Better Scaling and reasons for Sector Jumping, and Exploration incentives.

First off, there is absolutely no need to remind me that it's a beta. I am not complaining. I am making suggestions and adding reason behind my suggestions. Because I know it's a Beta. Second, I was not suggesting that the game force players to explore every planet in the galaxy. I was trying to give a solution to the fact that there are an exponential number of worlds in each sector, but only two or three will ever need to be used. The game is not taking advantage of a game mechanic that is possesses, that most games don't have. Also the fact that fuel costs are so high is more reason NOT to try and explore other planets, but rather sit around on one searching tirelessly for what you need. (Also I think fuel costs should vary by distance traveled.) And to clarify I was also not suggesting the player be forced to "hunt" for certain ores. The ship could easily give you information on what a planets dominant mineral composition is and to prevent forcing players to find both low level and correct ore planets, difficulty scaling could easily be based on what the dominant ore is. If that's too simple for you a drone system could be implemented where the player crafts a drone to check planets before visiting them so they know these things. Your entire "Exploration" note contains elements that newer players are first, not going to know about unless they read the entire wiki, and second, unlikely to come across if their usual progression only takes them to one or two planets in each sector for them to progress the game. As for your comment on sectors, you misunderstand. The idea was that a player was started on a level 1 world in a barren and underpopulated (As in few Settlements, not few monsters) sector. And all planets in that sector have levels of difficulty from 1 to 10. Then after beating bosses, which I said could have a chance to SHOW UP after reaching a certain tier of equipment, not that they would be HARDER based on your equipment, (And if being able to prepare is so important why are you defending the "you're not allowed to get better gear till you beat this boss" system?) you would receive incomplete, or damaged parts that you would need to finish/repair that would allow you to visit different sectors. And these sectors would house large population points of various races. So you would hang around the "alpha" sector to find ores, equipment, loot, and treasure, while going to different sectors (which also had these things in the less populated ares) to visit different racial settlements, trade, sell unneeded materials, and possibly upgrade your ship so that travelling costs less. It wouldn't remove the need to progress to higher tiers at all. It would simply change the placement of those planets that were higher tier.
Hope this clarifies my original post.

 

Forcing a player to explore is different from having the option to explore. A certain level of freedom which it currently has is great. Since
Limiting each planet to 2 ore types I can see this happening:
A) Spend hours looking for a planet that has the ore you need to advance, each galaxy you need to restock on fuel. Tedious After all the ship you are on is only a bare hull,
an escape vessel. It wont help you early on in any way to determine a planet's natural resources or forms of life.
You find the planet you need and quickly gain access to mountain load of ore. Reduces game length...
C) You find the planet and spend just as much time as now looking for the ore you need on every single planet for each ore type. That would get very dull, finding the same stuff with no surprise nodes or other ores.
I can imagine digging endlessly through dirt and stone only to find a handful of one type of rare ore after hours of digging.

Mentioning dominant ores, they already have something like that in place. Certain planets yield more of specific ores than others. There is still that random factor too that you could be lucky to find a planet with unusual quantities of a rarer ore type for that planet type.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy the discovery of rarer minerals in a planet when I am mining away, more so than chests and their mostly useless contents.
I would need to spend ages on a planet with copper to make sure I keep my pickaxe or drill repaired.
Also there's the tedium of finding out you are one ore short of making a bar to craft something, but you are on the wrong planet for that ore. You would be forced to travel to a planet that had that ore, get it, then travel back to resume what you were doing previously.

My entire Exploration note is there because it is common knowledge, as the game is now (I am going to mention it again) in Beta. Since it is not complete there are no tutorials or quests, as of yet, to explain what can be found within the game. As for the whole one planet side, the game doesn't have enough in it to tell you to do anything. Everything right now is focused on Beta development to get 'important' things done, and anyone who is signed up for Beta should be following the news, gossip and such to help bringing forth problems that they find.
Suggestions are really only useful once you know what the devs have implemented, and how it can be improved upon.

