mech was using the staffs. I then switched to an assault rifle because I found the only way to win the fight is shoot down the virtually undodgeable missiles** while avoiding the other attacks using the Double Jump and Energy Dash. I also had to switch to 2x zoom, otherwise there simply was not enough time to react to the dash.

*This is a separate problem with the bosses, there should be some system where the screen automatically locks on the center of the arena or something. As it is you either have to constantly readjust your screen position or set zoom to 2x

**Another problem with this fight, the missiles home in way too well for how much damage they do, they either need to nerf the damage or make them more avoidable.

 

This is the standard model for boss fights in platformers across the board. Figure out the pattern, beat the boss. This game is forgiving when it comes to boss fights (allowing the use of healing items, accounting for multiple playstyles, etc). Games like Wings of Vi and Rex Rocket are far less forgiving in many aspects (Very damaging attacks, super twitchy avoidance mechanics, loads of health. etc).

That being said, I cheesed both the Penguin bosses my first attempt. The UFO was on screen but not actively engaged so i just fired rocket after rocket into it from a distance. The Mech can be engaged even if you don't go through the doorway, so you can fight it without being in the arena (closing the door when the rockets are fired). I did later go back and fight them legitimately in equivalent gear, but those kinda bugs are something that should definitely be addressed.

 

I can agree with you on a few things there. Yes, a revving animation would great for his dash. I think it's obvious that, when he just decides to prance off the side of the screen that something is coming, but it's true that on your first run, you'd have no idea what. I had the same thoughts about the missiles. My first strategy for trying to dodge them was to jump at the last second to get them to slam into the wall. Too bad they do a 180 and come at you anyway. Now, I don't think that's inherently bad, but I do think they lost the potential for a wider range of approaches to countering the attack.

The ability to lock the screen is something that hadn't even occurred to me. I wonder how feasible it would be with the current engine. It would definitely improve arena-style encounters like this across the board. Even the ability for the player to manually lock the camera to a specific point in space as opposed to a point relative to the player would be welcomed.

 

I have 3 comments on this topic:

1) As far as pickaxes go I'm not sure what you're talking about. The matter manipulator mines so stupidly slow (even after all of the upgrades) that I am constantly lugging around my replicator and crafting table just to make diamond pickaxes (for medium hardness stuff) and diamond drills (for hard stuff) just to keep mining at a decent pace. They still outpace the matter manipulator which, regardless of everyone else's complaints, still makes sense to me. My only problem with them is that they're disposable. It seems silly that they got rid of hunger because it was "nothing but an annoyance", but then they change pickaxes to a mechanic that does nothing but force you to stop every 5 minutes and craft a new pickaxe and drill... The old "repair with ore" system was better.

Before every 5 minutes it was:
1) grab ore and repair pickaxe
2) drop my fireplace
3) cook all my food
4) pick up my fireplace
5) eat a meat

Now every 5 minutes it's:
1) carve out a ledge
2) drop my furnace *
3) smelt all my highest tier ore *
4) pick up my furnace *
5) drop my crafting table
6) craft a new pickaxe
8) pick up my crafting table
9) drop my replicator
10) craft a new drill
11) pick up my replicator

* finally no longer needed now that I've gotten to the point where diamonds are common

Even ignoring the three steps not involved with diamonds, the new pickaxe system is "nothing more than an annoyance" more than the old pickaxe and food systems combined >.>

2) With regards to bosses I really didn't like the bosses. Honestly I had way more fun with the old bosses (I hope the dragon comes back Q.Q)

The bosses could definitely do with one of two things. Either:
A ) Less health. A whole lot less. Like at least cut them down to 2/3 if not 1/2.
or
B ) More stages to their health, with different attacks.
Giving an enemy a ton of health doesn't make it any more interesting as Image Not Available stated. It also doesn't make it any more challenging. Once you've learned the bosses attacks, avoiding them turns super trivial. Trying to make things more difficult by making you dodge the same high damage attacks over and over repeatedly until you either mess up and die or defeat the boss is really poor enemy design... Especially The battles would be the exact same, just a little less annoying even if the boss had 1/2 his hit points.

3) As far as glitches with the bosses go, if they stay with the current boss setup I would say leave them in... I killed the bosses on the first playthrough. It was annoying and tedious, but I did it. On both of my other characters I just glitched the bosses because I didn't want to have to sit through that experience again. The bosses weren't fun for me, so I appreciated a way to skip them.

TL;DR: 1) the old pickaxe system was better 2) Didn't like the new boss system 3) leave the boss glitches in since otherwise the new bosses are tedious and pedantic.

