Coal, Early Game Exploration, and Smelting Wood

Okay, so before the rebalancing, wood was a fuel source. And immensely powerful and plentiful one at that. And now it's been toned down just as immensely. Where as before you could jump to a jungle planet, chop down the entire forest, and have enough wood to fuel your ship for the rest of the beta, now that same amount of wood will get you through maybe 4, 5 jumps at most. However, using that much wood means putting off important crafting requirements, such as the yarn spinner for the Snow Infantry armor, torches and campfires to light caves and to cook food and keep ones' self warm, as well as a myriad of other craftables that are necessary to advance early on in the game for a number of reasons.

Okay so wood is no longer a significant fuel source like it was before... Alright fine. But what do we do now for fuel? Coal? Nope, still just as rare and still just as necessary to keep around. Torches are used to make campfires, coal is used to make steel as well as furnaces and refineries. So how does one fuel a ship if one is using all of the fuel one needs on other things that aren't fuel related?

Well, before I get to that there's another point I'd like to examine. The conversion ratio of wood to coal. If we think of wood as an "ore" for coal, and we examine that relationship and compare it to other ores in the game, we find that wood to coal is blatantly and horrifically restricted compared to other ores. The only other ore that comes close to being harsh on crafting costs is diamond. And that's not even half the amount of ore necessary to craft one diamond. If you have 10 diamond ore, and 10 wood, you can craft 2 and a half diamonds and one coal from the diamond ore and the unrefined wood, or coal "ore" if you will. Is it just me or does that not make much sense? I mean in Minecraft wood is able to be made into charcoal. Granted you need to use another fuel source to do this, but the principle is similar. Why in Starbound do we have to invest so much so early on to travel between stars? Why is it that we don't get to travel easily and quickly until much later on in the game when better fuel sources become available?

I understand that things are still being adjusted. I mean we just got the latest rebalance patch about a week ago. But honestly I'm surprised at how hard it is to acquire coal from wood. I would've imagined that smelting 4 wood would yield one coal. That seems like a fair number to me. It puts player crafted coal at a similar creation rate to diamond. Obviously it's a lot easier to get due to the high population of trees on many planets, but I feel that player crafted coal is supposed to supplement what small or large amount of coal a player finds anyway. After all, the idea is to explore right? Why should we have to hamstring our progression to travel to a new planet? Why should we limit our exploration options to advance our progression of tech? Even 6 wood to coal wouldn't be TOO bad. But 10 wood? I could make so many useful things from that wood that making coal to go to a different planet seems pointless. There's plenty of ore on the planet I'm already on to beat the boss, and doing that means I save fuel so I can just travel to a new sector and do it again.

tl;dr: Early fuel sources are too limited, exploration gets gimped because of this. Lower wood costs when crafting fuel, I suggest 4 wood to one crafted coal.

 

Honestly I feel it's fine as it is. Everything that costs wood or planks doesn't require that much to be 'put off' for coal. The amount that you save from putting them off gains you only what, 2-3 coal?

Just spend 5 minutes or so chopping trees down and mining any coal you see on the surface, the fuel comes easily enough.

 

It may seem fine, but twice now I've spawned on a planet with lava and hard stone to mine though. Very few trees to be found and coal being hard to find. The only other planet is a freaking moon. So I lack the wood to make half my tools let alone the spinning wheal to make lather gear. -Worse- this is the only planets in this star system! That means I need to find enough fuel just to warp to a whole other star system. This is leading to a lot of blind digging sense I can't be wasting what coal I find on torches!
Three hours and I've not come across enough yet.

So no... it's not 'easy', it's based on pure luck... so what do you do? If the starting world isn't that faverable start over? They need to make it more balanced so even if you start on a harsher planet you have a means to get OFF it.

 

My favorite solution to this issue is less tedious mining. I think they have the density of the resources a bit higher than they need to, generally speaking, but it takes forever and a half to actually collect them, which is what actually matters. Also, coal does have too many important advancements associated with it, so upping the quantity of that resource would be nice.

 

Ah. Alright, my bad, I didnt consider such a thing.

