Question: Can combat be turned off or customized?

Hi,

I'm new here. I've been looking at some Starbound images and videos, and was wondering if combat can be turned off (or at least minimized) if you're running your own server. Some friends and I are considering running a server for a student community, and we'd like to create an environment where the focus is on exploration, building and crafting so being frequently involved in combat might detract from the experience. (we'd like to use the game as a community building tool, to build rapport among the student population and encourage teamwork and a sense of belonging, while still instilling a spirit of competition between designated groups of students)

We're trying to find out if Starbound would support "modes" similar to Minecraft where you can switch between the standard Survival (combat) and Peaceful (non-combat) modes, or even better yet allows the server admin to finetune combat granularity such as PVE+PVP, PVE only, PVP only, non-combat, etc. It would be even more ideal if admins could tweak how aggressive the NPCs are per species when PVE is turned on.

Has anyone heard anything with regard to this aspect of the game?

Thanks in advance.

 

Quoting the part where you talk about the different modes, there will be PvP, and from what Terraria had, you can activate it or not, and disable PvP completely, and enable it so you can hurt each other without PvP, so I think they'll be going down the same path there, hope this helps from that part!

 

PvP will be toggleable by the server owner. We don't know what else server admins will be able to control. I highly doubt that PvE is toggleable, since it's a core part of the game. But, when in doubt, mod it in.

 

They should make peaceful mode turn all mobs to passive instead of simply not spawning any of them.
I think with the random monster builder you could have a lot of fun discovering finding new species while building or whatever.

 

Cool~ thanks for the replies guys!

 

But the other aspect is that the PvE can help with team building, etc. It gives groups of students something to protect each other from other than other students. Fighting that boss enemy together or exploring a dungeon as a team might get that feeling of friendly competition that you desire.

I.E. You could give different groups of students their own planets to explore, set up a safe base, and give them the goal of completely exploring a dungeon, while working together to stay safe and fend off local hostile creatures.

But other than that, if you can't turn PvE off, there might be a way of preventing hostile creatures from spawning, like putting down torches in minecraft.

P.S. Good luck with the project! I personally find it awesome that you are using games as a way to build teamwork instead of fighting against video games in their entirety.

 

You could always just Mod out all the Mobs, if thats your thing. so the universe would be populated by Player Characters and non hostile NPCs only.

On second thouhts, Modding out ALL the mobs might be a bad idea, you could mod out the aggressive ones though, there will be mobs that don't attack you unless you attack them first so you can keep those in, so that the monster generator doesn't crash your game by trying to pick parts for a monster from an empty box.

 

From what's been seen in the livestreams by Tiy PvP looks like it has to be toggled by individual players, ie. they have to opt in as has been stated in some of the other answers. Of course this is just footage of a developer build and could change at any moment.​

 

It has nothing to do with your question to do, but I love your background picture. Wallace and Gromit is great.

 

Thanks guys for all the replies, I guess I'll really need to play the game and tweak my own server to see how things will turn out. I must admit, the past few updates have been very exciting! =D

@OneOnlyDan: Yes, Wallace and Gromit are awesome~ I watch mostly things from the US, but there are a few gems I found in British production as well. W&G is one, the team of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright is another!

 

I think you will be able to toggle it, apart from that you could probably just build on a very low lvl planet, so monster won't do any harm

 

I dont see the point of turning combat off. I'd like to think there are peaceful planets where combat is really optional.

 

What is fun about exploring if there is nothing threating to violently rip your face off?