 

This sounds like a really good idea. I hope Chucklefish considers it. Whatever happened to the suggestion boards anyway, they sort of seem to have fallen into total disarray after the old voting system was discarded?

 

Thank you thank you thank you thank you x1000
I've been looking for an intelligent and put together thread for days on this topic.
Granted, I don't know if that means I'm dumb or if the suggestions section is a total mess.

Anyways, I would just like to ask whether anyone else noticed how strange it is that the gate in each system beams you to the middle of the gate next to the base, but, on the way back, beams you to the same place as where your ship beams you to instead of in the middle of the gate.
Also, if anyone else has found some threads comparable to this one, I would appreciate it greatly if they could link to them.

 

I think the MM is to good, its this deus ex machina kind of tool. Need to cut down a tree? MM. Need to drain up liquids? MM! Need to mine anything? MM. Need to build or place objects? MM. Everything is Matter Manipulator and i quite liked a more tool based progression. I'd like it far more if actual tools, such as picks/drills, axe's and a new liquid draining tool were the first go to step. With the MM being the more expensive options that kind of lagged behind until late game.
In their current incarnation the mining picks are pretty pointless, I found a copper pick in a chest just after starting and enjoyed the 3x3 faster mining for a whole 5minutes when it was already worn out.

Fuel I agree with your assessment aswell. Its far to common and easy to get. At this point you get the O2 systems, and Moons have no spawn and low gravity with minimal fall damage. There is essentially no risk at all on a moon. You just dig straight down till you see the vast pools of liquid. Conveniently glowing so you don't even really need any light sources. And in just a short time you will have thousands of liquid erchius. Its so easy that fuel is almost redundant right from the very start.

Generous ore spawns seem to still be a thing aswell. Why I am already able to find platinum and diamonds on starting planets is beyond me. Whats the point of exploring other planets when I can just bite down and go hard for 30min and emerge with enough copper, iron, gold and silver to craft for quite a while. And enough diamonds to turn in two quests the moment they pop up at the outpost.

And the outpost is another thing. Everything is being directed by the narrative around the Outpost. Atleast early on, I haven't gotten to far yet. I can just feed a bit of silver into a machine and my matter manipulator can now bend the laws of physics some more. But to fix my FTL drive I must do the quest. Upto this point everything has been quest driven, and everything is designed to be quest driven. Everything starting system will be on a lush green planet and you are guaranteed a desert planet nearby because a quests says you need glass.

The survival aspect has also been clean torn out of Starbound. No hunger anymore. No getting cold except maybe in snow biome worlds, but I could happily go to a Moon in a Frozen Star system and apparently it was nice and warm. And the O2 systems used to be something to work towards, a milestone, unlocking new interesting worlds. Now you get it so early, i couldn't even get to any worlds that lacked an atmosphere. A solution to a problem that hasn't even come around yet and it pretty much takes the last bit of survival, where your character at least needs some air to breath, out of the game very early on as well. The survival part of the game is pretty much gone.

All things considering. The super-abundance of fuel, no more starvation, no freezing, no oxygen problems, abundance of resources, minimal fall damage, easy healing, early available higher tier resources has made the experience incredibly easy. And i was worried that not playing for 10months might be punishing.
Now put that all on the tracks of the questing system and it feels to me like Starbound has lost something. The free roaming spirit, the ability to make mistakes and be punished for them, the scrounging of resources, the environmental hazards. You cant even accidentally stumble into a mission or boss that's to tough for you because there are all kinds of gear requirements before you can even start these.

Some mechanics have of course really improved. The hotbar, ship upgrades are cool, more biome diversity, weapons feel more balanced, combat feels beter, (energy is still iffy though), loot is beter, there is so much more to see. And that really gives Starbound a more polished feel. But there is just to much handholding for my taste, and that detracts from the sandbox part of the game and simply killed the survival part. Two things i held dearest in Starbound.

 

I somewhat like that fuel is easy. In the earliest incarnations of the game, you only had wood and coal fuel. Which was a bitch to farm tons of. On top of that, CF used to get crap from a bunch of people about how impractical and stupid it was that a future tech FTL drive ran on crystallized carbon and organic matter.

 

I like that it uses a special fuel, coal was silly of course. But its so overly abundant and easy to acquire that there is no management of any sorts. If the hunger system was removed because it eventually became a minor nuisance at best, why is there still a fuel system?
The very moment you unlock Fuel its already meaningless as it takes just 1 quick zero-risk dig on a moon planet to acquire literally thousands of units of fuel. Enough to not have to even think about fuel for a good while.

