Making a house in starbound is useless ?

You said there was no reason to build outside of your ship. I gave you several reasons. I thought you wanted reasons to build. If you don't want a reason to build, feel free to ignore my posts, because I'll probably mention more reasons to build as I remember them.

I've found building a house to be very useful, although I admit not everyone plays the game the same way I do.

 

The general consensus with building is there is no practicality behind it in terms of actual gameplay or drive to build, I was not commenting on aesthetic or storage across characters. I'm glad you like to farm and use structures to store items for characters now that they use the same universe saves, but when most people discuss building having no purpose, they mean that in terms of gameplay mechanics. It seems you're having trouble understanding my point.

Imagine if you could purchase or build an item that 'claimed' blocks outward so many meters. Then the territory would be protected from certain levels of harm or other players editing them and it costed upkeep to maintain it. You could setup rooms for NPCs to live there who served a purpose, like a medic. Try to imagine Towny from Minecraft as the only good example I can think of right now. Actually colonizing a world on the basis that you can claim land.

I was in no way trying to comment on farming or storing items. Nor was I trying to demean the notion of building for creative or aesthetic purposes.

 

I think storage and farming are very practical. Most players would also consider them to be gameplay mechanics.

 

The general consensus is if I say the general consensus with no evidence to my claim, my opinion becomes more valuable and becomes a scientific fact.

 

To build a house in starbound is to make a statement. To make a declaration toward the universe. To dig into the soil of a planet and turn it into something much greater. To move mountains and drain oceans. To struggle against nature and come out victorious. To see the world before you and claim it as your own. To observe the vastness of space, from the most hellish world drown in magma and flame to the most majestic realm filled with wondrous life form, and say "From today, I am your master."

Yes. Even if all you did was dig a hole in the dirt and sleep in the mud, then call it a house.


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Dramatic theatrics aside, I think the idea of the post was simply asking for more gameplay mechanic surrounding around building a home. Since we already have a mobile home being our ship, it doesn't give much reason to build a planetary base right now. Maybe when we get to set up colonies and stuff.

 

I have plantation on my ship and on many occasions I beamed planet side, did my stuff, beamed back, and everything was fully grown. So it's not a shipworld thing either.

 

I think it's nice that players find building useful for farming and storage. However, farming at the moment is pretty useless. You don't actually need any of the buffs food provides. I can play the game just fine without the slow healing of food. The extra speed and higher jumping buffs can be used by stims without the horrible "well fed" cool-down that takes too long. By the time I can eat again, I've forgotten about eating. Food ends up taking extra space, and becomes obsolete. I can explore just fine with bandages and medkits.

Storage is not necessarily a game mechanic. It's just bad inventory management. A lot of the things we tend to gather are basic tiles like cobblestone and dirt, and decorative objects we don't end up using. We also collect all these weapons that we don't use, since they probably aren't as good as the ones we use to fight. In the end, I just throw all that stuff away. Every character I start ends up accumulating all these items I never use. The only things that really become useful are bandages, ores and bars, best weapon/shield found or crafted, and the armor on your back (and back lantern).

Building right now is strictly a hobby and serves no true purpose because farming is not useful--storage is just a way of placing things we think we're going to use, but don't, somewhere that doesn't clog our inventory. There's nothing wrong with building being a hobby though. However, since Starbound is supposed to have sandbox qualities, building should be emphasized more. I think Chucklefish should create more opportunities for modders to expand on, and create interesting building mechanics. There are a few modders out there that have done interesting things, such as the colony mod, but we are for the most part, very limited since modding npcs and quests are very limited right now.

 

See, the thing is, the question was if building a planet-based home was "useful". "Useful" is entirely dependent on what tasks you're attempting to complete, your play style, etc. It's not a rigid metric based solely on some kind of numeric function. For many people, building a home is very useful.

Things can be useful without being tied to "progression", and things tied to progression can be not useful.

Example of the latter, since I'm sure there's some knickers all bunched up already...



These three tables are all directly tied to progression. Through them you can make equipment at a high enough tier to unlock an important mission. But you only NEED one of them. The left two are, to me, pretty useless, as my playstyle favors melee combat, thus really only the Violium table is useful to me, relegating the other two to furniture-making at best (and as a general rule I prefer the look of the Impervium furniture, also craftable from the Violium table, so well then).

Cosmetic purpose can be very useful too.



That's my old crafting good storage in the EK build. Every one of those chests has 16 storage slots. As far as simple function goes, I could use nothing but the default chest you find on any world, or (in that build) small storage lockers, and it'd be the same effect. But thanks to the fact that all the chests look different, I can tell at a mere glance what each chest contains. The bottom row is ores in progression, with more ornate/color-coded chests in concert, so if I need to store/withdraw Aegisalt, I don't have to tic off boxes, I know it's the green box towards the end. (Now that the upper ore tiering has been rekajiggered, this works even better). I know that the Flower chest contains the various plant matters and natural-growing stuff, the Bone Chest the Monster Scales, Cell Matter, Flesh Strands etc, the primitive chest has crafting woods, the two different-colored tech chests containing different technological items (left is components, right is boss/sector-tied stuff). Quick and easy.

I find certain farmed/cooked meals very useful, even with the existence of stims and bandages.... because they stack. When tackling a boss or a prolonged fight in a protected area, a big meal can give you a temporarily-higher max HP with a long Regen period, letting you heal light damage on the go between rest points, while you can use bandages and stims in combo to boost health in emergencies.

Again, "useful" is subjective.