I agree with you on the terms of fuel costs. It limits the ability to roam freely.
In any event, different level planets is likely to come back, as it is mentioned as one of the things the devs want.
The current way space is handled has been mentioned, it is a place holder, not the final result. So until they set up space how they intend to have it... no matter of nudging will do anything.

Still do not like bosses randomly showing up. However... if the home planet is exempt from boss invasions, I may like the idea you present (ie. having them show up at some point when you reach a certain tier of equipment).
... Then there is only the slight issue of waiting around, and being in the right location.

 

I agree i spent hours gathering ores on the first sector, then on the last i get the same ores with the same pickaxe in like 5minutes it's ridiculous

 

Let's try to keep it concise here guys. With all these walls of text, it's making it a pain to figure out what the main points of the post are. Myouhiro is not saying that any planet will have a gamebreakingly high or low amount of ore to the point of effectively force exploration. He's trying to augment the current system by making the variation between planets more visible (as well as more pronounced).

For a player to appreciate the variation between planets of the same type with varying resources, it would be required to explore multiple planets of the same type to gain a grasp on what the norm is (which sounds a bit tedious to me). I'm all for exploring, but I would like to have a way to know this variation before burning the fuel to get there. Do you have a link to a place that discusses this mechanic? I assumed that planets with higher resource densities mostly increased all ore by a single factor and am interested to know more.

edited because I am bad at replying

 

This thread, and also the dev assertion of future plans: "Ore & Difficulty: Higher difficulty planets will have improved ore distribution" both confuse me.

Maybe I have limited experience with living on real planets, but I'm pretty sure the ore content of a world doesn't have anything to do with the aggression and power of its flora and fauna.

Why are these two things connected? They're two almost completely distinct systems of resources (living and mineral). Treat them as such. If there should be any connection between surface and underground, it should be that very mineral-rich planets have more extensive civilization on them, since that would be the basis of an economy.

Speaking of that, why is the player character the only person in this universe interested in mining? Not a single mining colony to be found...

As for the distribution of ore: I am reading a lot of strange opinions about it. "Way too much ore at the moment" ???! Maybe I've just had a really improbable string of worlds in my playthroughs, but generally speaking ore is far too rare and dirt/sand/gravel is far too common. (Caves are also far too common, but I understand that's to make planets less boring.) There is no such thing as deep subterranean "dirt". Any solid planet is going to be almost entirely iron if you dig down deep enough. Thus, iron is very very very very rare in the game compared to what it should be. This being something of a successor to Terraria, I didn't think I'd need to explain the idea of rock strata, since Terraria has it implemented.

It goes without saying that moon "biomes" should never have coal or diamond on them. What is coal? Ancient life that was processed by active geology over eons. What is a diamond? Super deluxe coal. What do moons not have? Life and active geology.

Asteroids (completely separately from the fact that they shouldn't be a biome above regular planets at all ever forever) should be 100% iron, 0% dirt, 0% sand, 0% plutonium (plutonium doesn't even exist in space, it's artificial!), 0% inhabited by birds.

 

The planets generated by this game are not realistic, but that was never the goal. An immersive atmosphere is a lot more important (which realism only has a miniscule part of in a game like this). Sure, not everything (and by that I mean most things) in this game makes sense, but it's first and foremost a form of entertainment. If you want to take away from the cool stuff moons and asteroids currently have, throw in a new/alternative resource to replace them that people would want to find (removing the value from current content makes it difficult to find support for your idea). The amount of ore is purely for balancing how quickly players progress through the game, and this is entirely fine by me.

I have encountered a couple mines in my travels, but active mining settlements would be a cool implementation.

I know where you are coming from. A lot of people have a lot of varying hopes out of a game like this, but in a sci fi game like this, reality needs to take the back seat in the name of balance and gameplay.

 

Not sure how you're defining "immersive" if it can sit in the same wagon as "blatantly fake". If we're going to throw all semblance of realism out the window then why are the planets spherical? Why do they orbit stars? Why are we in space rather than a dimension of pure snot?

