Hang on let me explain. See I just made this post just a few minutes ago and was thinking over how one goes about fixing what I was whining about. Basically, I find that Starbound's gigantic open world is very empty (being an alpha and all), and the main reason for that is because the largely random generation is fairly consistent across different locations. That means everywhere in the game of the same Tier is the same in terms of gameplay, and there are no real unique items to obtain from any one kind of place in particular. The following points need to be addressed in order for flying around in Starbound to feel like a proper adventure: Civilized & Savage Planets Each of the vanilla races should have a plot of the star system reserved for themselves (except perhaps humans if we're going with the space hobo thing.) This is just an area of space that has a large number of civilized planets featuring that race, and is probably marked with a different background color on the ship navigation. Having these 'empires' of sorts serves to give each race a tangible place in Starbound's universe and thus they become more meaningful than just a name - they are now a unified culture. This will also add room later for doing faction quests, random quests from civilians, or faction wars when racial NPC's attack each others' planets. The player's ship should start with data for some of these planets. For instance, the Hylotl will know of their own star system, and will also be keeping tabs on their mortal enemies, the Florans. Thus, the Hylotl ship you have at the start of the game has information on the Hylotl and Floran star sectors (i.e. their locations), giving the player a basic understanding of where everyone is in the world and giving you an immediate place to return to when you want civilization. These civilized sectors are your Tier 0. The immediate area around them is Tier 1. In general the further you go from civilization, the more dangerous planets get, with some oddball exceptions here and there. Every Planet Is Worthwhile As it stands, planets vary greatly in their usefulness. Some planets have absolutely nothing worthwhile. The game completely randomly decides whether a planet has a village or not, if it has two dungeons or zero, etc. etc., and some planets get little or nothing. Just an empty desert full of evil squirrel Togepis. This unreliability of being interesting greatly discourages me from going to other planets, because I'm not at all faithful there will be anything there worth the walk. For those of you famiiar with Minecraft and/or Terraria, you may know that both of those games feature somewhat interesting structures in completely random places spaced few and far between. Even with a huge slew of mods, Minecraft's world still feels very empty until you catch a lucky break. Terraria is helped because it is designed under the assumption you will only play one map which is limited in size -that map is guaranteed to have the great majority of game content in it somewhere. Starbound has a bajillion planets. That means none of them are guaranteed to get a share of that content. To fix this, every planet should be generated under the presumption that the player is stranded on this planet with nowhere else to go. Every single last planet should be guaranteed to have "a major dungeon". That is not necessarily a civilized place. It can be a long-abandoned pyramid or tomb, it can be a spider cave, it can be a Terraria-style jungle with Whispy Woods as its boss, whatever - every planet needs to have a potential reason for someone to explicitly want to go there. And the key point of every dungeon? It has a boss. Not a critical boss like the existing Tier bosses, but a major one that has boss music nonetheless. You summon the boss by doing specific things in their dungeon, and are free to leave without fighting them if you like - but that boss might drop something unique and really good. Most Planets Are Colorful There is a good reason to have single-biome planets such as Desert planets - hell it was good enough for Star Wars - but I find that an awful lot of planets maintain just a single biome. That is incredibly bland and unconvincing. A majority of planets, even if that is only 60%, should maintain multiple biomes, especially if they are very large planets. If they sustain life there's got to be some kind of liquid somewhere, most likely water; where are the watery biomes? Having multiple biomes also improves the chance that the player's starter planet will be hospitable. You Need To Explore To Progress (Maybe) Later on Starbound will contain alternate 'jobs' like farming and real estate, which don't lend themselves well to a migratory lifestyle. This section deals primarily with the existing 'get better at killing everybody' style of gameplay. You can currently 'beat' Starbound by using one or two planets per Tier, especially for the higher Tiers when rarer metals move up closer to the surface. This is because any given planet is just as good as any other for the ores et al you need to build things. The way to fix this while also encouraging players to actually play is to adjust the crafting recipes for each Tier to include hunting materials. Those hunting materials are found only in specific biomes. EXAMPLE: The Floran Tier 2 weapon might be made from Steel, Snapdragon Leaves, and Rocksnake Teeth. Snapdragons and Rocksnakes only spawn in Forest biomes. Each race is specially designed to have a 'main' dungeon theme for their creations - Florans for instance use a lot of forest dungeon material for their stuff - but intentionally add ingredients from mismatching dungeons later on to give the player more variation and force them to mix up their tactics since they now have to fight something new. And of course, if you're building another race's armor, you'll be going to that race's