With the release of 1.0, I have heard that the devs will now be able to stop working on the engine, and focus more on gameplay and scripting, that being the case, I have a suggestion to make on the topic of colonization. Currently, as most of you probably know, colonization consists of building (or reusing) structures, placing little computers on the wall and placing a door and a light source. That gets you a colonist, who, regardless of anything other than his little cell with a light, will give you a small amout of pixels or basic items every x amount of time. They also give you interesting little quests and become crew members. Personally, this seems like a bare-bones system. There is no incentive to re-visit your colonies for any longer than it takes you to claim your rent and leave like some kind of slum lord. And somehow, these tough little people manage to find food and water on the dead barren world I abandoned them on. I always build crop fields and wells and defensive walls in my colonies, but they are purely aesthetic. I could get the same result if I simply repurposed a cave system and packed them in the walls like ants. My suggestion is to add more scripts to the colony system. I think there should be an option (maybe an option in the menu, or when creating a new character) to have "realistic/hardcore colonies". For colonists to come to your empty structures, you should have to have x amount of crops and water. It should be calculated by how much tilled soil and crops there is in your colony, and for water there should be scripted and tiered well-pump-pump station objects that you place like you would a table. These objects should be craftable in the different tiers of workbench, and be purchaseable at the terramart at the usual extorsionate rates. If you loose crops/water, then colonists should slowly start dying/leaving, and there should be a long cooldown between you rebuilding the supply and them returning. There should also be a defense rating, based on the amount of guard colonists, turrets, land mines, etc... that you have in your colony. Based on this amount/the amount of colonists, there should be attacks on your colony. If your defense/population ratio is high, then possible invaders will be scared off by the defenses (not in-game), resulting in very few or no attacks. But if you have a heaving colony with a couple of guards and a bit of barbed wire, your colony will be besieged. A quest will either simply pop-up in your list, or it will be given by the AI, and the quest will require you to go to your colony and defend it (it shouldn't be an issue to get there, because everyone has either a flag or a teleporter in their colony). The colony should be attacked by a sizable group of the bandits that there are in the other random quests. If possible, their AI should focus on killing npcs more than the killing the player. Maybe on higher tier planets, or in the case of an absurd lack of defenses, the besiegers should be able to destroy blocks (I can imagine this not going down favourably with other players). In the case of that being to extreme, colonists getting killed should have a negative effect, namely that no new colonists should arrive for x amount of time (as no-one would want to re-populate a colony that just got massacred), perhaps it should be 48 hours real time before colonists start coming back. In the case that you don't come or don't arrive in time there should be a 50/50 chance of the colony winning the fight and only losing a few colonists or the colony losing and getting utterly wiped out. There should also be more of a reward, considering the work put into supplying and (perhaps) defending the colony. If you have high/surplus ratings, you should get more pixels/better loot from the "rent", demonstrating the wealth of the colony. If you place workbenches of different kinds, the colonists could drop related loot, like ore/bars/components if there are furnaces, guns/armour/melee weapons if there are workbenches...etc If necessary in the game engine, perhaps you would have to place boundary markers from east to west, so as the other friendly npcs/crops that may be on the planet don't count as part of your colony. If you build a colony on your ship it would be exempt of these rules. Maybe. I don't really know if it would work. From there I could go on and on about happines metres, revolutions in your colonies, in-fighting, assigning colonists to work, colonists breeding, colonists building their own structures..etc But you get the idea. I have no idea if any of this is possible anyway. Also yes, I play an awful lot of Fallout 4, but I have been thinking about this being added into starbound since long before Fallout 4 was released
I like everything but the combat aspect since that would just make colonies s chore,but I'm on board for the food and water,and breeding yes yes breeding
