Ship Upgrades, Ship Abilities, and Planet to Ship Interaction

I would very much enjoy a feature where we had "Ship Upgrades" similar to Tech. Imagine finding a blueprint for "Ship Upgrade" similar to finding a piece of tech, once you use it would be consumed and you learn that upgrade. Then, on your ship, via the tech module there should be a ship management option. From there, depending on your tier of ship, you will have a certain amount of rooms, maybe starting with one or none and unlocking another room every time you upgrade your ship tier. You will be able to select what you want that room to be, and depending on what you select (You can only select rooms you found the blueprints for) you will gain a ship ability.

Perhaps, starting at second tier you will gain your first room that you can select an upgrade for. You can change the rooms out anytime for a credit fee. Once you have your first room unlocked, you will have a "Ship energy" bar while on planets. This would start empty and slowly regenerate. Then, depending on your rooms you will have "Ship Abilities". For example, if you had the room "Orbital Ballistics Control" (or something like that) you could call down an orbital strike from your ship costing a considerable sum of "Ship Energy". Other room ideas would be The Armory, which would allow you to call down a mech for a short period (A good way of implementing mechs in to the game properly). I would hope to maybe have 8 rooms total at the maximum ship tier (Tier 8, so one per tier), but would like for there to be 10+ blueprints in the game, allowing for uniqueness from ship to ship. Perhaps you could even upgrade your rooms / ship upgrades, up to that of your ship tier. So if you are at tier 2, your rooms will only be able to upgrade to level 2. But if you're at tier 5, they can upgrade up to level 5. This would balance it out so things like Mechs and Orbital strikes can scale better while progressing through the game, so the ship abilities will always be useful but never overpowered. This would higher tier ships more useful, instead of just having more room to put chests, decorations, and crafting stations.

I believe this will make ships feel less bland and add a much higher level of customization and uniqueness, and this would also be a good way to implement things like mechs in to the game in a balanced manor.

Edit: Another idea would be that the abilities would use Fuel, instead of adding a second energy bar and making abilities essentially free. This way there is a level of resource management, as you can't refuel your ship from the surface and fuel can be expensive if you use a lot of it, so ship abilities would only be used in dire situations. Thanks to Notunknown for this idea.

Ideas for Rooms / Upgrades:

- Ordnance Bay - This room would allow orbital strikes from your ship, you would use it similar to activating a tech, then in a region in front of you there will be a bombardment. To keep it balanced, you would be able to upgrade it to a certain level depending on your ship tier. The higher the level, the stronger the orbital strike. That way, it would be useful throughout the progression of the game, and won't fall of late game, or be overpowered early game.

- Med Bay - This room would give you the ability to call in a healing beam that targets you, consuming a decent amount of energy and healing you over time until full, the longer it heals you, the more energy is consumed. Can be cancelled by re-activating the ability, to save ship energy. Healing depends on the upgrade level of the room, higher level means more healing. Again, this would keep it balanced throughout the game. It would also heal you over time for free when you are inside this room.

- Mercenary Quarters - Allows you to hire mercenaries from outposts, you can then use an ability to call in your mercenaries to the surface for a short duration before they beam back up. The amount of mercenaries you can have depends on the rooms level, and the strength of the mercenaries depends on what sector you recruited them from. Perhaps, if Ship Battles became a thing, these mercs would help defend against boarding. If a mercenary dies, it's dead for good and you need to hire another. If on the surface a mercenary would beam up early if dropped below 20% hp, to prevent death. If defending against a boarding, mercenaries would fight to the death, due to lack of escape options. Mercenaries would be basically guards that follow you while active, and hangout on the ship when not active.

- Mech Bay / Armory - This room allows you to produce Mechs, the mechs strength depends on the level of this room. The mech would be an activated ability used on the surface, it would call down a mech depending on the rooms "Current active mech", which would have to be changed on the ship, on the console in the Mech Bay / Armory. Perhaps, each race begins with a racial mech that scales with the mech bay, but could buy blueprints for other mechs from traders or loot them. Perhaps some looted / bought mechs would require your Mech Bay to be a certain level before you could use them.

- Planetary Mining Facility - This room would allow the user to call down a mining beam to dig a shaft straight down on a planet. The beam would consume energy over time, similar to the healing beam. The longer the beam is active, the deeper it will dig, the dig speed will depend on the rooms level. The blocks / ores that the beam mines will be directly deposited in to a storage built in to the room, the beam will not work if this storage is full requiring the player to beam up to their ship and empty it on occasion. The storage will grow larger depending on the rooms level as well.

