How to Make Planetary Exploration More Interesting/Rewarding

Note: If you're planning on responding with "it's a beta," don't. That's why I'm posting this - so that the developers can get an idea for what should be fixed moving forward.

Let's face it, planetary exploration right now isn't very interesting. Hell, it's downright boring. The only interesting thing I've found on any planet or moon are the "dungeons" and even they're not very spectacular. This is for three main reasons:

1. World Biomes Are Too Similar
Alpha Sector gives us a standard variety of planets with forest, arid, moon, snow, and desert worlds, and even then there's little significant difference. A moon world is just an arid world with moondust instead of dry sand and moonrock instead of dry dirt. Once you move forward into the advanced sectors the differences are even smaller. Beta Sector adds jungles, which are just forest worlds with mud and clay and more plant fiber to harvest. Gamma Sector adds grasslands, which are just forest worlds without trees.

Fix 1: Give Us More Interesting Worldwide Biomes
When your idea of making things more interesting is to give us grasslands, that's a problem. Where are the exciting and cool worlds we were promised, like lava worlds and tentacle worlds? Don't bury your weird stuff! Weird is what sci-fi is all about!

Fix 2: Make Smaller Differences Matter More
I hope this is already on the docket. Right now most blocks have no use except just to place them. Sure, you can make sandstone furniture and smelt sand into glass, but there's nothing you can do with mud or dry sand or moondust. I hope that this will change going into the future.

Fix 3: Give Different Worlds More Varied Terrain
So far every world has the same basic terrain: big hills, the occasional flatlands, small pools of water. If world biomes had more of an impact on terrain that would give the different biomes more variety. Forest worlds should have big lakes or even oceans, the frozen ocean should be a mini-biome for snow worlds, arid worlds would have more mountains while deserts would be more flat with the occasional rocky mountain or high sandy dune. Moons should have deep craters and could have oceans of fine dust that you can sink in like quicksand (hint: our moon has these).

2. Mini-Biomes Don't Feel Special
When I'm on a forest world and I head into an eyeball forest mini-biome, nothing much really changes except the trees and the oculemons on the ground. I don't get the feeling of "wow, this is a whole new region of this world!" I just feel like "huh, eyeballs, that's creepy."

Fix 1: Give Mini-Biomes Unique Backgrounds and Music
In Terraria you knew the Corruption was special because not only did the grass turn purple, but the sky went dark and the music changed. There's nothing like that for the mini-biomes on Starbound worlds.

Fix 2: Make Mini-Biomes Deeper
The other problem with mini-biomes, aside from the specifically underground ones, is they're only surface deep. Dig underneath a poison swamp and you find the same things you find under every forest planet: dirt, rocks, and gravel. Mini-biomes should go deeper, or perhaps have a higher chance to have certain mini-biomes under them. For example, a poison swamp mini-biome could be more likely to have a slime mini-biome under it.

3. Creatures Feel Too Generic
This is the problem with generating all of your creatures from the same pool of traits, and also is a major contributor to both of the first two problems. There's no significant difference in appearance or abilities between the creatures you might find on any particular planet biome or mini-biome and it makes all alien creatures feel too generic.

Fix: Creature Generation Should Be More Focused
Don't get me wrong, creatures on various planets should have the ability to spawn with any traits, but it should be more common on different planets. For example, there's no reason why a creature on a forest world shouldn't be able to breathe icy cold wind at enemies, but it should be much more common on a snow world. You could also do this for mini-biomes - creatures specific to toxic swamps would always have poison-based abilities and attacks; creatures spawning in eyeball forests could have eyeball-related appearance features, like heads that are single giant eyeballs or multiple eyes all over their bodies. This will help with the first two problems as well, by making biomes and mini-biomes more unique from each other.

 

I'm sure as time goes on and content gets added, all the biomes we see now could be its own single planet and we could still find a wholly unique set of biomes on another planet. I do hope that when they begin to add content they go really crazy. The eyeball trees only scratch the surface of what they could do.

I agree with you about the creatures. All of the animals ive seen so far feel like they couldve been on the same planet.

The space travel really just feels like a fast travel on one world so far. When they implement snow planets- it shouldnt JUST be snow blocks and white. There should be a whole new class of creatures, terrain generation style and challenges.

 

It's a beta!

No, but seriously, yes. YES to all of those things.
I'd assumed that they'd planned to expand on these things anyway, at a later date, since immersion issues are rather small compared to "Everything explodes when I try to do [x]!".

 

I know it will be implemented eventually but I do like the ideas of all of the things that will make the discovery more fun and interesting.

 

I know it probably wont be a popular idea, but i would like it if we were surprised sometimes at what resources a plant or object yields. Like what if there was a tree that gave wood AND vines, or maybe even wood and copper. I think each new planet should give us at least a few gameplay surprises and game changers. I know some people dont like surprises, but it would be cool if every now and then we had to "rediscover" what resource on a planet is best to make a copper equivalent axe with. Or what new thing on this planet has the exact same crafting properties of wood from another. It shouldnt ALWAYS have to come from the obvious tree, it could even drop from an animal! They could really go wild with the "whole new world" concept.

 

I was surprised to find that the planets themselves were the biomes. It seems as though it would make more sense to have each planet generated based on a climate.A Temperate planet for example might have forests, lakes, jungles, grassy planes. While an Arctic planet would have tundra, frozen lakes, alpines, mountains.

But yes, as it currently stands, besides trees and plants, every planet feels largely the same. I have whatever flavor of dirt is below me (strawberry being my favorite), whatever flavor of bedrock is below that, and whatever flavor of trees the game decided to give me (as a floran, eyeballs are delicious).

 

Well, some mini-biomes do things like this, like the giant mushrooms give you mushrooms when chopped down, and the giant flowers in the poison swamp give plant fiber.

Still might be nice, like... if you've ever landed on a planet that had those big metal trees (I've seen a few of these) they could give copper or iron when felled.

 

For me the exploration is boring because I could use some reasons to actually go there apart from scenery. Maybe different planet types should offer more of certain ores, or better gear, or unique NPCs with quests. As it stands you don't even have to leave the starting planet to finish the first tier and move on to Beta sector. I'd like to see that change.

 

Honestly, you don't have to leave your starting planet to get all the way to gamma sector. You can find plenty of iron and coal to make steel right there in alpha sector. You only have to leave at tier 3 because you can't find titanium in alpha sector.

 

I dont think we should NEED to hop planets to progress- but i do agree there should be great incentive to. Our starting planet should have end-game content if we looked for it.

 

I dunno...it seems kind of to defeat the main point of the game if you don't explore at least one planet.

There should maybe be a bit more story structure though, so that there IS an endgame to look forward to on your initial planet or sector, before you blast off to a new one. And definitely a bit more to do on each individual planet. Quests from NPCs would be very nice.

 

Well, they could balance it so that no, you could theoretically find everything you need on your planet (or at least the solar system you start in), but the incentive to leave is to find better gear, niceties that make it easier to progress to the end, or just plain old fashioned interesting crap to do.

 

This is what i think they should aim for. Traveling should be for variety. Travel to a forest biome for potential forest themed loot. Or Travel just to get a different roll on resources, but i dont think we should have to travel because we outleveled a planet.

We shouldnt be able to outlevel an entire planet unless that planets specific trait is that it weak and feeble. The problem is probably size and content though. Right now i'm not sure if they have enough content to make a planet transition until end-game. So they have to break it up into chunks.