DJ's list of concerns.

Have added some concerns about crops, guards, and music.

 

Gravity Slam doing no damage actually does seem to have a useful effect in certain situations on the part of the monster. Specifically, when they're mobbed together, they will kill you with contact damage after grabbing you with gravity. The other gravity related skills seem to be based around this. It certainly needs improvement though.

Village guard definitely need a boost, but in the meantime, huge walls of turrets should suffice in keeping your villagers safe-ish.

As for healing... There actually is. Its called the Nanowrap Bandage, and it is crafted after using the Pocket Pixel Printer to learn a ton of new recipes. In Impervium gear, it has about the same healing rate relative to my maximum health that Bandages did when I was in no gear at all. So, its quite quite quite perfect. And these require 50 pixels each, which is the sort of thing you are meant to be spending pixels on. Everything from the pocket pixel printer makes for a perfect pixel sink, especially the cheap lights that serve as torches and also work underwater.

 

Healing effects stack. You can eat a Health Regen 3 food and combine with a Nanotech Bandage. Doing so allowed me to "Swim" in the lava of a planet's core in the Delta sector (or whenever you unlock nanotech bandaids), since it STILL only inflicts the Burning debuff (3 damage per tick, ramps up to 12 damage per tick max), instead of the Melting debuff (100 damage per tick).

You can also eat a Health Regen food, and sleep in a bed, to combine the healing effects. Fastest healing ever, during planetary travel!

I'm not sure if more than 2 healing effects stack though, I haven't really felt a need for it except in combat, and I don't plan on sleeping in combat.

To the OP: They've verbally addressed the issue of Moons and Asteroid Fields, by saying that they plan to have that be a Sector 2 thing, where killing the first boss unlocks the ability to craft the Survival System, or something that allows you to go to those planets safely. Yes, that leaves open the possibility that players can trap themselves in Sector Alpha by going to a Moon planet with the absolute last of their fuel, but hopefully they can address that, too.

 

These are AWESOME pieces of information. Thanks!

 

Added some concerns and eliminated the one about healing. THANK YOU SOPHIA. The Portable Pixel Printer is now my best friend.

However, it has opened up a new concern for me.

I really freakin' love Light Metal tiles. But... 50 pixels PER TILE? I wouldn't mind 10 pixels per tile, or even 50 for a set of 4. But 50 pixels PER TILE?

I mean, don't get me wrong. It's not SUPER expensive, and it's not very hard to make money (what the f*** do I even need Diamonds for now? Right to the refinery with you!), but jeesh... I can't help feeling like that's one hell of a pixel sink just to buy enough tiles to make a kickin' pad. And this isn't even taking into account background walls!

 

50 pixels each is not much once you get a refinery and ore mine higher tier planets for a few hours near the core with soft blocks.

 

You are oh so very welcome! I was quite happy when I was shown the item existed too. And... how fortuitous for you I also have yet another solution for you! Discovering that I've sank maybe 100,000 pixels into my own structures, I figured that there... had to be a better way. Turns out, there is. For all advanced tiles, there are rather massive supples from which to mine. For light metal tiles, find an Apex research lab, an Apex tech maze or an Apex experimentation compound, and you'll find plenty. For smooth metals, find a USMC underground base and feel the love. After the peppering by plasma bolts and nightsticks and stuff. And then if you like ship parts, I suggest checking out advanced Avian pyramids. They're these really giant white pyramids with advanced tech and what seem to be Avians wearing glitch equipment guarding them (or just Kluex worshipping glitch?). You'll find ship doors, wall panels and tons of other modern materials therein. Naturally, mining these things can be a bit long and tedious, but a diamond drill definitely helps with that. And it can be much quicker than just mining out entire planets for their ore to convert to pixels. So, sometimes I mine these dungeons, other times I just pass them by, depending on mood. I think I extracted something like 4000 pressurised steel blocks from just one small section of an Avian Tech Pyramid...

