New Patch: Fuel

As I said, a single tree, being on the forest biome for about 5 minute can net you more than enough for a two way trip.

 

I think fuel cost for jumping should be somewhat influenced by the distance of your destination, even if only a little. This will make it possible for starters to jump around neighboring planets a bit and explore even without digging for toooo much coal. When a 'fuel processor' is made later on with the required materials, it will help with the more distant planets and wood should be able to be converted to fuel but maybe at a lower ratio. e.g. coal to fuel is 1:2, wood to fuel might be 2:1.

 

Our space ships should run similarly to the Delorian from Back to the Future 2. No longer needing plutonium, you can now put ALL your trash items into the engine and it'll give it varying degrees of energy.

 

Also I would like a Delorian.


Maybe have pixels transfer to fuel at an absurd rate like 1000 to 1 since it's the only truly renewable resource at the moment. just something for emergency situations.

 

I think I have the only legitimate complaint regarding not being able to use wood as fuel:

I started a new character, and my starting world has literally no ore of any kind on it. I've searched the surface, I dug down quite a ways. No coal. No copper. No Iron. Nothing. It's therefore impossible for me to leave the planet in single-player mode.

Coordinates are x=-70804489 7=-85444339, "Alpha Geras 1113 I c" is the name if you folks want to see if you've got any there. Maybe it decided not to render properly for me? I'unno.

 

Wood is too plentiful to be an appropriate fuel source. The game goes out of its way to tell you that you're out of fuel and need to find more. If it takes me all of four seconds to beam down and cut down a tree, fuel is not a concern.

Wood was just handed to you on a silver platter and it's everywhere.

 

I think they need to make plutonium/uranium worth more but I personally agree with their decision to remove wood. it made all other fuels defunct because you can get so much of it so quickly.

 

How about a dirt to fuel ratio of 5:1? That is a great way to get around, eh?

 

Wasn't there art for that in one of the newsletters?

 

You are wrong. Finding fuel to explore discourages exploration... This is like saying gold would be great if it were everywhere. Copper is everywhere and copper sucks. Gold is great because it's not.

Limiting fuel is how they simulate, and apply a value to, distance. If you could get to every planet for free there's no sense of accomplishment, no sense of distance traveled. I have no doubt there will be a creative mode eventually for people like you, in which you have access to everything at no cost, so why try and bring these concepts over to the current mode?

If you want to argue that mining coal is boring, fine. Perhaps there could be some more interesting systems or relevant game-play for obtaining fuel. Why do you jump, instead, towards "make all the things fuel so I can pretend fuel isn't needed".

 

How about they just make it so that wood gives 1/4 fuel? That way it isn't OP.

 

Or just implement the ability to "burn" the wood into coal. I wouldn't say at a 4:1 ratio, but 10-20:1 seems more applicable.

 

I agree, coal is very uncommon so it makes it really boring and slow to mine the coal.

 

You are wrong. Period. A game about exploration where the lion's share of it is spent mining is not a game about exploration. It's a game about mining with exploration as a thing you may do. In the previous patch, I ran out of fuel quite a bit and had to run planet side - but it only took a little bit of time to get back on my way exploring stars.

Lastly - and this is a serious point - if we could refuel a space ship on most planets IRL, then NASA would have explored MUCH deeper into space by now... as it is, they have to get all the fuel they can carry from ONLY our planet and it is not as abundant as trees here. The end result is no manned mission beyond the moon.

You are provably wrong.

 

after the wipe, I landed on a planet that doesn't have that many trees, and decided it would be a good idea to use the wood that I had to make a jump to a more forested planet. nope.

Edit: I also believe that having to grind to get to use a MAJOR PART of a game is sort of a lack of thought as far as game design goes.

 

Coal is not that hard to find though, but you could still use my mod to burn it from wood to coal, and from coal turn it into Coal Space Fuel. More efficient, if nothing else.

 

lol. before the patch i didnt even knew that you could use wood. i always traveled trough coal and it was ok. i actually always felt like i whould have too much coal o_ô

 

That is my thinking, I honestly agree with your point on story, you should feel like you're stuck on a planet initially and have to work your way off, but my issue is, it constantly feels like you're puddle jumping from rock to rock, trying to scrape up enough fuel to reach the next without an easier system. Currently anyway.

Yeah, one of the other big issues I've found is that limiting it to coal early on adds a vicious circle, where in you require coal to travel, but you need coal for torches to find more coal.

Yeah I have no idea what that is about. Those things ALREADY work as fuel, but they're not until very late game. From my experience, this means anyone who wants to planet hop is encouraged to rush through the content to late game so they don't have to deal with being so limited by fuel.

Not entirely, it could be a mechanic built into the current fuel box thing, just that you have to repair it before zipping off into the stars. Problem solved.

I don't disagree on the balance, but coal is just as absurd as wood in terms of sci-finess. The simple solution is just making wood a lot less efficient, say requiring 5+ wood for 1 unit of fuel.

And players who like hard games need to also realise not everyone wants Darksouls + Terraria. This was not sold as a "hard" game, it was essentially sold as a space exploration and building sandbox game, in addition to that, challenge is subjective, not everyone finds grind challenging, just boring.

The only way to solve that issue is to add a hard core mode, else people are always going to be divded between the two camps of "too hard" and "too easy", which is an even bigger mess with the addition of RNG. As it stands, I don't find the current system challenging, I find it frustrating, so I rocket as fast as I can to end game (I hit x sector in a matter of hours) to avoid that frustration. That doesn't give me any sense of accomplishment, that makes me frustrated because I can't enjoy the early half of the game, and instead I'm liable to skip past it.

At least from my opinion, I don't have an issue with coal. I have an issue with being forced to do things I find highly tedius just to hit the exploration part (Mining for hours, is not my idea of exploration) It just so happens that the removal of wood severely impacted that exploration, and the only alternative early on is coal.

Also, the RNG plays a big part here. I started on a 3 planet system, 1 of which was snow so unexplorable, and both other planets had little to no coal obviously visible. Add to that mobs that could now 1 hit me on both planets (Lighting spewing monsters with stupid range, and flame spewing beasts that were stupidly fast) it made for a not so fun time.

 

I'd have to say I agree with most of your points. As I've said elsewhere on the forums: The patch changed it from an Exploration game with resource management aspects to a Resource Management game with Exploration aspects.

 

Maybe it's all on my end, but right now coal seems to have a lower rarity than gold. I'm finding gold at the surface on Alpha Sector worlds more than I'm finding underground coal.