Request/Concern about the NPCs

Hi everyone! So a lot of dev updates lately been about NPCs and how they work, which is great! I love that they are doing great job at making them look/act alive and populating the worlds with someone other than you and the monsters.

BUT

I would like to ask devs to make it so that not every planet has NPCs settlement on it. Just because that will get redundant pretty quick, and will take away from the feeling of discover and adventure. I want to land on planets that have no NPCs at all, in fact if it would be my choice, I would make NPCs settlement pretty rare, just so it would be very exciting to finally discover one, and you chose to destroy them, you would really have to think about consequences, as they might be the only settlement of that race in your entire galaxy.

In best case scenario, it would be nice to have option that allows players to control number of NPCs settlements/traders/bandits when galaxy is been generated. Something like Abundant/Common/Scarce, so you can get gameplay that you want.

Anyways, that's just what I am thinking, maybe devs already figured it out, but I thought I made this topic just to get this point out there, as a lot of times I think developers are too eager to go overboard on something in the game because they think its very cool and therefore everyone just want to see or play with certain feature/mechanic all the time.

Any comments and discussion are welcomed! Thanks!

 

That's actually a great point. Though I wouldn't want NPCs being extremely scarce, because although it would be more realistic, and more satisfying when you find them,
it could also be bad for progression in the game (since I'm assuming lots of quests revolve around NPCs or are given by NPCs).

 

I think regardless if you like the outcome of how NPCs are implemented, modding will provide a solution for you.

 

That's is true, but that's why I would very much like to see an option to control it. I am interested in Starbound for more of a artistic, and exploration qualities, because I like to build and explore so it really doesn't bother me if it would take me longer to progress because I am not finding too many NPCs who can push my progress alone, also it will only make it more fun for me to TRY to find those guys while getting by with little of what I have.

Man that can be applied to like half of the features in this game. You are certainly not wrong, but while developers working on the game, and have all the belts and whistles laid out in front of them, might as well just get thins done right now

 

I agree Vladplaya, you have some really good points that I had yet to think about. As far as scarcity goes, I'd like the chance that a planet has intelligent life/civilization to be fairly low, and have it that your ship auto scans for civilization perhaps. Or have that be an add-on that you can choose to augment to the ship for those that don't like the predictability. I don't way to get stuck in this rut/grind of finding every single planet already discovered and taken, that would be beyond lame.

 

happy if the nps fight monsters

 

Juice Box entirely agrees with you.
Juice Box was thinking something of a settlement every 5-10 planets or so, (remembering that planets are pretty large and would take a fair while to fully explore the full surface).
Juice Box also wouldn't mind if most planets, (every 3-5), had a small house on it though, just to sprinkle some quests in.
Juice Box's final piece of input into this thread is that there should be certain galaxies with certain amounts of NPC's. - for instance a galaxy with more friendlier, less aggressive mobs should have more NPC's inside.

 

I like this.
A village should be rare, and the small house idea is cool.

 

I agree I think villages should be semi rare not as rare as minecraft.

 

If I remember correctly when you analize a planet on your spaceship it says if that planet has a village/dungeon/whatever on it, so you can choose if you want to explore a inhabitated planet or not
I saw that on the roadmap I think

 

That would be ridiculous, there's no way you can explore the whole galaxy by yourself and even with some friends. having only 1 settlement of a race in the entire galaxy , that just can't work.
But other than that I also hope that not every single planet is occupied and I have the feeling they will not be.
I would like the occupied planets to be uncommon, doesn't have to be extremly rare. But I am sure that if there will be enough demand for super rare villages, than modders will do the job for you.

 

Good points, but I can't help think this is a little knee jerk.

We have had a lot of village/npc updates because that's what they are working on right now. Pretty sure they will work like dungeons and everything else in the game because populating the staggering number of planets would simply be too much.

 

I don't think every planet would have NPC settlements, only certain types of planets would have settlements based on the species. There are asteroid/moon/airless environments as well.

Making NPC settlements rare however isn't really a good idea. Firstly it won't make sense story-wise. With the technology for interstellar travel being commonplace, its implied that most if not all the races in the game already have a certain level of technological advancement. Only the Glitch seem a bit stuck in medieval times, but there's a Glitch player spaceship so they aren't really lacking in that department either.

Secondly, I don't want to have to hunt for NPC settlements in a 1 in 1000 worlds spawn chance or something like that. I'd prefer that the spread of settlements are patterned in a roughly spherical area around their respective homeworlds, so it makes more sense instead of randomly placing them all over the place. If you've played 4x games, your space empire will eventually grow and spread out from a single world/system, which is how I think should be represented in this game.

It would be quite disappointing (and breaking immersion somewhat) to make the entire universe sparsely populated when internal logic of the setting implies a larger, galactic civilization. Think Star Wars, with many space-faring alien species, and most of the core worlds are developed and populated, while getting progressively less developed and less advanced as you head to the fringes of "civilised" space, and beyond the outer rim.

In a setting where space travel is so fast that it takes a relatively short time to jump many lightyears at a time, and spaceships are so affordable that individuals can own one, the interstellar civilization, population and economy that makes it possible must be immense.

 

It would make no sense at all for civilization to be a rare find. A planet can either be inhabited or not inhabited but inhabited planets should not be rare. Possibly infrequent.

 

Yeah, I agree, especially with the idea that they get less common and less advanced the further away you get. It'd also make sense if civilization was rarer on hostile planets (environment-wise(somehow, I managed to never discover 'environment' had an N in it until recently)), I mean, you wouldn't build a town on a volcanic lava-covered planet. It'd make sense for a secret underground research lab, or a mining facility, but not a town.

 

I love how you made this thread as I had the exact same thought on my mind for many many days now, ever since NPC's were introduced actually.

But I was thinking the same about monsters in general, if there were actually abandoned planets where there were no creatures at all, and very very few minerals, no dungeons.

Though

I believe it's safe to say that.. No matter what happens there will be planets that don't have settlements on it due to how they are in environment.

Might be heavy coding but, depending on environment I PERSONALLY would love to see settlements adapt or not exist at all. =x

 

You seem to rationalize it way too much, while also using your personal preferences and views on how you would like things to be. I made this topic looking at the situations from mostly gameplay perspective, my main points are 1) Don't over use a feature to where it becomes boring 2) If its possible, give us option to control certain parameters so everyone can get gameplay they would enjoy the most.

That's pretty much it, it doesn't matter what the story is, or what you like don't like, as long as its reasonable enough where it doesn't kill the exploration and excitement of discovering things (in this case the NPC settlements, and encounters), which seem to be pretty good chunk of what Starbound is about, it will work fine, and if we get an option on how much NPCs are their in the galaxy when its generated, then I can have galaxy with minimum amount of NPCs, and you can have your StarWars like world if you think it makes the most sense and that's what you want.

 

I doubt that every planet would have civilization on it. I mean that just makes sense- some planets are so inhospitable that creating a town there would be a dumb idea. This was the way I was assuming it already worked- putting NPCs on every planet would be a bad idea, in my opinion :/

 

This is a very good point IMO at least about the settlements being not super common.

 

After having read Lynx88's post, he did raise some good points. I think what would be logical - and at least somewhat immersive while still allowing people to discover many planets that are either sparsely populated by NPCs or completely uncivilized - to have the planets set up in such a way that there is a higher density of civilized planets, but the further you go from there, the less and less often you find planets like that, eventually getting to a point where it's very rare or there are no planets that are civilized.