My character feels insignificant. Does anybody else feel the same?

I land on a planet, kill the dungeon, explore the town, maybe kill the town, mine some ore, and move to the next planet.

I feel like nothing I do has a lasting impact on anything. I don't feel like I've "beaten" a planet when I leave it. (It's the same feeling I get when I go to work and post on the Starbound forums instead of working.) I've showed up, done some stuff, and left unfulfilled.

I think it would help if there were ways to utilize planets on a higher level, something that would make me want to come back and be like "Yeah. That's because of me!"

• Ability to set up interstellar trading posts between planets in a solar system. Maybe they could earn me pixels. Maybe planets with trading posts (or travel networks, or something) slowly upgrade to higher tier planets over time. I could monitor this progress from a menu.
• Ability to dig down to the core and plant a doomsday device that destroys the planet. On the star menu I would see a debris field. I'd certainly be done with the planet then. I could check an interface element that shows stats like "Planets destroyed" "Innocents killed in the devastation" or whatever.
• A way to set up automatic mining colonies. Let me place (enslave?) some NPCs who mine that visibly remove terrain. You can come back periodically and check on the progress and collect what they've uncovered. They could only return 1% or 5% of the materials removed to make it a slow process.

I dunno. Maybe these are dumb. I want to feel like I have some sort of lasting impact on what I'm doing in the universe and can't figure out a way to do that yet.

I'm still having a blast playing, but I feel like there is "something" missing.

 

Build these things yourself? Once you're finished exploring a planet "colonize" it for your respective race.

 

The game has a heavy exploration feel to it like the X series or The Elder Scrolls. I never got the feeling that a planet is supposed to get to a point where you "beat" it. Automatic mining colonies would be a cool idea though. Set one up and come back later to gather resources.

 

Yeah. "Beating it" was probably the wrong choice of words.. I want to utilize planets after I've explored them somehow. Or.. I dunno. I really can't place it. I just feel like I am currently wanting more. Character progression is awesome in this game, but I want to progress on a larger scale simultaneously?

 

Wait for it, there may be more content ahead.

Too early to tell. But they do want to enable you to terraform planets and do stuff on them.

AFAIK they also want to enable you to create cities with NPCs.

 

Maybe it's just me but I don't think the game is every supposed to be about the large-scale. You explore, you mine, you make, you build, and then you move on to another planet to do the same, it's all very.. active I suppose, it puts the responsibility on you, so if you want something you have to seek it out yourself.
It's not a game like Minecraft where it's a lot about the large-scale: automated farms, mob grinders, etc.
That's just what I think though.

Creating cities, eh. Well that would be a nice balance between lasting impact and personal gain. It would certainly change the planet, but you'd still be expected to buy things, which I think is fair.

To be honest I'm still uncertain about the scope of the base game, I kinda believe that the devs should just work on the base, the core, while modders add more awesome stuff like trade agreements and what-not.

 

Colonies that do different things would be awesome. The trick is figuring out what would be useful but wouldn't replace other aspects of the game.

I was thinking of planets that grow food for your other colonies and such, but those ideas lead to making this game more of a 4x game and not a sandbox adventure/platformer/RPG. But I do like the idea of utilizing planets for some purpose, especially if that purpose helps with the story of your race.

 

I'm liking this post very much! So many good ideas. Now if only they could implement them all now haha!

 

What I'd like to see is oil/lava extraction for fuel and electricity. Kind of like what you can do in Minecraft Tekkit.
Stretch long tubes into the earth, etc.

 

Wood = 1 Fuel
Coal = 2 Fuel
Lava/Oil = 5 Fuel

 

Working as expected... for now. So much of the planned content is not in the game yet, such that there is a limit to how much we can do with planets for the moment. This earliest 1st stage of Beta is not as feature rich as later ones will be; I am not sure tree regrowth is even implemented in this build.

 

I would argue that this is not necessarily by design, but by what the community has come to establish as "best practice" in a way.

 

Maybe basic extractors would be okay, so you can get a trickle of lava for fuel or whatever. But I've played too much Tekkit, and I'm rather sick of heavy industry in sandbox games.
I suppose it's an option in the end and I don't have to use the systems in place if I don't want to.

 

Very good topic.

I've been following a couple of streams and I share the somewhat hollow experience.

I'm sure there are many features to come.

I would love it if there would be thriving cities, economies and politics in the game. A lot can be player-driven of course, if we are given the tools.

 

I put it that way because I don't even like acknowledging vanilla Minecraft as Minecraft; mods are the way to play, big modpacks like Tekkit and Feed the Beast have completely absorbed the base game.
That being said I'm perhaps not the best to talk. I've played far too much Minecraft, and I've developed a rather hefty bias against it.

 

I like the ideas in this thread and am also feeling this to some degree
BUT its beta... i am reasonably confident that this will be something worked on at some point in the future.

Did anyone play Epic Inventor? This thread reminded me of its strange progression with automated wood/stone/ore farms.
for those who haven't played epic inventor, in short: you CAN build automated farms but they cost you a ton of resources, take up a lot of space and output very slowly.

 

I forget the name of the items, but there are ways to spawn different types of NPCs to hang around your base, and some can be put in your ship.
I'm hoping this is a glimpse of what is to come in terms of creating colonies.

 

I want to add that creating a colony on a planet currently takes a lot of pixels, but once you've emptied the planet..there really isn't a way to earn pixels other than farming respawns or converting ore via the refinery. Which is kinda why I wanted some sort of auto generation process.. so they could generate the resources themselves without you having to travel to a new planet and stripping it bare, in order to build up your old planet.

(Not that I have a problem with destroying something to build something else.. I'm just lazy)

 

I think you've got a great point. Leaving your mark on a planet would give exploration a little bit more meaning.
On the other hand, I haven't even finished a planet yet so I don't know whether I'll feel like I've left a mark on them when I'm done or not.
All I can say is that your ideas were all intriguing and they all seemed fun to me. :\

 

Don't forget that this is the first stage of beta! Once the stages get on there will be story and more stuff to do on planets!