Greetings! Welcome to Akado's "Believe It Or Don't", where I'm Akado, and you probably don't believe it. Anyway. Planetary scanners have been talked about, and it's very likely that they will happen in some form. I think that's great, but there's a lot of gray area. I would like to talk about one function that a planetary scanner could have, which I think would be really awesome for Multiplayer servers and Sector X. Allow planetary scanners to have/gain the ability to show how much "evidence of sentient life" there is on a planet. The goal is to allow players to quickly identify if a planet has been visited, settled, or left completely untouched by the ravages of my far-reaching Floran hands. For example, right now you see Planet Name, Biome, and Threat Level. What if there was also a line saying "Habitation: 5%" which says that 5% of the surface layers contain or have been replaced with Player-placed blocks? This could either be a static number (the number of player-placed blocks) or a percentage (rounding up to the nearest 0.1%). Benefits: During singleplayer games, placing a single Flag or block at the spawn point would move the Habitation number/percentage from zero to non-zero, and you would now know that you've been to this planet before. On multiplayer servers, this would allow new players the opportunity to identify "Big City" planets in the Alpha Sector, versus "The Boonies" planets that would provide a brand new experience. For PVP servers, this would allow Invaders the chance to identify large planets with an enemy "Base" on them, but also find smaller outposts that hopefully contain fewer than 50 defenders. This also allows for "Hide and Seek" opportunities, because the planetary scanner only scans the top 3 layers of the planet. If you are like me, and you build your towns in the lava of a planet's core (it's pretty hot), then your planet would escape detection from any potentially-hostile players AND traveling planet-to-planet solicitation. Unless you fortified your tunnel with new blocks. Think of "Hoth" from the Star Wars movies. There is a very small surface presence of humans, which can be detected from space. However, the main portion of the base is underground, which cannot be detected from space. An invader would need to go there in person, to determine if this is a mostly-underground base with a small surface outpost, or if someone just created a shack as they passed through. Thoughts?
Thanks! If you have feedback, or different ways this could be accomplished, please feel free to chime in. I'm really just hoping to find a way to mark "I've been here" in my games, since I play singleplayer almost exclusively. At the same time, I do have a bunch of RL friends that I will play with once Starbound is released. So, "Hide and Seek" would be a lot of fun there.
There could be one problem, there are thousands of planets, so you might have to be very lucky to find a planet that got visited already, so there would be only a veeeery small chance that your additional information gets ever displayed, because in 999 of 1000 cases the planet has never seen a human being before. I would prefer a kind of "add to favorites" feature like in the most internet browsers, I mean just for planets
That's a good point, although I still think this could be a nice feature if it's easy to implement and doesn't have any performance concerns (AKA it doesn't take too long to get this info). A "Favorites" or even "Recently Visited" feature for planets would be absolutely amazing, but that still only tracks personal history. On a multiplayer server, a list of favorites would require others to publicize their planets, so that others can add to their own favorites list. Granted, I think it's a safe assumption that public servers will publicize their list of "big city" planets, because they want more people to show up and add to them. However, servers like that would not likely publicize any outposts or smaller bases, as they don't want them to become gigantic cities. This option would allow for discovery of such planets, for better or worse!
