Exposed Electrical Wires

This object can be placed just like spikes, damaging anything that touches them. However, they are not the same as the electrical spikes that have been seen in videos and images posted by the developers. No, these ones are special.

First of all, exposed wires can create sparks that fall to the ground, causing damage to anything that passes underneath without being careful. You could place these along the ceiling just to drop random sparks all over the room. They can also be turned on/off using the wiring system, just like any other device.

Obviously you would take damage from touching the active wires, but if they are submerged in water it adds a damaging area of effect around them. This causes continuous damage to a larger area instead of simply damaging once on contact. The area would probably be 2-3 blocks of radius or so, and deals electrical damage as long as you are in the area. The exposed wires no longer create sparks while underwater.

You could make an elevator that has exposed wires on both sides, which pass by without any harm normally. However, you could flood the elevator with water if there are intruders to prevent them from easily following you.

The best part is that they could be used for really interesting dungeon rooms. For example, there could be a room that has no regular lights inside. When you open the door, several exposed wires on the ceiling & floor activate so that they start dropping sparks all over, but the sparks also provide light inside the room. In the center of the room is a chest, but there are pressure plates all over the floor so that you can't easily reach the chest without activating them. If you step on the pressure plates, water gushes in from above the ceiling and contacts the wires, causing you to take damage from the area of effect. If you shut the door behind you, it turns off all of the wires so that you don't get zapped, but then it is harder to avoid the pressure plates and if the water gushes in then you can't escape and would drown unless you open the doors anyway.

This sort of puzzle room could be made more or less difficult depending on the design of the room.

 

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I like it. This would be an interesting little trap feature. If you places them on the ground, would they throw sparks in an arc around themselves? I'd like to place them on things like broken consoles, so when people tried to activate the console, they'd get a shock.

 

This sounds like it would be pretty cool to add into the game, It would make things interesting and the idea for the dungeon actually sounded like fun to me xD

 

Sounds like a pretty good idea.

I'm also thinking that you could put them under the floor or something to electrify the water if there is a puddle across the floor, but I'm not sure how I would do that. One of the biggest problems is that the exposed wires can't modify the state of the water itself, since the water flows all over the place and adding more complicated variables to that would probably cause tons of lag.

Maybe there could just be blocks that can be charged with electricity when they are on, but can be turned off.
Serves the same general purpose, I suppose. Any other ideas?

 

Great and original suggestion....annnnddd..... upvote

 

This could be pretty interesting if done right. Maybe allow for both FG and BG placing; FG being used as how you suggest it: BG being used to simply add pretty effects in the background of ruined areas / Electrifying water without taking up an FG block's space?
Also, how big would the maximum range of the shock be while in water?

 

I was thinking 4-6 blocks diameter. Instead of damaging you once with knockback, it would deal continuous tiny damage as long as you stayed in the area so that you can still pass though, but at a cost. Any armor that protects against electricity would probably nullify it.

I was considering the possibility of having them in the background, but I liked the idea of them casting sparks. I supposed they could still do that even in the background, though, now that I think about it. After all, torches can snap to the background and they drop little light particle effects.

 

Sounds fair. Maybe a cluster of them would collectively add to the distance? Say, a 3 x 3 chunk of them would zap maybe a 12 block range instead of 6? Something like that.

 

Why not just spread them out to cover a larger area?

 

Eh, I dunno. Aesthetic purposes? To make it look like a major damage had been done instead of many perfectly spaced smaller ones, I suppose.

EDIT: Mayhaps adjacent wires would connect to eachother similar to how Fences in Minecraft connect?

 

TBH, I care more about the mechanics. I like the idea of them snapping together for appearance, though.

Not sure about grouping them together to get a larger radius, though. What stops you from grouping 1'000 together to get a huge radius that fills an entire screen, to kill other players without them even knowing where the damage is coming from? Even if they can see that the water is electrified, they can't really do anything about it... I'm not sure if that is good or bad or what. I'd have to think about it more.

 

Hm. You have a point.
Hmm.
I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Maybe sacrificing power for range? Or the rate at which it zaps? Iunno.

 

You could make the radius increase for the group go up slower and slower the more wires you put on it, as though they were real wires affecting the volume of the sphere instead of the radius. Eventually, the wire that you're placing down would increase the cluster's radius more than that of the damage radius. At this point it'd be useless to place more wires to surprise someone. That radius could be fairly small, like 8-12 blocks.

 

Sounds like some work in terms of coding, but it's a great solution. Thanks!

 

If we have variable power (Power levels rather than a magical pressure plate that provides unlimited power (Terraria(Not Minecraft, Redstone is magical))) Maybe the wires would discharge the electricity at an extremely fast rate, meaning people should use them in moderation or if they are planning on sapping power from a dungeon, avoid activating them.

 

That would be a huge pain in the ass to deal with.

It would make an awesome mod, for sure, but I'd hate to have those limitations on building in the vanilla game.

 

Honestly, I don't think unlimited power would work with a game like Starbound. Many suggestions already make use of a variable or 'dynamic' power supply as opposed to a Minecraft/Terraria like power source. (Static)

 

Many suggestions will either not be in the game, or will be changed significantly beforehand.

Limited power resources would be annoying. It would give players the incentive to use natural light sources instead of using the myriad of creative items the developers designed as light sources. It would be like having torches that only burn for a certain amount of time. You'd have to spend more time recovering spent resources for energy than you would actually spend time progressing and getting better items, equipment, materials, etc...

Like I said, it would be a great mod, but I'm strongly against it. IF the developers implement a limited power supply system, THEN they can figure out how to modify my suggestion to fit. I'm not going to waste my time on it, though. I'm pretty much 99% sure that the Devs will leave such a thing to mods.

 

If you take 'Industrial Craft 2' as an example for variable energy - there are plenty of ways these light sources could still be used effectively. Eg. Solar panels, Wind turbines, and in later tiers energy systems such as: Nuclear Energy and Fusion.