New Patch: Fuel

For those interested, I just spent what little gold I had to make a gold pickaxe, and timed myself for 30 minutes, searching exclusively for coal. I found 221 pieces, not nearly 500. As someone who only likes to play for maybe an hour to 2 hours at a time, that's still a half hour of doing something I felt like I was forced to do. :/

I think that increasing the amount of fuel coal adds to your engine would make sense from a gameplay perspective, but again... it's freakin' coal. Doesn't make sense to begin with, especially if we can't use wood.

What might work is if they made the numbers bigger and had more of a Mr. Fusion type thing (from Back to the Future) going on where you can use almost anything as fuel, but certain things would only increase your fuel reserves by an extremely miniscule amount. At least that way would provide more interest to the whole concept so you're not grinding for one thing so much.

 

You either accept the mechanic and the way they've implemented it or you find an alternative.

With the patch notes they've made it abundantly clear what they want you to use for fuel. Now adapt.

 

I agree with jumping costing less fuel, but coal and wood as fuel just seems like kind of a dumb idea. What kind of advanced starship runs on firewood?
I think someone earlier had said something about crafting synthetic fuel out of other materials. Maybe this could be an option, and there could be different kinds of fuels you could make with increasingly rare but useful materials. For example, one might make a low-level "fuel cell" out of basic materials found around your teleport landing zone that fills maybe 5 units of fuel in the tank. Then as you explore more you can find materials that allow you to make a 10-unit fuel cell, and so on.
Just a thought.

 

This is a beta, dude. We're supposed to discuss and dispute this stuff.

Coal and wood should add extremely small amounts to the fuel, at least enough to get around your solar system, but they should both give you the SAME amount so we don't feel like we have to go digging for it if we don't want to.

Instead of relying on them, have something you can craft (in the very very EARLY game) that lets you synthesis better fuel that works way better than coal and wood did, but requiring more resources to create.

 

I would like to see an actually renewable fullsource, even if its not really efficient, I mean wood was kinda nice as fuel source but way too overpowered. Maybe every 4th chunk of wood adds 1 fuel or even every 6th? Maybe adding biofuel and later on different kinds of energy sources like fusion or even exotic ones like Anti Matter

 

By the looks of it people seem to think it's more of an early alpha and that they get to decide the basics.

 

Craftable still?

Makes rocket fuel and brain cell killer.

 

Heh, no, this is a change that was made in the most recent patch. This is stuff they can still change around, and have proven (yesterday even) that they can change it relatively quickly. What we use for fuel could be just about anything at this point. Heck, a first day modder could make it so dirt could be used as fuel, so what we're discussing wouldn't shake the foundation of the game at all.

Yeah, something like that.

 

if you're forced to use coal then atleast let us "smelt" wood in the furnace to create charcoal and use that

 

Fuel yields from wood were clearly too excessive but I imagine that i'll be on my planet for awhile with some bland furniture if i can only get off of it with coal and i had the misfortune of being spawned on a 1 planet solar system.

 

All the changes that have been made so far weren't a result of them trying to please a part of the community and suite the game better. It doesn't take a lot of IQ to figure out that a broken combat system has to be modified regardless of what the people think.

They have a plan, they know what they're putting in there as far as features go. So instead of arguing whether something should or shouldn't be there, people should be discussing if it actually works as intended.

 

wow. just if you want easy mode just dl some mods from starbound nexus, let the rest of us have a nice hard fun game.. the real problem is you can craft a weapon with iron bars and 1 shot all the bosses

Edit: also after playing for 2 hours i had left my planet/solar system 5 times, thats 5 jumps and i had used hundreds of torches, made hundreds of steel. so i dont see the problem, use your time smarter

 

Personally I don't like using coal or wood to power a space ship when there's no reason behind it.

I think you should be stuck on your current planet until you've defeated the first boss and he drops something like a Mr. Fusion (from Back to the Future). Then you could dump all of your unwanted rubbish into it and depending on the material or item, it would give you a certain amount of fuel. So more complex or higher quality items give more fuel than a full stack of dirt. BUT, dirt could give you some fuel as well. This way every item has at least one purpose if nothing else.

 

ugg, YOU might be a lone survivor that was dumb enough to bring a horrible tentacle monster on board as a pet to kill your crew, but as for ME, I am just a apace explorer who set out by himself, to see what can be seen without any fuel issues, (at least ideally)

As for Sadeyx, and his "you want to explore instead of mine? your in the wrong game" comment. Almost all of the game videos show surface and dungeon exploration, only showing digging to show off the flash light. it was to the point i thought there wouldn't even be ores.

Now i am going to go test this update. if i can not fine enough coal to fill my ship in a good amount of time, i am just going to mod in a bunch of coal to put in chests on my ship, i hate that the coal stash might effect the balance of other things like crafting, but i would rather play...

 

I'm still puzzled about the up roar about coal and wood.

I initially started the game a day after official BETA launch.

I did not know wood was an alternate source of fuel and I still managed to land on 30 planets in 9 hours of game play...

I must have did something wrong.

 

I certainly have no difficulty hunting down coal to fuel my ship, but I think turning wood into charcoal doesn't sound like a bad idea.

You can find more than enough just traversing the surface of a planet.

 

Na, because you actually did a little exploring to find some coal and took the time to mine it, you were able to move pretty easily. I never had a problem with running out of fuel, and I never used wood either.

 

Even before this patch, I had no problem spending 15 - 30 minutes digging and getting at least enough coal to get to another planet in the same star system, if not the next few systems over. But obviously before this patch, you could just spend 5 minutes collecting wood and be good to go anywhere.

 

I have yet to run into any fuel issues, and I never used wood at all in the ship, it just doesnt seem "right" ti use it.

If anything keep the wood out of the ship and add a fuel refinery item that can convert organics into ship fuel

 

I only mined the coal that was immediately available at the surface or within flashlight proximity within the generated cave systems.

Just think of the potential ore gains with more powerful mining tools!