So I just finished playing Treasure Adventure Game, and I have to say that the Mushroom Dungeon was probably the most creative application of that idea that I have ever seen. The effect when you touch the Psycho Shrooms reminded me of the Fuzzies from Yoshi's Island, and then it hit me: This should be in Starbound! Basically, the planet would be completely designed to screw around with your character's state of mind. It would have numerous spore-like particles floating through the air that would reverse your movement controls if you touched them. There would be occasional weather like clouds of purple haze that make the screen go all wavey. If you damage the plant life, large plumes of toxic vapor are released that make everything blur for a few seconds. Half of the mobs that spawn are just hallucinations that can't deal damage and your attacks pass right through them, and then they vanish without a trace. If the mobs that ARE real manage to hit you, venom could cause you to lose sensation in your limbs so that your health bar is no longer visible. Honestly, any and all of these effects could be interchangeable, with the actual effects being randomly generated. So with all of these things combined, the difficulty of the planet could get rather high. Perhaps a toned down version might have only a few of these hazards. Maybe you could encounter some of these hazards on other planet types as well. However, if all of these hazards were present in one location, you would want to be prepared. Special Armor Mods might allow immunity to some or all of these effects. Immunity to one particular effect might be inexpensive/common, while immunity to all the effects would be very valuable/rare. I don't think that these effects should be available on weapons, though, because that would be very effective in PvP and useless in PvE gameplay, which is not very balanced. Thoughts? Suggestions? By the way, drug abuse is a serious problem, not a joke.
You forgot things like bizarre ever-changing colours and impossible NPC's you can meet (you can never be certain whether the NPC is real or just a hallucination, though you should be able to talk to them all the same). Anyway, anything that has the word "psychotropic" in a video game is usually fun.
Despite is incredible obnoxiousness, I'm liking this idea. I'd certainly like to be able to take some of these plants and animals to other worlds, and use their broken parts for traps and weapons! Just imagine a base defense system that world psychologically! An intruding player walks in, but instead of being shot at like they expected, suddenly there's a gigantic monster running at them! (Except there really isn't, nor is their health bar actually slowly going down).
I suppose rapidly changing colors or inverted colors could be tossed in with just about any of these. I don't think it would anything more difficult, but it would be cool looking none the less. Reversing the screen image might be an interesting alternative to reversing just the controls. Now imagine if pink elephants were on parade. Disney at its best!
Maybe there would be such areas (most likely caves or rare, unusual biome) in some non-psychotropic planets. Any such area may make the planet's threat level go up due to it's existence on that particular planet. But I really like the idea. Any mob ideas or psychedelic loot to obtain? I do like the thought of psychological warfare.
For mobs, I prefer to rely on the procedural generation so that there is plenty of variety. As I mentioned before, though, the mobs should automatically get psychotropic debuffs on their attacks. For loot, probably just the usual stuff you would find on a planet of that threat level. Perhaps something like toxic pollen or spores that could be used to craft Psycho-resistant armor. Nothing fancy. The environment itself is what makes it interesting, not the stuff you find.
This could actually be a really good change on the PVP experience. For an instance, imagine some mindless looters/killers attempting to destroy your home, then when they are getting close they see the most big and scary thing coming towards them, and if they do get close enough for being touched by the creature would produce this "thing" and make these people have no damage although some effects similar to hallucinations. If this does get implemented, living on this twisted planets may be the best way to be safe from attacks from other players, otherwise maybe if the "thing" that makes this effects can be used directly in another place in a planet that does not have this effects (used on a place like for example your house), then this "thing" can be used to have the best weapon, defense. (Although imagine if this is used directly on weapons? These weapons could cause situational invincibility, something similar to an invisible cape, so hopefully there will be no weapons like this, or at least, whit lesser or not such effects)
