Problem: I recently realized the problem with procedurally generated content games is that anything that is procedurally generated can potentially be very awesome or very boring, but is almost never exactly what you want it to be. This leads to googling to find better seeds or inventory editors, both of which cheat the system to give someone what they really want. The problem is not that this content is procedural. The problem is that there is no good editor in game for any of these things. Examples: Borderlands 1-2: Procedural weapons and equipment. Minecraft: Procedural worlds. Terraria: Procedural worlds. Limit Theory: Procedural ships, planets, systems. Starbound: Procedural planets, weapons, dungeons, NPC's...I'm likely missing some things. Suggestion: Implement a weapon crafting/customization system. I have outlined a rudimentary weapon crafting idea here. xAusteax has outlined an better thought out alternative here. There are other weapon crafting threads in the suggestions. This is not something I've found a mod or cheat for, short of hard-coding in my own weapon mod. That needs to change. Fully craftable weapons need to be in the future of Starbound WITHOUT mods or cheating bridging the gap. Suggestion: Add the ability to customize the NPC spawners. When I drop down a Glitch "King of Town" NPC, I may want him to look and act a certain way. I may want to equip a guard with a spare set of armor I had lying around and change their weapon. I may want to have a specific shop keeper stay inside a secured area and never open doors. All these options and more should be configurable, either when making the spawner and after the NPC has spawned. Additionally, the items themselves should not go away after the NPC spawns. It should be able to spawn a new NPC with the same stored settings just by interacting with it and inputting more pixels. Additional: I want the ability to assign a spawned NPC on my ship or in my town that I control to a piece of equipment like a forge and have the NPC load everything I put in its inventory into that piece of equipment and remove the result. In that way, I could add crew to my ship that are more than just for looks. I want other AI behaviors available for my NPC's, too. Example: A farmer who I can assign to a specific set of connected farm blocks. The farmer will gather fully grown plants and replant a specific crop. The farmer will place produce into a container of some kind that I specify. A cook will take ingredients from its inventory and a container I specify and will create food items, placing those in a different container that I specify. Additional: I want the ability to make NPC's I control never ever open doors! I lost all my guards on a planet with fire-breathing monsters just because they wandered outside and got breathed on. Suggestion: Make fully-customizable player-ships the norm. This mod allows me to build whatever ship I want. A friend of mine built an NX class ship from Star Trek. I'm planning a Nova Class build for a more stable, future version of Starbound. I should not have to mod in order to do this. This should be the norm. Additionally, manning and equipping my ship would be cool, but with the space travel system that's in place, I can't think of too much functional stuff that I would add besides a crew. Suggestion: Add the ability to make a new planet/moon or terraform an existing one. What on Earth do you do with all that dirt and cobblestone you've been accumulating? Well, if you don't recycle it into pixels or throw it away, the answer is simple! Make a planet out of it! This is, by far, my favorite idea in this list. You may want a planet made of dire stone and purple dirt with plate metal trees and grape vines abundant across its surface. You may want a planet with bones as far as the eye can see, or maybe a planet covered with books or made out of high tech blocks. All these would be remarkably expensive, but in the full game, after you've completed sector-transitioning, built your giant fortress and completely decked out your custom super star destroyer, what's the next challenge? The biggest challenge I can think of for long games would be gathering the thousands or perhaps millions of custom materials to generate a new planet your way. You want a candy-cane planet, go for it. You want a planet made of mushroom blocks, go for it. Once you've built the planet, build a fortress on it. Once you've covered the surface with structures and populated it, build it its own moon. Combined with atmosphere and liquid generators, you could build whatever planet you want. You don't even have to put creatures on it. It's YOUR PLANET that is JUST FOR YOU! Additional: This is by no means a complete list, and I've made other posts of things I want to see happen more. This is simply something I've noticed about procedurally generated games and some suggestions on how to improve Starbound to break through those barriers and become a better game than it already is. Edit: Changed mod link to playstarbound.com one, rather than nexusmods.
I agree on everything but the custom building of the ship, we don't know how the future planed space combat would work but I can imagine that it would not work well with custom ships.
I disagree. Ship combat would work quite well with custom ships, leading to real damage you'd have to really repair. Those who pour more resources into their ships' hull and shields would do better than those who kept their starting ship as it was without modifying it.
Real ship damage would be very interesting but I mean there would more then likely be issues where players could exploit the flaws in the system. More so players would pick a particular shape or material for there ships because of combat advantages instead of what they want it to look like, the ship is not just a weapon to most starbound players it's a home and they want it to look good. With ship upgrades you are forced to have a certain shape and color but you don't have to worry about how the interior design affects the combat.
And that's your right as a player. However, form follows function, and function, in the case of PvP, is player-ship-killing. You want a pretty ship, go for it. You want a well-defended ship, go for it. I do believe players being able to design their ships for better PvP should be an option. Skill is as valuable to Starbound as asthetic, at least so far.