Well, a solution would be one I brought up awhile back. A energy battery. Basically a seperate fuel bar called Energy, which refills on its own. Time it takes to recharge enough for a jump would be quite abit slower than if you went out to gather fuel, but basically acts as a free jump in case of such bad luck. Your starting ship first starts with an extremely inefficient energy converter, maybe 30 minutes for 50 energy, or 2 hours for 200 energy. After defeating penguin boss you get a better one that improves recharge rate by 100%, meaning 15 minutes for 50 energy, and an hour for 200. This bar is separate from fuel though, so they cannot be mixed. Eg you have to use 200 energy to jump, if you only have 100 energy and 100 fuel, you cant jump to another solar system

 

I agree with OP

1) Make the wood to coal conversion rate 2:1 - wood is difficult enough to get already unless you find some jungle map, and even then its a limited ressource that you'll run out of sooner rather than later due to steel and a reasonably constant use of torches

2) make it possible to plant trees. Just like in terraria. It might be bothersome to code, but come on, this has to be done. Once people can make an entire planet or two into tree-farms, then we'll stop bitching about our coal supply.

3) another fun option: Make vendors that sell coal for pixels - and by that note, allow us to sell stuff back to vendors (perhaps at a one tenth the buying price or something.

 

Clearly they don't intend for you to use wood as fuel, so 10-1 is acceptable. It's easily ten times easier to chop a tree than mine some coal.
Although i kinda agree with you being able to get a bad start (this coming from someone who both characters started in a toxic planet with the nearest tree half way the planet). It was not too hard to leave the planet after a little bit mining only surface coal and from the little caves. Now if you are in a whole bad solar system, starting over is a better choice.

It's planned to have trees being respawned

After the first planet travel, it's easy to get enough fuel to keep traveling only mining the easy to mine coal and i think they did this nerf with the wood to encourage people to go underground more often. I only get easy coal and don't have problem with fuel.

Now if you really think it's still bad, i would encourage to suggest another source of fuel instead of trees. there's so many possibilities to include new things, why bother arguing things that is already done and many people think it's balanced

 

The motivation to go underground is already high enough from wanting ores other than coal that the incentive due to needing fuel is unnecessary.

Other sources of fuel would be a great thing to have, but until we have them, we're going to be upset with the current system, which, contrary to what you said, many people think is not balanced. And I have no clue by what you mean by "done."

 

Yeah i think i misused the word "done" and should said "implemented" instead, i don't know. And the reason i said that is because i think they added smeltable wood due to people asking for it already.
i dunno, i think i can't see your point of view to be upset cause i really don't have that problem. i usually have 400+ coal in my pocket only digging easy coal i find in the way. Although i can agree it's can be a little boring to have to stop in most easy coal pockets the whole game.

 

Honestly with the recent update I've not seen coal to be a horrendously hard thing to find as other are making it out to be.

After exploring my first planet which happened to be an Jungle planet, small enough for only one dungeon have you. I had then gathered 5000 wood. At the current ratio that's 500 coal, enough to jump literally anywhere as 200 fuel is the highest cost I've seen, even from Alpha to Beta sectors.

After my first jump I then went to a desert planet, this one big enough for two dungeons. After a full circle of the planet and mining all surface coal and exploring all surface tunnels I came out with another 1000+ of coal. All the while NEVER using any torches. Why people cannot use the flashlight is unfathomable, it seems as though whiners are making it a useless implement.

On the idea of giving a person a free jump I'm against it, the plot is that YOU as the character ESCAPED said home-world and then have now been STRANDED and are forced to explore the planet your are now helplessly idling around. Not simply needing to kill time for the hyper-drive to charge. Yes it sucks, yes its an inconvenience, them's the break's space cowboy.

If people could actually spend a few hours on their starting planet instead of going 'Whee I gots a universe to conquest!' Then they would find all the materials and advance a lot farther then they conceive. Point in example I had already cleared the Robot boss tier before leaving my first planet.

The main concept; explore what you get, and you can surprisingly do more.

 

The main point of this thread is not that jumping cannot be done, but is inconvenient. I don't want to clear every tree off a planet, I do not want to stop exploring the world every time I see a vein of coal. I could, and fuel would never be an issue. I'm just saying that as far as enjoyment or immersion is concerned, I'm painfully aware the only reason I am doing this is so I can jump to a different world and refuel there. It would be very easy to stockpile on one world and never worry about it again, but it would be very dull. To many players the fuel gives players a sense of immersion, for others it feels like an empty waste of time. What the devs could do is give players a renewable way of powering the ship, so they get to build a fuel farm, or domesticate creatures and have them generate power on a treadmill (a bit more ridiculous than shoveling coal into an ftl drive, but not by much), or allow you to place solar panels that passively charge your ftl. If you look for a few minutes in the forum, there are alternative suggestions to fueling the ship that sound fun and make it so it is not a grind from sector one. Any feature in a game like this that does not enrich the experience, does not need to be there.