 

There's more you've posted that I agree with, but I really wanted to back you up on the ones that really bug me.

The sector access being universe based is annoying. It's not the only thing that seems to be though. The codices seem to be as well. I don't know if either are known issues or anything. I've been assuming it's unintentional. They said that server owners will eventually be able to control whether new players have to make new characters, which would prevent anyone from abusing gaining access on one server and abusing it on another.

The NPC thing has been driving me nuts. I don't have any NPCs on my ship so I haven't had the same problem as you, but it's still frustrating. NPCs are extremely vulnerable, and die to the simplest things. Even in Tier 1 I almost killed our NPCs accidentally twice. I went to help a villager once, but when I swung my weapon to kill the enemy, the villager jumped into the arc and died. I believe that friendly NPCs should not be able to be damaged normally. It should have to be intentional, such as requiring you to hold shift+click with a weapon in order to damage them (just an example). Village Guards really do need to scale with the Threat Level as well. When I discovered my first Floran village, the place got massacred by some birds that could one-shot every guard while taking minimal damage in retaliation.

The status effects really do need to scale. I assume something like that is planned, because otherwise it's kinda silly. I don't know if percentage is quite the answer, because it could make those effects silly in the opposite direction. Maybe something more like, having extra effects on equipment having their own stats (and thus being calculated into the DPS, another issue at the moment).

Crop seeds have been driving me nuts. I haven't looked too much into it (I did a brief search and couldn't find much detail), but I've built a large and ever-expanding farm on the server that my friends and I play on, and I don't understand it half the time. It's taken forever to get where we are to begin with, thanks to what you said about sometimes just getting unlucky with generation. My other problem is how inconsistent crop (and tree) growing is. I initially assumed that each crop had its own preferred environments and such, but even if it's true, it still seems off. Half the plants in our farm never seem to grow, and some seem to be fully grown every time I check. Annoyingly, it also seems to be inverse to how easy it is to get their seeds. Wheat grows extremely fast and spits out seeds like water, whereas Neonmelon never seems to grow at all, and only drops one seed when it does. I haven't had it happen with crops yet, but I've had tree saplings mysteriously vanish on me multiple times. I initially thought that maybe growth wasn't guaranteed, or maybe it had to do with obstructions, but even if those are true, again, it seems to happen most with the things that I have less of (regardless of whether or not they're actually rare).

If you don't mind, I'll throw out a few things that have been concerning me. Who knows, maybe they've bugged you too, but you forgot to mention them or hadn't realized how much they bothered you.

Enemies... overall, I don't really mind the combat in this game or anything. I've gotten used to it and I'm pretty good at staying alive, even when in over my head. But something has me to the point where I've almost passed frustration and entered into a helpless amusement. What would that be? The hopping. The incessant hopping. Every enemy jumps like they have built in pogo sticks, not just the ones with Triple Hop as an attack. It was really annoying when starting out and relying on the bow, wasting chunks of energy because an enemy would hop just as the arrow was about to hit, but it hasn't gotten less annoying, even now that I have weapons they can't avoid that easily. Every aggressive enemy wants to fight you. Really fight you. They'll time their jumps perfectly to match you trying to pass over them. And they have ridiculous control over their jumps. I understand giving players control over their jumps, because it always feels weird in games where you don't have control (even if it's unrealistic), but the monsters are insanely good with their precision. It's nearly impossible to run out from under an enemy in the air without techs, because they love landing on you and can expertly follow you, no matter how much you're switching directions or fleeing.

Which leads me into a similar problem. I appreciate that collision isn't innately damaging in this game... but there are still two problems with that. 1) A lot of enemies love trying to stand in you anyway. While it may not be damaging, a lot of weapons, including bows, cannot hurt something unless it is a few feet in front of you. It doesn't really make sense that I can't stab a monster with a dagger because it's too close (realistically, longer reach weapons, and the bow of course, do have minimum range issues, but it feels really cheap in a game like this). Then, of course, there's the fact that there seems to be an inordinate amount of enemies whose attacks are essentially collision attacks anyway, they just aren't always on. But these kind of enemies just time their attacks with their homing superjumps anyway, so the result is the same a good deal of the time.