From your post, I rather expect you'd like Dwarf Fortress. The gameplay I mean, not the "graphics" if you want to call them that. Yeah I'd like the general idea you have. I also think the colony system should be more involved. More consideration, more work, more reward. Paired with a better reason to do so... necessity. No more random pixel drops. Get your pixels through selling found goods and rent... especially rent. I might as well copy/paste a previous post of mine. I also think the tenants should have a bit more room and furniture than the game encourages you to. I'm done some preliminary work on re-working the tenant system itself. But I don't yet have anything worth showing off because my attention has been elsewhere(well several directions) mostly. I'll probably start off with using beds(cloned from vanilla) in place of the colony deed. I hate the look of it, and who would actually have that thing in their room? Everyone would have a bed. I think I'll require more basic furniture too. And I agree with your direction here... more space. Or rather they're not gonna be happy otherwise. I'll also make it possible to have multiple tenants(families) on a single colony deed(maybe after a mini-quest per case), or optionally multiple deeds in a room... but they really won't like it! I'd make it a harder-to-please but higher reward thing. Also I want my tenants to demand food (but again for more reward)... But I would have them go periodically to a kitchen area(probably new objects). Not all races will want the same foods. Perhaps they'll even pay you for the food(again high reward) but they'll be mad if it isn't available. A cook might be a good tenant if they can take your raw food from the farmer, and make higher tiered foods from recipes you already know. I'd have some tenants(like guards) actually charge you for their services rather than provide you rent. I think the farmers etc you are adding should fall under that category. If you aren't keeping them happy(including food), they will demand more salary. Higher tiers will also cost more. I hate the current chasing after rent system. I'd probably have them place it in a rent box, or maybe have it as is but let you hire an rent-collector to go collect it for you and place it in that box. Guards etc would collect their salary from that box as well. This would serve as a useful pixel sink(something I think Starbound needs). Equipment chests and wardrobes. The equipment chests would be wired such that you can tell them to put on whatever equipment is inside(only looking for the first thing they find per equipment slot), and there must be room for their old equipment. Only guards would actually USE their weapons if you give them any, but anyone could walk around with one. The armor though would function and thus make survival easier. Wardrobes would hold a lot, and they will put on a new random outfit(appearance only) every day based off its contents, so you don't constantly see the same boring tenants. There is a mod that adds musical instruments as furniture. So if you had that mod (and instruments in your rooms) you would get musician tenants that will play music(if you can even make them do that), which would make other tenants happy and I think I'd like to hear random tunes played too. Multiple musicians would join together to play in the same way multiple guards will join in an attack. To play, they would also require instruments given to them via equipment chests(equipped as though weapons). Rather than having regular rooms, for merchants you would set up an actual shop(they'd live there), and occasionally sell other NPCs things (which may end up in their wardrobes). You also can buy from them. They can also sell your stuff for you, but they take a cut. Their rent would be based off of sales. You could place tourism teleporters(themed per race but probably just cloned vanilla varieties especially the new nightly ones) would allow tourism. Maybe also require a tour guide? The glitch teleporter brings(spawns) glitch tourists(who requires glitch approved food, will want lots of NPC "toys" to interact with, and will obviously spend money at merchants shops thus increasing income. They won't pay you anything if they aren't kept safe! You get paid upon them teleporting home(despawning). So all and all, it would encourage you to set up something that looks and works more like a village/city. That's the vision anyhow. I suppose a lazy person could just lay waste to an existing village, and then repopulate it with their own tenants. That would certainly be... efficient.
I think another way to improve colonies, building off of bk3k's suggestion, is to increase rent/decrease fees and increase work efficiency/guard level based on the price of the furniture and items placed in the colony, encouraging players to seek out the rarest of materials and furniture (most of which will be unscannable or obscenely expensive to print) in order to maximize their colonies' effectivenesses. Since guards are drawn to the [weapon] and [combat] tags, furniture with that tag, totalling up to a certain price would give the guards boosts in equipment. Farmers' equipments would allow them to farm faster and more effectively. Cooks would have more ingredients and foods available to sell. Blacksmiths could build higher tier equipment (which would subsequently make colonies/farming a totally viable option as opposed to mining, or (in another suggestion) arena/dungeon grinding), musicians could provide higher happiness, and tenants would pay more rent. What do you think?
