Anyone else feel like ships remove incentive to build?

Planetary constructions huh?

How about being able to build a landing pad, actually landing your ship on the planet, having a ship hangar door open up so you can just walk into the ship and access all your storage n stuff.

How about being able to build a giant pump on a moon which drills down through the core and acts as a fuel pump for your ship. If you build a landing pad or dock there and connect the pump to it, you can refuel your ship. It could maybe fuel up to 10 000 - 100 000 or more instead of the regular 1000. There could be a split between primary tank and secondary tank. Your primary tank is the big one that can only be refuelled on planets or moons and the secondary is the one you manually fill inside the ship. Maybe balance the way you jump between sectors to require a larger than 1000 tank to jump over extra large distances.

Part of the ship could be a storage dock, think Serenity from Firefly. You could land on a planet, accept a trade mission, load up (in cutscene or whatever), fly to target planet, random events like space pirates could happen or your cargo could have a problem, especially if it is cows..., land on planet, ensure area is secure, more events could happen, finish the trade mission, unload and move on. Ship size upgrades would increase storage space and thus the reward money or type of cargo you can carry. A tiny starter ship would not have a cargo hold like this but instead be able to transport a passenger NPC. The first size upgrade would allow small cargo like emergency medical supplies, a prize space horse, or whatever. The next size increase would allow a medium container. Next a full container. Ocne you get to max, you can carry several containers.

There could be illegal goods. You could smuggle spaceweed to florans or blue bananas ala breaking bad blue meth, to apex colonies. Cops or pirates could board your ship and you'd have a reason to install turrets on your ship or hire guard tenants there. You could have a heat meter, so when the heat is up, you could lay low on your planet, leave the illegal goods there and whatnot.

You could specialise in cargo types. Transport foods, transport explosives or volatile things, transport people. You would need a ship crew to keep it all running. Maybe one person per upgrade. If you specialise in illegal stuff, you might need a mad scientist and guards. Specialise in food, hell you could start a space food truck and hire chefs and souschefs and managers to prepare food for when you land (so no time wasted). If you transport people, you're basically an airline (spaceline?) and you need hostesses. You could be legit and be a regular airline, or illegal and transport criminals, or legal and transport criminals to prisons so you'd need guards instead of hostesses.

Your crew would have a homesick meter or need vacation or shore leave. If you have a homeplanet with houses for them, that lets them chug along longer and better.

We should really have blue bananas.

 

Yeah well. What you describe would be awesome, but that would be a sandbox game.

Starbound is a themepark which forces you to linearly progress with the stupid quests and missions in order to get wider crafting and exploration options.

One can hope and dream though.

 

Absolutely! It only makes sense, after all!

 

Alsso the thing about building on a Ship verssus building on a planet-like map (like moonss, planetss, assteroids, etc.) iss not jusst about a matter of Fun, but alsso a matter of sspacce.
I perssonally am the type of persson who has a chesst for every block type in the end, with a massssive sstorage warehousse which normally takess up sseveral sscreens-worth of space.
You can't really do that on a ship, and even if you could, where'd you put your bed, crafting tabless, maybe a farm, etc.? Ccertainly not on the ship.

Alsso I too would like to ssee ssome planetary sstuff added in for uss to make, maybe ssome kind of fog of war-type thing for the universe map, with a sspecial relay to put on planetss to exxpand it bassed on the planet'ss possition.

Don't know what elsse you could do. When thinking of planet-based things, all I think of are beaconss to attract sspacce monssters to planetss, giant shieldss and big laser cannons.

 

Meh. I'd like to think ships are what you make of them. I turned my ship into a cool ass pad with a mini greenhouse, kitchen/food storage, crafting area, and two-roomed closet for clothes and such. The rest was just decoration; I just set up a storage facility on an asteroid biome for other things.

 

Knowing that there is "something on the end" of the road while doing something amplifies fun quite a bit. For everyone. Even if the reward is in your head, made up. Some people simply want the reward being part of the game.
So yeah, you might not need a purpose, but some people does. In fact, after a while of "pointless" building, I want some incentive to actually build something in middle of nowhere, or in a place where it is hard to build it.

 

Ships are still easily griefed in multiplayer unfortunately. (Quit stealing my fuel!!). Which also makes large scale storage a nightmare. I've lost so much stuff from trying to pick up from a stack of containers even smashed accidentally.

I love Swatellite's suggestions, which could even be done by objects to allow for more personalized decoration/placement.