Crafting patterns are another thing that bother me at the moment. I understand, and am currently okay with at least the concept of the tier system. I also very much enjoy the sense of exploration. I'm cool with there being a lot of stuff you have to find to craft, especially the more exotic stuff. But I'm also bothered by the lack of information about crafting. This is one I want to particularly mention because I feel it's something that's not just an unimplemented thing, and could remain an issue come launch. When I first started, I was okay with having access to almost no crafting patterns. It made sense. Start small, and expand as you get used to the game and the universe. When I killed the first boss, I was like "Okay, so this is how I'll unlock more stuff to decorate my base with." Then, after the second boss, I was wondering where any kind of basic decoration was still. Eventually, I realized (unless I'm still mistaken) that most of the miscellaneous stuff in this game is not made, but found. In general, I'm okay with this. I have two caveats to that though. 1) It needs to be more obvious. A lot of people are going to go into this game from other sandbox games. Not just Terraria or Minecraft either. Most sandbox games I've played are about you making stuff to make the world interesting. Not taking stuff from an interesting world and making it yours. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be pointed out early on, if it's going to remain true. 2) I still think there should be some limited exceptions. For instance, you could at least start with (or unlock early on), the ability to craft basic housing features from your race.

Speaking of the fruits of exploration, that's another concern I have. I've already read some stuff about buffing the weapons found in chests, but since you mentioned a couple of other things that are likely to be beta issues, I feel the need to briefly mention this. Exploration can be really neat in this game, from the perspective of finding a huge variety of detailed stuff. I was not expecting to find brain trees, or a rusty penal colony, when I started this game. However, it quickly becomes only an aesthetic reward. I've only found a good weapon or unique gear in these places, like, three or four times (maybe less), in all my hours of playing so far. I love my aesthetics, but it really has started to make the game feel same-y, which is a huge shame. Once I've torn apart the dungeon that has the look I want for my ship/base, it's not really that exciting to find anything new.

Fuel costs seem annoying right now. It feels too static, and the fuel sources are too grindy. It's easy to make a tree "farm" for as much coal as you could ever need, but it's time-consuming and not very fun. I generally dread exploring with my spaceship, because of the time I know it will take me to make the fuel I just spent back up. Part of this feels like a beta issue to me, but I'm not sure and I want to point it out anyway.

My biggest concern. Out of everything. Storage. Storage was a huge problem in Terraria too (which I mention because it's due to a very similar item proliferation). At first, storage actually didn't seem so bad in this game. And then I started really exploring, and it became a nightmare. I eventually threw up my hands and copied our Terraria solution, which was to hollow out a massive basement packed from wall to wall with chests, but it's still a very awkward solution, especially without at least some way to label the chests. I love how many items are in this game. I love how even the trees can come in near limitless combinations, all with their own saplings. I love how there are so many different colors of dirt and stone and sand, and it makes the planets infinitely unique in a way they couldn't have been if someone had to come up with entirely unique uses for each planet's resources. It makes gathering a lot of this stuff a nightmare, however. And I'm not talking about collecting every little new thing I find (although I'm sure there are people who do that, and I feel sorry for them). Just cutting down trees and mining and taking apart a couple of neat dungeons fills a house full of chests. It's really annoying when you have, for instance, two piles of blue dirt, and they don't stack. With shades that close, you don't really need both, but if both happen to be on planets that you're going to be picking up a lot of it, it gets annoying to manage it. It's insane. Inventory management is something I very much do not enjoy, and it's something that has killed many MMOs for me.

