Okay, so it's been confirmed we can capture creatures (or at least I'm pretty sure it has) right? So, being the explorer type that I am, I thought "What if there was a way I could bring creatures that I discovered to my home planet?" Then I got to thinking. Technology is quite sophisticated, so what if we hired a team of scientists to deconstruct a creature on a genetic/molecular level? Based on the creature, threat level, rarity, or some other unseen parameters, it would cost more or less pixels. Also, things like this take time. It might take several "Days" (Based on whatever factors constitute the length of a day. For intents and purposes, we'll just use "Real life" seconds/minutes. So a massive dinosaur could take 60 minutes to genetically deconstruct. While a poptop might only take 20. Just out-of-nowhere numbers. So, we have that down, but what's actually the point of it? Well, it can go one of two ways. 1) Once you fully deconstruct an animal, you get what is essentially a spawner. You can have it set to manual/automatic activation. If you place that spawner, it can either A) effect the entire planet, or effect a certain area in terms of radius. So if you leave the planet, and come back, whatever animal you deconstructed now is set into the appropriate spawn lists. 2) On manual activation, assuming the game has some sort of wiring/mechanism aspect, you could flip a switch and spawn that creature. This could be extremely useful for adventure maps. You want a dungeon of penguins? You can HAVE a dungeon of penguins. ______________________________________________________________________ Things of possible interest/conflicts. 1) Items. Should they drop them? I say no. They shouldn't drop items at all to prevent whatever abuse is going on. You're cloning the animal, not the stuff they have on them. 2) Procedurally generated creatures, and possibly a unique spawning item for each one? Perhaps when deconstructing that creature, the same parameters that make it unique can be applied to a procedurally generated spawner in order to spawn that same creature when triggered? 2b) Or, perhaps creatures can be categorized into subsets, (which might defeat the purpose a bit.) If you have, in terms of procedural generation, a creature with a value of 134, for example, that spawner might only spawn 13X creatures. This might seem like gibberish at first, but if I grossly butcher procedural generation with this simple demonstration, it'll make more sense. Let's say the first digit is teh type of animal. 1: Penguin 2: Deer 3: Turtle The second digit is the sub-species. 1: Featherless 2: Feathered 3: Skeleton And the third is a modifier, we'll say "elemental." 1: Fire 2: Electric 3: Ice 4: Wind So perhaps the spawner could omit the last digit, and only spawn skeleton penguins of many subgroups, instead of just a Wind Skeletal Penguin. That way, the spawners themselves don't have to be procedurally generated. (Not sure the extent of how their procedural generation works, so it might be easy for them to procedurally generate spawners.) 3) MONEY SINK. Yet another thing you can do if you have tons of money and nothing to spend it on. _________________________________________________________________________________________ What can you do with a system like this? 1: Build an adventure map with very specific mobs in specific areas, using these spawners. 2: Build a zoo 3: Literally bring tons of animals/plants to your favorite planet to collect them.
Capturing animals and stuff is indeed nice, for me, at least. But yeah, I like this idea, TOTALLY. Well, as long spawners don't work like minecraft's (spawning 100000 mobs, and they shouldn't be breakable too).
I can already see the massive zoo project, where someone collects as many monster types as possible from the community and puts them all on one map. Not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, just an interesting thing.
True. Interesting indeed. Plus it might spawn some sort of weird mini-monster collecting/trading meta-activity.
This is already starting to bring back memories of Monster Rancher. Time for some suggestion debugging. How would we deter players from using a monster zoo to farm a particular mob for a particular resource?
Somewhere in the wall of text monster I mentioned that no spawned creatuers will drop any gear/items. Guess I should make it more prevalent so people can see it better. o:
There are some mods in Minecraft that let you collect a monster spawner when you break it, allowing you to place them as traps or other defensive ways; perhaps a similar use could be found in Starbound?
As an idea for the item drop balancing. If you make a world spawner, where the creatures just appear randomly on the world due to your artificial migration, I would consider those to be fair games for item drops. This way, yes, you could make a "farm" planet, but it would still be at a fixed chance of finding AND getting the drops.
I do like the idea of being able to actually get drops, but It can quickly unbalance itself if someone captures a rare mob. If, say, my entire planet is artificially populated this way, the monster would only have the ability of spawning there at the same spawn rate as when I found it in the wild. So a rare monster with a .5% spawn rate chance would appear with the same rate if I released it into the wild on my planet. But I prefer not having drops, because sometimes it's fun to have to get them yourself, too.
I like the idea of transplanting a species to your planet of choice. Another option could be to make the native species hostile to certain planted species. Would be cool to see them attack each other. NPC vs NPC kills would generate no loot.
