Notice Ask us anything.

Are you planning to make the vegetation and "features" more dense both overground and underground ?

That entirely depends on the biome. Some biomes have very dense vegetation whilst others are sparse of vegetation or decoration.

 

How will quests work, exactly? Will they be randomly generated, pre-made, or some mix of both? Can we expect the sort of depth and complexity that we saw in the mock up in the July 4th update?

They will be part procedural and part prebuilt. We're going to try and get in as much variety as possible, but the system is still very much in process so I don't want to get too much into the finer details. We're likely going to build a bunch of templates where certain variables are changed up each time.

 

When you claim a home world, how will cites be created? Will you have to make them or will they be auto generated?

Cities aren't built for you. If you want some kind of city you'll have to build it yourself.

 

Are creepers from minecraft still in the game, and if so can you tame them?

They are and no to taming, they'd make terrible pets.

 

there have been a few threads on this recently, but how extensive, if any will ship customization be? expansion? decoration? buying? trading? etc

To start with you'll be able to upgrade the layout and make the ship bigger. You can also place blocks and objects on the ship to get a completely unique look. I'm looking into ways I can expand it further. I'll post details in a daily update if it works out.

 

How exactly will upgrades to ships work? Will ships be cross server along with characters? Exactly how customizable are ships?

More than likely they'll be cross server and saved with the character.

 

Ah, nice, seems I managed to slip this question in before the thread locked again. Excellent. Now, on to my question. Now, feel free to answer this as vaguely or as explicitly as you want to by this point in time. I understand that nothing is ever set in stone in a constantly-updating game, let alone one that has yet to even be released in Beta. Reguarless, here goes.
Now, I'm sure everyone here is aware that one of the features you have pointed out early in development is that, unlike most sandboxes of this nature, the planets will loop around instead of either stretching on endlessly or cutting off at an abrupt boundary. Nothing really hard to understand there. That is, until you stard over-analyzing, as I myself tend to do. While thinking about this feature, I eventually came to one conclusion: what would happen if you were to dig straight down to the core of a planet? Now, people like you and I may know that the core of a planet is made of a dense spherical mass of metal, just like our Iron core here on Earth. However, I can only imagine the problems that would be caused were one to enter the center of a sperical object, let alone if you're actually going to have the game generate a spherical plane as opposed to a flat loop to give an illusion of one. Will you create an impassible barrier or unminable block layer to keep the player from reaching the center of the planet? Or perhaps have a clever way of making it very undesirable for the player to delve too far underground, such as an extremely high climate that cannot be endured for very long reguardless of equipment?
Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there. I guess the main questions I'm trying to get at is how deep could a player go into a planet, and what percautions, if any, do you have in place for going "too deep" into a planetoid?
Wait... that's two questions, isn't it? Ah well, delete this if you feel like that's too much, and sorry for having to make you read all that just to weed it out if you do. ^_^'

When you get far enough down there are obstacles you simply can't overcome. Layers entirely filled with lava, things like that. This is technically necessary I'm afraid.

 

Will we be able to build a large variety of traps and such with the wiring system?

That's the plan, at some point I want to give you guys proximity sensors, pressure pads, things like that and allow you to wire them up to all sorts of dangerous things.

 

Will you ever implement a time stamp to the dev roadmap?
It is quite disappointing looking to see if anything has changed to find that the roadmap is still the same as when I looked a week ago

I'll post on the front page when it's updated.

 

Hope this isn't a dumb question, but I just want to be sure I understand. When you say that planets carry over between players.. what about characters? Does that mean if I start a new character it's possible to find structures my previous character had built? If I'm not on the right page, then what exactly what does "carry over between players" mean?

We're still deciding if characters should share the same universe or not. There are pros and cons either way. It's not set in stone yet.

 

Will mechs have to be rebuilt if they get destroyed - obviously after being built the first time - or will they have a reconstruction timer? Do you have something else in mind?

Right now they're energy based. But we'll see how that works out in practice. Taking damage in a mech drains you of energy. Once you're out of energy your mech despawns and there's a respawn timer.

 

Exactly how moddable will the game be? Will we be able to add our own races and associated items, descriptions, etc.? I'd heard that server-side mods of this nature won't require the client to mod anything and it will simply get pushed out to them.

We're aiming for insanely moddable. It might take a while but the engine is built for it from the ground up, so when it comes it'll be really good. The plan is indeed for servers to push mods to clients.

 

I did Tweet this to you, but since it's open I'm asking it here:

I'm not sure how much has been updated, are stealth mechanics still in game? I saw something about crouching and stealth gear.

Honestly we felt the stealth thing wasn't working out. It might make a reappearance later when we have more time to play with it. But not right now.

 

Anything you'd like to say about the trailer? (How close is it to completion, how important is it to you all at the moment, etc)

The game is more important to us than the trailer right now. Plus when we do put out a trailer we'd like it to represent the finished game.

 

So will we be able to experience all the tiers in the beta? Is the beta limited only to three tiers at the moment?

We're going to attempt as many tiers as we can for the beta

 

Will ores be randomly generated?

For the most part, no, not at release

 

Will space combat be in the game?

Big plans for this post release. I know exactly how I want it to work.

 

Do you plan to rent an office and get the team together post-release?

Yesssss!

 

Will the game have a borderless window option? I use dual monitors and I'm always excited when that's a option in the game.

I'd certainly like it to have one, I'll speak to the programmers about this