I think inventory management should get a dedicated pass. No one should dread exploring because they don't want to have to organize their spoils when they get back. No one should be searching through chests when they want to build. No one should have to build a fortress of chests just to keep their inventory clear (even if, realistically, you'd need more than a tiny chest to hold the soil that once made up a mountain ;P ).

Some solutions I propose:

• Introduce a system similar to what Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 use for crafting materials. A special storage that has unique slots for every item that can go into it. For instance, a "seed pouch" tab to your inventory that holds every seed (it could hide the slots for seeds you haven't found yet, to keep the surprise and sense of exploration). It could still be limited, but the limit should be high enough that you won't still want secondary storage for those items on a regular basis.
• Something similar could be added for basic materials like dirt and stone. Maybe your ship could have a special hold just for all the basic materials like that (since a ship's hold would be much more likely to handle mountains of dirt than a couple of chests or a backpack), and, like the seed pouch idea, could easily show you the materials divided by type and color.

Now, both of those solutions are more personal, and some might fear them ruining interaction between players, but I think most people who were willing to give up spare seeds or materials, could still be asked to part with some if they had any. It's not going to be that much different from those spares being perfectly public, but buried in such a huge wall of storage that no one can be sure what they do and don't have.

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Since this is my first post, I feel like I have to throw in a little disclaimer here. Despite the length of my post, I'm not trying to hate on it or anything. In the end, that's really what a beta is for, though. Our "job" is to make sure the game is ready for launch, and that's going to require pointing out the things that aren't up to snuff. If anyone thinks I just spent my first post complaining, it's only because I like the game.

 

Once you get into the last sector, it's nothing. Just get a refinery. I have hundreds of bars for most metals. Also, if you don't want to do that, just destroy every building you see that has them. That's how I got a lot of Titanium Panels.

 

I know full well about the apex labs. My issue with those is that mining the tiles is kind-of a chore. I know it's always a good idea to choose the lesser of 2 evils (depending on which is less in your case), but wouldn't it be nicer to not have two different evils to choose from in the first place?

In the meantime, I don't really NEED Light Metal tiles that badly. Titanium Tile are almost as nice and much cheaper and easier to produce. I have over 1,500 tiles at the moment.

As for you, Jokubas, I like a lot of what you said. I'll need a separate post to organize my thoughts on it, though, so gimme a sec!

 

I've cropped most of this just to prevent my own post becoming insanely huge.

Anyway, something I want to say about this, is that there seems to be an ongoing issue that several people are reporting where specific crops do not seem to grow. Toxic Tops come to mind, right off the top of my head.

So, I imagine that the plants that aren't growing are refusing to do so because of some bug, and I'm hoping that gets fixed later. I should probably add a mention of that in my concerns.

Hey, no problem! I continually edit my list because I know there are other concerns I have that I just can't recall off the top of my head at the time, and I do get to them eventually. Let's see what you got!

Kinda snipped the whole thing because I don't want my own post to get exceptionally huge, but I agree. At the same time, though, I don't find this annoying so much as BORING.

Combat in this game is really... cut and dry. It doesn't feel like it requires any skill to beat anything. It all comes down to whether you have the appropriate gear or not, and then just trading blows until one of you dies.

The only real semblance of skill involves timing swings on slower weapons like Hammers so that you don't miss and have an enemy come charging at you while you recover. Even shields, as awesome as they sounded at first, manage to be kind of boring because they're forced to be paired with kind of boring weapons.

My main issue with the combat is that all the melee weapons are essentially the same damn thing with only slight variances on motion, speed and power. If you ask me, Terraria did it right. They didn't doll up their weapons and feign variety. You had broadswords, shortswords, and spears, and they all acted radically different.

StarBound has ShortSwords and Broadswords (by Terrarian terms), listed under a variety of different "type" names to produce false variety. It's kind-of sad, in my opinion. For this reason, I pretty much just stick with Hammers. Highest Damage-Per-Hit and it doesn't take a genius to just time them properly to make those hits.
And having enemies that tend to rely entirely on contact damage anyway also adds to the boredom. Again, it removes skill by giving you very simple rules to follow. Fighting any enemy in this game results in a simple game of keep-away. Enemy too close? Swat them. Back away. Repeat.

