Ore/NPC/Interest Detection

Looking through a lot of the current common complaints as far as balance goes, ore and settlement generation seems to big major headaches for people. So that got me thinking: hey, we're in space, why not go outside the box on this one?

Instead of fixing generation issues, why not just implement a detection gadget? Like, a Detectron 4000 or some such that you can upgrade (proximity, range, or whatever).

It will come basic with NPC detection, and will either beep or have a little light that flashes onscreen to indicate your proximity to NPCs. Slower the farther you are, faster the nearer you are.

More importantly, you can "feed" it ores or items, and it will switch to detecting the proximity to those. But what if the ores are super far away, like way underground? Well, what if an Aliens style map was implemented alongside it? It wouldn't appear onscreen, but you could pull up a simple, monochromatic techy-looking "schematic" of the planet that you can scroll through, and have the specified interest (i.e., gold ore) show up as blinking dots. That way, you don't have to keep opening and closing your maps or have a minimap, and you don't need glow potions ala Terraria.

This will also help with the issue a lot of people are having with seeing ores. You could increase the challenge and charm a little by actually reducing ore visibility - you have to rely on your Detectron!

Opinions? Is this even feasible as far as coding goes?

I think this would be a fun little addition that would really make Starbound stand out among its competitors. I mean, hey! We're in the future! Let's take some of the guesswork out of the tedious stuff.

EDIT: This scanner would only for the planet you're currently on. It would be an attachment along the lines of a backpack. Having "planet scanners from orbit" would be too complex to code and take a lot of the exploration aspect away from the game, in my opinion.

 

Thinking of outside the box, why not steal from ME2 *ahem* use this idea:
After unlocking the robotic workbench you can craft a small station (let's call it scanner for now) that shoots drones down to the planet you're currently orbiting?
Depending on the tier it will show more or less information:

• At first it will only show if artificial structures (meaning they were build by NPCs) are on the planet-surface.
• Next tier will tell you if coal/iron/copper can be found close to the surface (it checks a depth of ~25 blocks)
• The tier after that adds silver/gold to the "close to surface"-scan and if there are NPCs on the planet (because some NPCs live in tents and not in structures)
• Some tiers after that the drone starts scanning for ores in a depth of ~25 to ~75 blocks. These results are listed seperately from the close-to-surface-scans
  
• The next tier of ores starts showing up on the scans.
• Now the drone is able to scan deep under the surface for ores, number of chests and/or structures (~75 to ~250 blocks deep)
• The next tier of ores starts showing up on scans and the drone will tell you what kind of structures can be found (like: "Glitch Village" or "Florian Prison")
  
• The drone is able to scan the core and tell you what can be found in or close to it.

A fully upgraded scanner give you a seperate, short one-sentence report on
-What can be found on the surface
-What can be found by digging not very far
-What can be found by spending some time deep underground
-What can be found by digging all the way to the core
-If (and which) structures can be found on the planet
-How many NPCs live on a planet

Many more details or features could be added, but the main idea is to craft a tiny robot which you shoot from your spaceship to learn about the planet you are orbiting. Because... it would be a waste to throw away those inferior brains... right?^^

Its not as detailed as a map, but it would help a lot if you know roughly where you can find your desired stuff, if it is present at all on your current planet. Furthermore, since you need "bullets" to use the scanner, it could be possible to find
drones more advanced then the ones you are currently able to build with merchants or in dungeons/treasure chests.

EDIT: Instead of saying "cans ~25 blocks deep" it would be better to let it scan something like "10%/30%/80% of the distance from surface to core". Since planets have different sizes you would have problems scanning larger planets if you scan only a set amount of blocks. Not sure if that would be good or bad though....

 

Because there are actually issues with ore generation. It's not just people being dinguses and looking in the wrong places.

 

I think also, maybe having a logic to the way ores are placed. Maybe gold often appears more in sand biomes? A large glitch village lives over large coal deposits. This would change ore variation, but I think it would give a bit of strategy to looking for ores instead of strip mining any planet you happen to find.

 

The way it's coded now, it's already possible to set different ore distributions per planet/mini-biome, it's just not really taken advantage of currently outside of the asteroids orbiting planets having a different ore distribution.

 

But you still need to more or less guess where you can find what kind of ore.
That or you go online and get the coordinates of planets that are confirmed to offer your desired ore, similar to all those "this is where you can find the gun-merchant-pirate" threads.

 

No you don't. The way ores are currently set to generate is purely level-based.

 

I would generally agree with this.

However, I don't want something that says "Hey, there are Apex NPCs here!" To me, that would kill a lot of the exploration. If I'm looking for something I'll wind up spending more time on my ship hitting "Find Random" than I will actually exploring. And that goes against the core gameplay. If there's a scanner, it needs to be very vague. "There's a {small,medium,large,few,many} artificial structures" "The ore is {dense,average,sparse}" etc.

 

Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at. There would still be an exploration aspect to it. Nothing too detailed, just simple "there's something here but you don't know what it is" type mechanics. It helps keep some of the charm intact.

Also, I'm not sure how ores are generated, but I don't know why a proximity detector wouldn't work, at least in the short range. The ore's already been loaded around you, right?

 

Oh, also an addition to this, if this seems too easy, would be that the drones would have a durability of scans available, or could have a chance of getting mauled by wildlife on it's search. That you could get this technology, but it takes a bit to maintain it, making sure it an actual difficult choice between if you just want to beam down and look or use the scanner.

 

How about a system that just states the % of said mats and settlements.
e.g.

Alpha XYZ prime III

Ore: 10%
Semi precious ore (T2 ore): 30%
Precious ore: 5%
intelligent life signs: 2% ( abandoned dungeons etc.)

and the scanners only work with the top 20% of the planets to prevent loss of exploration.

 

Something like that isnt bad. But there should be various degrees of precision I believe... either cheap drones with rough results or expensive drones with lots of information so yoou canpick the ones you like to use.