 

Honestly, I don't think the abundance is an issue. I think the danger should be in handling the liquid once you have it. Making it extremely volatile and risk exploding when you move or fall too far would be awesome (they made an effect like this when testing the new status system so we know it can be done). Making it explode when you come in contact with it would be fun too.

Further, I'd say it should be less stable the more you have on you, so you could still harvest three or four thousand, but it'd be extremely dangerous and probably end in a spectacular explosion xD

 

Having pickaxes feels far too redundant and annoying to me. I feel we should remove them entirely, and instead replace them with an alternative mode for the MM, that functions the same way pics do (short range, increased mining speed and area). We'd fuel the MM with ores at the same rate we'd get from making pics (or lower, to compensate for the convenience). This could use a separate upgrade track that could be tied to the game's progression.

 

For the survival part, I think it would have been better if the various suits gave resistance to a planet's adverse conditions rather than complete immunity to it; as it is once I get into the right suit all planets are roughly the same except for the flora, fauna and weather (gravity changes being quite negligible to me).

For example, the cold suit should be changed to allow you to land safely on frozen planets but some conditions may still make it dangerous such as night time (particularly taxing for planets with short daytime periods) or a blizzard, where temperatures may drop so much that you'll start to freeze anyway unless you have a campfire or are within some kind of enclosed shelter. For irradiated planets there could be planets wherein daytime is simply too dangerous to stay in for long periods (making underground, night time or quick shelter-to-shelter travel necessary; add a system aboard the ship to determine current period of day before beaming down), or have occasional periods of intense radiation bursts that inflict some damage and/or negative status effects like reducing maximum available energy. Heat suits would only provide a limited amount of time on the surface before their protective capabilities are overwhelmed. Oxygen suits could also be limited in the amount of oxygen available (2-4 days' worth?), meaning that small outposts may be necessary for replenishing air while on huge planets or performing extensive deep mining. Upgrades can increase resistance but, again, should never completely negate the environmental dangers of the planet the player lands on.

I'm also disappointed that hunger is currently not an issue. The fast rate of growth for some farmed plants and long cooldowns after consuming food (particularly bad for healing foods) in a system without hunger means that I end up with lots of rapidly replenishing food that I usually skip in favor of stim packs, bandages and medical kits. Additionally, most food-related merchants become unnecessary (the way I see it, only the one in the outpost is useful for the harder to get ingredients), and their high prices aren't helping them either.

I'd support including dangers to acquiring stuff like oil and erchius. They should be somewhat volatile so that accidents like setting them on fire (meteorite impacts, monsters with fire attacks, your own flamers/rocket launchers) or other triggers could end up costing you the resource and damaging you.

 

Arylin, I like your suggestions in relation to suits. Quite a bit actually. Jumping from shelter to shelter, with cold/heat/etc. suits only providing protection for a period of time or up until a certain threshold reminds me of Metro 2033. I don't want them to remove total protection from the elements entirely, though. Those suits just need to be far end-game gains.

However, I still disagree with hunger being a mechanic. I think I've explained it before in another thread, but I might as well detail my logic.

Hunger in a sandbox game is a fundamentally doomed game mechanic. Think about a survival game. The rate at which the player acquires food can be controlled to a degree by the designer. They can balance the hunger rate such that the player will never truly be in danger of starvation unless they're ignoring food altogether. This works well. In a good survival game, the player is always worrying that they might run out of food soon, and so they've always got their eyes open for it, and the designer has created the areas such that the player will find the food they need.

But in a sandbox game like Starbound, it's a bit different. Here, we can farm. And since it's a sandbox, we can make our farms arbitrarily large. Once the player acquires some seeds, they can very quickly duplicate their yields to an insane degree. It's trivial for the player to create a functionally infinite source of food. Slowing down growth time doesn't solve this problem, it only makes infinite food take marginally longer to get.

And this means that it's impossible for the designer to balance the hunger rate properly. You might think that, if the player has that much food, then the hunger rate should be pretty high! But this screws new characters, as they have no food and it does take a not-insignificant amount of time to generate a food supply. If you have a high hunger rate, early game characters will be forced to eat, eat, and eat, meaning they'll be forced to ignore exploration and even setting up a farm, meaning they're entirely boned.

 

I do concede that balancing hunger would be problematic, though I'll remain hopeful that someone with a good idea will find a way to accommodate it within the sandbox environment. I suppose I could always trade off the excess stuff for pixels when they include a functioning trade system; being a space trader is another of my interests besides collecting flora and bugs.