At least games like MegaMan Zero/ZX made it interesting by adding flinching and combination attacks.

Snipped for the same reasons.

I agree. It bothers me that you can't make platforms that match the steel or titanium panels you can later make for housing purposes. You can sort-of make decoration in the form of Beds, lamps and chairs (but, as I mentioned before, they removed consoles for some mysterious reason I am not entirely happy with).

Yeah. And in fact, this brings up another issue.

Why are there 3 different kinds of snow? The colors are just barely noticable on a microscopic level. Did they really need to be that differently tinted? I complain about this because I'm the type of player that doesn't like to leave big annoying holes in a planet from digging, so after I'm done plucking out some ore I like to cover it back up with whatever ground-block fits there.

The difference between one color of snow and another is so phenomenally small that there's really no reason for them to be different at all. This bugs me because it means I now have two stacks of snow where there really should only be one.

On top of this, I UNDERSTAND all the different types of Cobblestone, but it seems that even if you have two separate stacks, you put them down on the ground somewhere and you always place the exact same kind of cobblestone. It doesn't matter how many different varieties you collect, you'll always place down the basic kind. I imagine this is a known issue, though, and will be fixed later, so I'll cross my fingers and wait.

... but yeah. Really? Miniscule-ly different shades of snow? C'mon... Don't...

Oh god yes, this was my primary issue with Beta. The fact that all that steel requires coal, which is required for space-travel, which I really love to do. I don't want to be stuck on one planet forever grinding up coal just to get out. I want to be able to explore WHILE I advance. There should NEVER be a point in the game where I have to sacrifice exploration for advancement. But, unfortunately, Beta Sector does exactly that.

I love how this one brings me right back to my snow point.

Honestly, I never experienced that problem with Dirt because usually the shades are just different enough to justify them. But then some things like MagmaRock and Snow (again) just get ridiculous. It gets to a point where it's annoying, rather than interesting.

... I mean, the difference between that white snow and that blue snow was practically infinitesimal. That's not interesting, that's just cruel.

StarBound DOES sort-of have something like that. Most of the "dirt" and other "ground type" materials end up in the second tab of your inventory. If you look at the inventory storage icons, that second tab's icon is a dirt symbol, which is pretty neat in my opinion.

Anyway, I can't say I agree too much with this part because I take great pride in manually arranging my inventory. I'm organized by nature so it doesn't seem odd or annoying to me to spend a few (or even SEVERAL) minutes arranging my vast collection of things into neat little piles. It's almost a minigame for me. But if chucklefish wants to go ahead and make it easier anyway, more power to them.

No worries. I actually read. Bl

 

Plants have different growth rates, toxic happens to have one of the longest. Awesomango is pretty long too, so is currentcarrot or whatever you call it.

Coal is easy to get, I spam torches everywhere underground and I still nearly never have to grind it. My last game I was carrying 300 at one point. You have an entire tier between each tier where you need coal to save up. If all else fails trees and later in the game there are other fuel sources. If you play smart and pick each planet to visit where it has 2+ planets around it you can go to those for 1 single fuel. You should NOT be paying 200 fuel if you aren't going to a different sector, until sector X where you find other items to take coals place.

 

I'd like to re-open this thread with a whole new list of concerns (aka, my feedback) regarding the new stable update.

At the moment, my biggest concern is this:

 

There's a larger variety of hammers than you let on. They're no longer just a melee weapon; some have missile effects, others do "creeping" damage, and some can damage blocks. Look around, you may be surprised.

 

I feel as if the new blocking mechanics make everything else underpowered in comparison. Seriously, axes are pretty much the worst weapon now... they have short range and can't block.

 

I know about those. I'm talking strictly base hammer mechanics. When it comes to craftable stuff.