 

That goes back to the varying hopes for this game. Immersive means different things to different people. My definition for this game is to be a starship trooper and not think too much about shoveling coal into my ftl drive. The one linking thread between all sci fi stuff is that it's fake and some level of imagination is required to get the maximum benefit out of it. I'm not attempting to upset you, I'm just saying your perspective on the game is in the minority of the community. To appeal to the majority, we'd want to see improvements to the gameplay or expansions/enhancements to the content that result in a higher value. Realistic is subjective and you clearly know your stuff. As far as this game is concerned, to the average gamer, this world makes sense, and that is what the dev's are going to cater towards.

There is a massive amount of people who want the survival aspects of this game to be harsher, but this does go a step beyond even that.

 

Wish I could find it again. Someone revealed data on each planet type and the chance for that ore (or density) is would exist on them. But there is so much talk about ore, density and planets it would take ages for me to even find it, if it still exists. This was also posted up before updates, so it will no longer be accurate. Few things I recall, Moon planets are supposed to have less coal but more other ore types than other planets. My friend has better recall of this than I, and even if I would share this all moot since things are still in the works and being changed.

 

No idea why people want to connect the two. I can understand actual technology and such to be protected by the beings that created them, but a natural resource has almost nothing to do with wildlife.
You can find mining biomes, remnants of a mining camp. True enough, there are no towns that look like they remotely care about the planet's resources.
Also, doesn't make sense as to why every planet has life on it.
Every planet apparently has an asteroid field floating around it, just at the edge of the atmosphere level... for some questionable reason (yeah, seems like gravity is ignoring those chunks of rock so close to the planet).
The character suffers no problems being so close to lava... including the planet's core (all life is heat proof unless touching it).
The planet's core is an infinite depth of lava. There is more down than up in this game hahaha. You could game-wise create a very odd shaped planet, one that has huge amount of depth but nowhere enough circumference to be plausible.
I could list a heap of things that defy any form of logic. Just like to mention this is basically a game for simple entertainment where everything is possible. It has been deemed as of right now, realism means squat.

 

So far partial discovery on looking for the site.
http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/1sjgas/finally_some_iron/
Quote 10 days ago "at specific levels and depths, ore had x% ( some fraction of 1 to .01 ) chance to spawn."
Quote 9 days ago "Basically the distribution of ores is based on planet level and depth only."

The first guy posted is what we (friends and I) discovered, still looking for the website.
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/144905/where-do-i-find-higher-tier-ores

... unable to locate it. sorry

 

I was just wondering if you had easy access to it. Don't worry about it, but thank you kindly for trying.

 

Well, I have just posted a thread regarding space stations and which, unfortunately, didn't get much attention, but it fits very nicely with the idea you have there of space ports.

- I believe (and if you read my thread) that you could link a player space station to a major (i mean npc) space port (basically another space station) and have players teleport themselves to and from that place.

- I say that all of the ideas posted on my thread have been completely thought out by me and I didn't copy them from anyone, even with them being posted later than yours and being very similar (we just share a similar view of what this game should be, i believe).

- In the even that space ship fighting can occur, players might also be able to go to these, as you call them, space ports and have their ships repaired by mechanics or by upgrades for their ship.

- There would be one mechanic per space port and that mechanic, depending on his race, besides the trivial upgrades that fit any ship could have specific ones for your ship depending on your race.

- Also, each MAJOR space port (equal to the number of races) would have different leaders (one for each race) and depending on the relations between the star ports, prices would vary (say fish and bird don't like each other, you are a fish and decide to go to the bird star port, prices would probably be raised for you or merchants wouldn't even want to trade).

- Quests could be done for people of that space port (find this item, deliver this to X on space port Y) and that would improve your relation with them, possibly lowering the prices or nullifying any disagreements your and their race might have at the moment.

- Space ports could be both small and medium (manned by pirates or small villages or the dungeons featured in the future) or big (like a major city for each race).

These are all just ideas, and i would really appreciate your opinion.
Thank you.

 

Gar, I was just informed by my friend. We watched how the planets are generated from a twitch stream from Bartwe. Live stream, no recordings. So I could search my whole life and not provide you with the source. Sorry.