I would love to hear peoples thoughts and suggestions on this topic, aswell as ideas for rooms / ship upgrades. Also, I hope I've explained my ideas well enough so you all understand. I will also be adding more rooms as they're suggested, or as I think of more. I will answer any questions. Also, these are mainly ideas, I would love to see people elaborate on these ideas and give their own suggestions!

 

Well, one thing is clear: The ship starts full of functions, even damaged! That should change in the future... Still not sure how, but should.

 

I'm suggesting adding more functions that actually add a level of strategy and planning to the game, it will also be a way to make each players ship truly unique.

 

Just added a list of ideas for rooms, to hopefully give people a better understanding of my thoughts. Please leave suggestions and I may add them, with credit to the original poster of the idea of course.

 

This is pretty cool, hopefully some of this stuff gets added!

 

Thank you very much

 

How about it consumes fuel from your ship, instead of free regenerating energy?

 

Hey, that's a pretty good idea. I mainly had the idea of energy consumption to prevent ability spam, and the regeneration being really slow with most abilities consuming over 50%, but this adds an extra layer of resource management that I like, and cooldowns could balance this to prevent spam. I will add to the post with credits to you.

 

When something costs resources which don't regenerate, spamming it just ends up detrimental to the user.

 

Added a little note about it in the main post, and gave you credit. Again, thanks for the awesome contribution.

 

Awesome picture

 

I don't know about combat abilities for ships, but something like a mining beam from the ship would be very cool.

 

You mind if I add this to the post? Will credit both of you

 

I would love the ship to be more interactable with the planet. For example a possibility to land, build a space base and eventually - maybe - contact other vessels for additional quests.

Also there could be a more advanced computer, handling a database (a sort of customizable wiki), with basic programming or scanning the universe around the player more thoroughly...

Whew, some crazy ideas spewing out of my mind...

 

I like the particular emphasis on the ship being more of a support thing. The Devs have talked about trying to keep base building as a thing but it is quite difficult due to the ships being very customizable and being able to make them into bases. If it has more of a support role rather than a home role as you have indicated with the orbital bombing, mec dropping and healing beam, then this would be accomplished but the ship would still play an important part. The only difficulty would be balancing it. Maybe have like super hardmode/endgame planets where you need that kind of support.

 

I think maybe having a maximum number of rooms in your ship and having rooms specific for generating energy/heavy machinery for mining from ship and each having a cost in both pixels and resources depending on the kind of room you build would make ships go into a support that helps at any point in the game and can only increase even in the latest stages of the game. Making these rooms further upgradable would cost a lot more pixels and higher tier ores and limiting interactions with the planets until further upgraded just to promote manual labor instead of making 2-3 mining rooms and being afk for hours just to get free ores. It would also limit the interactivity a player can have with the ship, if they keep the same shapes of the racial ships, but adding different unmoveable and interactable objects that can only be moved through the ship AI, thus only being able to change backgrounds and decorating the other portion of the ship.

I do support the idea of using fuel in exchange for functions but it would make it better if it used the old fuel system to power it up (and have a use for all these damn spare coal and uranium ) or alternatively make moon biomes relatively bigger or more abundant in fuel, as well as making a larger fuel pool to sustain it.

Of course it would need a lot of tweaks since this is just a raw idea but... you get the point.

TL;DR Mining Room + Generator Room, further upgradeable rooms, unmoveable objects in each room for supportive role and possible fuel system.

Edit: I forgot to say that instead of having to find techs for the ship and stuff you have to get some serious ammounts of materials to upgrade the ship to give more incentive for not blazing through tiers in matter of 2 hours.

 

As far as ship improvements go, I would absolutely love it if there were some kind of navigational logging system that keeps track of all the data of the different coordinates the ship has already visited, also allowing you to add notes of particular POI per location if necessary.

A captains log! Why don't we already have something like that?? Didn't Star Trek teach us anything?!

 

As far as I know that's already planned to be on vanilla Starbound. Tiy made a post about that but, on the best of fashions, there is no time set for it yet. It could be in the next stable update or it could take months for it to reach us. I, for once, don't care about having a bookmark for planets since I tend to build utopias in one planet rather than several small bases. Still, I give you all my support on that claim.

 

Oh that's great news! I'm relieved to know that it will be added at some point in the future. I'm hopelessly unorganized and as such, my hardcopy notes tend to get misplaced all too often so I could really use an in-game system to help me keep track!

 

Yes. I could really use knowing where I find certain shops or the like. Hopefully we'll be able to make notes on the bookmarks to know which planet is which. My goldfish memory is probably gonna act on me more than I'd like it to.