 

I like my ship being a space-house. I feel like the colonization aspect will encourage building more if you continue to develop features for it. I'm not against planet-only constructions, but don't go crazy with it either. Planet-Only constructions need to make sense or else it's just an arbitrary restriction meant to force a certain type of gameplay, which isn't really fun.

 

Its not only the ship that makes this, is also outpost fault. I have big ship with good amount of storage space, can keep NPC's on it, also I have outpost with every merchant and service I need, so there is no need to build anything.
Planets are just sad rocks you mine ore for new armor tier on.

 

This ^ is how a lot of people see planets.
And there's nothing wrong with that.

I think we need to realize that some people will never have a reason to build because building is (atleast currently) designed to be optional (as it probably should be).

If you're someone who enjoys building things, you're going to build whether there is a reason to or not.
If you're someone who doesn't enjoy building things, you're going to build as little as possible, and only when forced to to advance (this counts placing platforms to climb out of caves).
It's as simple as that.

No matter how many incentives you add for building, you aren't going to make people who do not enjoy building, build.
The only way to force people to build is to tack requirements for advancement onto building. Then the people who hate building will ignore it and not advance, or get frustrated and leave.

The same way before tenants were a thing, people built giant towns for nobody, epic farms, space stations, all that nonsense.

More incentives for building benefits everyone, even those who do not enjoy building, as they can (potentially) trade with other players (ideally).

Personally, I like building, but I need a good reason to do it. I've made my own house a few times, but mostly small storage homes with a lot of farming area, moderately decorated.
I hated feeling like it was a waste of time to build before Pleased Giraffe.
Now, tenants encourage me to build more, and reward me for doing it. And that's a good thing.
I look forward to tenant updates in the future, they do a lot to breathe life and fun into the game for me.

 

Well they decided on static quest hub, not only I don't feel the need to build anything, but I don't feel that progression, outpost is always the same and never changes, and has everything you need.
So it seems the core will be static and never changing outpost and all exploring of the universe and building on planets will be highly optional and disconnected from the rest of the game.
The thing is building is not blend with other parts of the game, you can do it, but there is no real need to do so.

 

I still have the danger block gift wrapping on my last two tiers, so...could my building on the ground remove my incentive to build in my ship?

 

Building is largely the allure of this game with me,well besides lootng all sorts of shiny treasures and living out my spacepirate fantasy,my only complaint is that for quite some time now,you can't create/place a spawn in the buildings and bases you construct.

I'm kinda the guy who'll scour an entire planet to find that one spot,that one area that looks interesting and really grabs at you to where you're like "Yes,this is IT! this is where I shall build,and it shall be swish,and amazing".
At this point I merely look at ships as a mobile/main homestead.

 

It is easy to turn the ship into an all-purpose storage container and workshop as well as the access point for the outpost and everything else, leaving planets as a place to just get ores and loot. That was my experience in the first playthrough. Good thing there are colonies now. That should make building on planets more functional, interesting and inviting.

That would be good.
The main things planets have (that spaceships don't) are the larger size, unfamiliar places, weather, earth, nature, lifeforms, etc. The objects would have to be related to the unique features of planets to not seem forced.

This fella, right?

I was thinking the same thing.
Mining is something that won't happen easily from a ship but planetary mining colonies are logical.
There is already a working rent system so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to make another tenant type called "Miner" that gives ores of the types that can be found on the planet. (There are already lunar miners that currently function as guards) Maybe have a bunch of requirements such as some sort of mine site, number of miners, depth or condition, and possibly add special mining machines (that only work on planets) like that driller. Some combination of these could be a mining facility that produces ores that accumulate over time.
This is also good for builder gameplay since builders need more ores to craft materials and they can build mining facilities to get more ores.


Another thing that could be suitable for the larger scale of planets and colonies is large items that require a lot of time/effort/resources to produce. For example, there could be the "megalith", a giant and expensive building material reserved for the mightiest of monuments. It would be something too much for the player to build (and gather materials for) alone but an entire specialised colony-sized group could produce it over time.
Something like this could be used in megastructures such as The Ark and the grand scale of it is a good way of showing its importance.

 

i made a "small" village of about a dozen buildings with multipule floors and hidden rooms, and use it to both amuse myself and store more crud than my ship can possibly hold (a girl's gotta update their wardrobe, and there's only so much space for clothes on there you know?) i don't really understand how you don't have an incentive to settle some small plant somewhere.

blue banana: banana +alien fruit + bread
A banana fried in a contraban-tastic shell of sweetened blue batter! it's the taste worth getting arrested for!