So I haven't had the time to search through every bit of Starbound information, so this may be in the game already and I just haven't heard about it; if this is the case, I apologize in advance. What I've noticed about the few videos I've seen is that the creatures you encounter do not have names attached to their health bars. Maybe more formal NPCs such as guards or shopkeepers are planned to have names (again, I don't know). My idea here is that it would be kind of cool to be able to, after seeing a creature for the first time, go into your data log (or whatever it's called) and name that creature yourself. If you think about it, that would make sense, considering you're taking on the role of an explorer. Again, I'm not sure if this is in the game, but if not then it's something I would like to see. Anyone agree?
Yes. I'd like to see some kind of system where you can check the journal log for a certain planet, and it'll have encountered species. From there, you could name them or something. However, I'm curious what conflicts this would cause in a multiplayer game. Perhaps each player sees creatures by the name they gave the species? I wouldn't mind that. It would give space for players to collaborate on some kind of index.
...and this index could use alien 'Nomencreature!' Get it? Nomenclature --> Nomencreature... xD ...or it could be a horrible Team America mispronunciation - you choose : p But really, on a more serious note, the developers mentioned such a journal for plants & animals back when they were posting pics of their monster-mashes & octopus-tentacled planet. ...I couldn't find the exact post, but here's something similar where they mention bookmarks and renaming planets. And here's a quote from Skarn:
I kind of support having a database, where you name a creature you run into - or you can see who originally found and named it. Then people online could compete to be famous explorers discovering wildlife.
Haha, yeah I thought of that as well, at least the part of the conflict it would bring on a multiplayer server. Again, I feel like that'd give it more of a feeling of "I'm an explorer, and I'm naming this thing whatever I want, not what someone else says." I like your idea of the index as well. Maybe there could be guild or clan indexes (if that thing exists) that you could just "download" into your own journal?
This couldn't happen, since each creature is Procedurally Generated when loading onto a planet. From what I have seen on streams, it also seems that they Procedurally Generate when you beam up to your ship and back down to the planet again, or when you die. No two creatures being the same. Also, I believe the devs' plan for all the names of monsters, NPCs and such are going to be Procedurally Generated as well, each and every time. The devs' plans for procedurally naming Mobs and NPCs (outside of things like the Po, with names given already, and probably bosses) is much better. Not to be a downer, but you can always just give them funny names in your head. The devs' existing plans for Procedurally naming them is going to be for the best. (That, and no one wants to enter some younger player's universe to find "inappropriate and immature names" everywhere.)
Ahhh...ok haha. I did not notice that they were procedurally generated every time you left the planet And as for the "inappropriate and immature names", I was thinking more along the lines of only you see the name of the creature as you've named it, not what someone else has named it. Either way, thank you for pointing all that out to me. Definitely cleared some stuff up for me
One possiblity is that they simply haven't got to a procedural engine for names. We know that Sentient NPCs will have names, as it was part of the preorder package. So if they simply haven't gotten around to that (and honestly, it's not all that critical of a feature at the moment) then that's alright too. But for some of the wacky things that come out of randomized creatures, I can only imagine the names we'd run into.
I agree so much I travelled back in time: http://community.playstarbound.com/...durally-generated-plants-creatures-etc.27845/
