Removing wood as a fuel source adds a lot to the game by limiting our bouncing between planets.

So what do you call mining/ stripping 10's of stacks of dirt and cobblestone venturing so far down into the world that you hit the deep areas to find it? Or skiming the top layer that still allows sunlight in? Because in my world I did the latter and I found jack squat I nearly had a tunnel going AROUND The world. However i found 4 more coal which allowed me to get off that sodding planet. Because i'd rather not spend 4 freaking hours looking for coal or making and expanding mineshafts just for coal. Gold yes, silver yes? Platinum I have YET to find some, let alone diamonds. Before i was able to get around 400 coal just by casually mining or exploring caves I HAD TO fight for dear survival to get 102. That's not right by any stretch, and that wasn't five blocks from spawn either i circled that planet four times. I didn't have any torches so I couldn't venture down.

 

I think 10 to 1 trees to coal is pretty fair, if their goal is to make planet hopping not completely trivial. You'd have to stop to cut more trees (stack of 1000) or dig for the more efficient coal, or a combination. This also makes wood not as useless as people are complaining about (in fact you will probably want it more).

 

Oh look grognards who want anything fun removed from the game. Because Starbound should be 90% tedium.

The charcoal option is a decent compromise I think. I agree that wood made things too easy, but you need to consider the RNG can occasionally make a starting planet completely unviable.

 

People are going on and on about how awesome it is that you now *have to* spend time focused on one planet before jumping to another...

OP put his edit that he can understand wanting to both stay on a planet, and planet hop a ton.

Here's the thing though, I've spend literal hours (before the patch) on one planet. I think in 40 hours of play time, I visited around 6 planets. Nothing in the game required I move to a different planet. I didn't want to, and I didn't have to. But now I have to stay on a planet for a long period of time just to find coal. If they put back in wood for space ship fuel, you can still sit there on one planet and just mine it. Nothing stops you. But keeping the system the way it is does stop people from hopping planets all they want, which they find fun.

 

I agree with Gl33m. I've been playing tons, and I'm only now venturing from the alpha sector. Even before the patch, I spent a ton of time on 3-4 planets, mining deep and designing forts. Having the extra fuel didn't force me to travel planet to planet.

Honestly, people that want to mine will mine regardless of how scare/plentiful the coal is. Restricting coal only effects those that have more fun running around, hopping planet to planet.

 

I wouldn't mind being able to convert unrefined wood to charcoal. It's understandable that fresh wood has too much moisture in it to burn reliably. The adjective "unrefined" serves no purpose as of now.

They could make it so that it takes two unrefined wood to make a block of charcoal, and charcoal would only serve as one unit of fuel.

 

I'm beginning to think that, unlike TErraria, this game will simply not be fun without mods.

I'd scrap hunger and fuel whenever I can.

 

I also believe that it is healthy to a certain extent. I think with the new patch allowing a ratio conversion of wood to coal will fix things.

 

I mainly used coal for fuel to begin with , but it was nice to be able to use wood in a pinch. Last night, I landed on a moon not realizing I was going to freeze every 30 seconds. I couldnt find coal for crap here, and I didnt have enough to get off planet. So, I had to drop a damn campfire every 30 secs, while trying to find non existent coal. I was not happy.

The other problem is i need that coal for torches. If we had another resource for torches, this wouldn't be near as big of a problem.

My last thought, is before, you could play just like you are now, and you could also planet hop. Now, you cant planet hop, and have to play like this. I dont like the new system at all. Im more irritated with the condensing the entire sector to lvl 1 than I am about the fuel. I spent 48 hours in the before the big patch playing and I only made it to mid beta. See I like mining, but I also like planet hopping and raiding villages. But now, there is no point to raid those villages and prisons. So ive lost 1/2 half of my play style with these changes. Before, I was able to do both. So the "diggers" and the the "hoppers" and ones like me who enjoy both, can coexist, but not in this current state of the game.

 

I agree that the decison of traveling somewhere is more thought out. It is more precious to travel. This adds value to traveling. But the planets still do not provide enoug incentive to visite them! They should be like businesses on any street - having something special for you, something to lure you in with, smething that makes differenciates them. Right now all of the planets are like cigarette packaging in australia - they provide you the basic information that it is a planet, that it tastes like arid but it doesn't say what is so special about it. Is there anything special about any planet at all? everything is so random and unique that nothing is unique anymore. You can get whatever you are looking for on any planet anyway. Why travel? Well, because at one point of the game(after you defeat the boss), it is the only thing left to do - change sector, but land in an exactly the same randomness environment. It is not and envirnonment, there is no theme or mood if the theme and mood is ''random''. This is similar to the mobs as well.
By the way I have a poll started about a matter many find very frustrating - traveling to the next sector and how it makes your progress redundant so far. I would appreciate your vote on this matter as we are trying to figure out if this is a real problem or a subjective preference of some. Here you go: http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/next-sector-a-loss-poll.48372/