dungeons instead. The Right Kind of Random Starbound has an excellent idea with the psuedo-randomly generated enemies, but the system is currently being heavily misused. It should be used to add flavor to predetermined designs, not to make every single bit of wildlife a randomized mess. That is, you should design a specific enemy with a specific appearance and attack pattern, make that enemy spawn in a specific biome where it fits, and then use your pseudo-random system to add a few more heads and leg styles to it so that each one that appears looks different. EXAMPLE: A chameleon that, like a certain robotic chameleon from the SNES era, turns invisible, climbs around on the background walls (or trees), and hits you with its tongue. When visible, its color changes to indicate its intention (attacking is red / fleeing is blue / etc.) Each gender has three different possible crest shapes for their heads and the females have cute lashes. Males have bulbous round tongue-tips while females have heart-shaped tongue-tips. They only spawn in the Jungle. These new biome-specific enemies drop materials used to craft things (see You Need To Explore... above.) Skinning Corpses When you kill wildlife you should be able to skin the corpse by attacking it again with the Hunting Knife. This is because the Hunting Knife is the only reliable way to get hunt drops (Meat / Leather), and it is a horrible weapon as soon as you leave Tier 1. As said above, enemies drop body part items you need to craft stuff. They drop that as soon as they die, but you get another chance to obtain them if you skin the corpse after the fight. You no longer need to use a Hunting weapon for the kill in order to get said drops; you just need to use a Hunting Knife on the corpse. Broken Equipment & Upgrades Don't worry, not your broken equipment, someone else's. You can find broken / unusable versions of weaponry sometimes when looting sapient dwellings or fighting barbarians / raiders. You can disassemble or melt down this weaponry to get spare parts or other materials to craft or upgrade your own gear. For instance, the "Broken ___ Sword" you get at the start of the game is just begging to be upgraded (possibly multiple times) into a much better weapon ala Master Sword. You should also be able to get other races' broken swords by fighting barbarians of that race. If Starbound chooses to add weapon durability and repair, then this system will also give players reasonably ample resources (defeated opponents' weapons) to repair their stuff, making a potentially aggravating game aspect much friendlier. Better Travel See this topic. In Short The playable races need to have a solid presence in the universe Every planet should have a guaranteed 'major feature' so there's purpose to being on it Most (but not all) planets (not moons) should have multiple biomes so they are not completely barren and monochromatic Players need to explore to acquire materials to craft their gear and progress (but DO NOT need to rely on rare direct drops of equipment!) Enemies are largely 'predetermined' in design, tailored to where they spawn (e.g. chameleons in jungle / snakes in forest), but their appearances are slightly randomized from a set of parts Hunting is now done by skinning corpses and not by fighting with crappy weapons You can find broken or damaged weapons etc. and disassemble or melt them down to get metals and other materials You now Bookmark planets you like, no more Set Home or Warp Home, long-distance FTL is 100 fuel instead of 200
Aaand decrease linearity. I agree with ALMOST everything, except the "You need to explore to advance" part.
Considering the theme of Starbound, not having to explore to advance would undermine the entire purpose of the game. Now I can understand if when they add "alternate jobs" like farming et al you don't really HAVE to explore to get new crops / livestock / w/e - not in a combat sense at least - but for the existing "fight everything until you're strong"? You should "have to explore" just like you do in any other combat-orientated game that has places to go in it. I can't see why you wouldn't agree with "The player has to play the game to play the game". If you don't like being forced to explore, why are you playing an adventure game?
I do like exploring. What I am worried about is... Let's give an example. Garrosh Hellscream decides to play Starbound. Garrosh sees that he needs to find a specific set piece in order to explore. RNG decides to screw him over, so he cannot. Garrosh Hellscream inserts an axe on his computer. That's what I am worried about.
I should probably be more clear in the opening post. You don't get (vital) equipment drops directly from dungeons. You can get equipment drops, but they are not absolutely necessary to progress through the game, and such equipment most likely only drops from the boss. What you get from the normal enemies are a high rate of material drops which are used to craft your vital gear. The example I gave was a Floran Tier 2 weapon made from Steel, Snapdragon Leaf, and Rock Snake Tooth or something like that. Steel can be found most anywhere, while the other two are dropped by common enemies found in a Forest. They drop at a fairly high rate and possibly more than one at a time, so players aren't forced to spend weeks just to get one armor piece. The idea is that your character makes more than just your crafting table from the environment, especially at lower tiers when you're still working with stone and iron.
Of course, when Starbound adds other 'job' paths, how much those incorporate exploration will vary. I doubt that a farmer will get much use out of exploring, since they will need to stick to the same one or two planets to actually grow anything. Possibly those job paths will allow players to themselves become useful destinations for the adventurer characters?