 

Like I said, an energy battery of some kind. Like another fuel bar, except it slowly regenerates on its own. It could be dropped by the penguin boss as an upgrade for your ship, since you're supposed to be stranded at the start. Thus, if you're really off to a bad start, kill the boss fast and you got your ticket off the planet. For free. Well, just needs a little time.

 

I think that bosses will eventually get random secondary objects they drop to make it enticing to fight them multiple times.

I've said in other posts photovoltaic cells would be a nifty way of passively charging our ftl drives (AND IT'S GREEEEEN). Sustainable design is OP and needs more love in this game.

 

Maybe the penguin boss could have a 50% chance to drop a solar panel. Each solar panel you add to your ship gives, say, 1 fuel per 2 minutes? Really slow, but that's only a single solar panel. 10 solar panels give you 10 fuel every 2 minutes, meaning 50 fuel in a mere 10 minutes.

Of course, there would be a maximum of, in this case, 10. To make sure that making the effort to gather fuel would still be faster.

 

Having gotten from the Alpha to the Gamma sector in under 24 hours, I can say the following:

Coal is easy to come across, much like mining in Minecraft, it all boils down to your technique.
However, in the early stages of the Game, it would be best to try and scout the surface of the planet to try and come across any surface Ores and mine those out, In the later stages of Starbound there are 3 extra Fuel Types which are added, Uranium, Plutonium and Solarium with the latter providing 8 Fuel per.

When you have a Platinum or Diamond Pick, you should do what I call "Surface Mining" is when you make a series of sporatic tunnels with no actual direction in mind and then mine out the back wall to light up the tunnel when required, this means you save on Torches, the next step is to keep mining until there are no dark spots in the area which you're mining in.

If anything I believe the ratio for smelting Ores should be overhauled since 2:1 for Gold, Silver, Platinum etc, means you end up with large quantities of Ingots when you start to stockpile ores, below is my characters inventory (Which I had legitimately gained without an un-modded game, except the Iron Ore since it stops spawning on High Threat Level planets.)

 

Ok Hoot - that is genuinly impressive, but maybe you just got lucky? I dunno

I'm having enough trouble as is getting enough coal for a third long distance jump after using almost all my coal getting to a weapons merchant so I take down the UFO boss.

And trees simply respawning isn't an option. What you alter the terrain where the tree originally stood? Give us seeds that we can plant instead - so we can control where the darn things grow, and optimize land usage

 

Sadly many people get a lucky start and end up on a world that is very plentiful and they have no issues.

Then there are some who end up on a toxic world or a magma world where there are few trees to be had... or worse... a 'flower' planet, where the only trees are flowers, or mushrooms, and theres no dungeon that spawned that has any wood.. so yeah.. NO WOOD. I've had that as well. It makes for a very rocky start.

Some people also don't like 'starting over' just because they get a harsh world. That could very well be seen as cheating, just keep retsarting until you land on a perfect world! No thanks.

I'm all for there being harsher starting worlds, it makes for a challenge. But a harsh start should still give you the tools needed to further your progression instead of out right hinder it.

 

After I get enough fuel to get off world, I go to desert worlds to stock up on ores. Fine sand mining almost feels like cheating. The only reason I don't have ore stockpiles is because I tend to refine them pretty often.

 

I remember reading in a patch note that the further you go down into a Planet the more you'll be rewarded, so when I had my Aegisalt armour, I headed to a Threat Level 10 planet, doing my absolute best to avoid any mobs (This meant having to trap them with the dirt that I mined) and proceeding to mine any and all ores that I came across.

Sure I may have gotten lucky, but it was because I had originally gone to the center of planets with the intention of hunting down chests and looting them.

 

If tree planting is implemented the whole issue of people starting randomly on toxic or flower worlds can easily be fixed: Have people start with a few acorns or whatever tree seeds...