 

Honestly i'd wish they give an idea of whats on the planet, Or even show what race or give rumours. " scans suggest avian activity." Is it a village? A temple? a dungeon? What is it? I'm curious! LET ME FIND OUT! But not all planets have to have this just enough so you get you curious. Exploring the planets are awesome, but it would nice to have a vague idea of whats on it. It doesn't take away from the factor of it. Because what if you hate avian temples? and would rather find glitch stuff? Or USCM stuff? Or you're looking for floran! IT would give a sort've map to the expanses, a better way to spend your resources. Then going ERRR THIS ONE. and blam you get everything you hate.

 

Just ran a brand new character through their first steps and lo and behold, got stuck on a forest world with the starting point being giant flowers, toxic pools, and the sole planet in the star system. Spent a good few hours getting out of that hell hole.

I ended up with over 30 silver bars, 30 gold bars, over 50 iron, but I barely scraped by on copper and coal. In a word, there is definitely something wrong with the generation. Too many gold and silver deposits along the surface of a planet, and definitely too few copper and coal deposits. Iron I'm iffy on. Don't know how I feel about it being easy to find, since the only uses for copper are a pick axe and some armor. It'd be one thing to call coal intentionally rare if every other ore were rare... but the more precious metals AREN'T rare. That's a big red flag there's a problem with the generation and there's no way to explain otherwise.

The people hammering those with a complaint either haven't bothered trying out the game with a brand new char, or find the low quantities of coal justifiable because now people are playing their way. ...As if how someone else spending their time planet hopping after skimming the surface has any influence what-so-ever on their enjoyment of their own play experience. But I digress, the thought process is all wrong. Regardless of the tier of the planet, the argument should be that all the good $#!% should be tucked away underground. Tier 1 or tier 10, the only things that should be on the surface are trees, coal, and a random dungeon. All the best stuff should be deep underground, but there are some issues I have with that...

First, underground is typically boring. Searching for a dungeon or biome down there is like searching for a needle in a haystack, and it's a very tiny needle in a very big haystack.

Second, caves only go so deep. Unlike in Terraria or Minecraft, the caves in Starbound only seem to go maybe 40-60 blocks deep on average then stop, and typically don't hold anything of value. The thing with Terraria and Minecraft's cavern generation is that it follows two rules: carve a path to the core, and link various ore nodes and other points of interest. Some people do like simply digging their own tunnel. That's a systematic approach. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really support an adventurous approach to the underworld. It's got a few sparse caverns on the surface and a bunch disconnected underground, but players have to find the latter through good old fashioned digging. Unfortunately, One could dig straight down and not hit a single one of those caves (or even ore veins.)

Basically, until the underground is made as interesting if not more so than the surface and more lucrative to boot, telling people to dig a hole in the dark isn't really fair to the people wanting an adventure game, not a literal 2D minecraft where they're expected to make some hyper-efficient mining tunnels, only here they want to find basic $#!% while being smothered beneath piles of "rare" $#!%. I know it's not Terraria or Minecraft, but it's underground generation could take a hint from either to make it more lucrative and interesting to explore.

 

I was under the impression that there will be randomly generated quests added later so that could be an incentive to bounce planets as well as the quests could send you to different planets.

Edit: don't quote me on this that was an impression I got not necessarily true.

 

Being able to move from planet to planet is what sets this above similar games, to me. Unlike most of the other games, if I get bored of a world, I can go see new ones - trying to make it so you have to completely mine out a world before leaving takes away a lot of the fun. If I only wanted to see one environment with little variety for hours and hours, I'd play terraria.

 

Hey woods back as a fuel now sort of you can smelt 10 wood to make 1 coal

 

i might be odd but i spend about a day on each planet (3-4 hours) basically to make sure i get all the resources i can because you never know when you are going to need that copper or w/e.

 

i think they need to work on planet generation still. So far most planets i visit feel the same. Same animals, same trees. I'm hoping that they are holding content back because its beta. If not, i'll probablyhave to wait for a few post release patches in order to get true variety.

 

I really wish there was a way to strip mine a planet. Some conveyor belts and a designated beam up location for minerals mined at an industrial scale would be very interesting.

 

Sounds like something a nice mod would add (wouldn't be too difficult to program) [i'm just too lazy ;p]

 

Yea, all they have to do is increase the appearance of coal of planets, also make coal appear on all planets. And remove the use of wood as a fuel, unless you build a special furnace to make charcoal. then use it to fuel you ship.

Like you would have a chance to receive charcoal in the special furnace like 1/10 chance to get it from wood.