Should bullets be added?

This was the compromise I was suggesting. Rather than having ammo be the ONLY way to fire weapons, why not have ammo add bonuses to weapons and have weapons use energy by-default? In this way, you give an incentive to look for specialized kinds of ammo, you keep guns from being overpowered (since energy is still the primary way to fire guns, you can make ammo as rare as you want), and you reduce inventory shuffling since you'll never be carrying full stacks of ammunition unless you save up enough of it.

As it is, replacing energy with ammo crafting entirely does nothing but add another tedious item to craft which doesn't advance gameplay in any way.

 

i think ammo is a good thing as it keeps players busy like different arrows bullets grenades rockets etc i mean going herp here s gun with infinite ammo kind a makes the challege for bosses or anything bland i mean ammo could even have cool effects like loads of craftable ammos like one that cause buckshot of shards or mini bombs or slime or acid or w/e it makes exploration better as you gotta go find unique stuff to craft it

 

The part I don't like is being able to craft them, mostly.

 

So what's the point of the Floran Racial Armor Bonus?

 

I've had a thought but it's going to take quite a bit of explaining. I'll call it simply the Magazine System.

Magazines are universal ammunition that can be used in any bullet-using firearm. They are created at a "weapon toolbench." The toolbench UI would allow you to create customisable magazines with automatically calculated costs, based on the additional effects selected. Kind of like the enchanting system in Morrowind, if that comparison isn't lost on anyone.

The "stock" magazine would be a 15-round one with no bells or whistles and a tiny base cost, say just a bit of copper. Enough to kill your everyday nasty with a few good hits. Now if you were to add a "full metal jacket" modification, which ups the damage, you could expect to add a bit of iron on top of that base cost. If you increased the capacity by 5, you would add a little extra copper. Adding electrical elemental damage to it would take up some kind of uncommon gem or something.

In this way you could potentially make a 60-round-high-velocity-flaming-silent-integrated-gerbil-on-stick magazine which, although costing a vast amount of materials, would make for a very powerful weapon. Of course you'd need a "maximum" cost on the toolbench to prevent someone from taking a tiny popgun loaded with said 60-round-high-velocity-flaming-silent-integrated-gerbil-on-stick magazine and wrecking an entire planet or server.

As for the worries about inventory management, a little "sub-hotbar" which could have stacks of magazines put in it could be used to change magazine on the fly without cluttering inventory - change from flaming-shot to high-capacity with just a click!

Apologies if this was incoherent, it kind of makes sense in my head but I'm not sure if I've articulated it well enough.

 

In all honesty, I am not overly fond of that. I'd rather have differentiation between ballistic and energy weapons, with corresponding systems. Making every weapon work based on eenergy, with bullets being just a boost takes it away.

 

I just think that having everything tied to the energy bar is a bad design choice. It severely limits the options of the player and makes combat an unenjoyable slog. You don't have to be looking at ammo stacks it could be clips with a reload function, battery packs, something. Or maybe find some other way of making movement abilities limited without needing the energy. 2D combat feels kind of lame when your vertical movement is limited unless there's some real skill involved like combos, counters, and dodges which would be hard to implement with the way animations and monsters currently work.

 

This actually seems kind of cool. Maybe instead of having finite ammo or using the energy bar you would have an equip bar for "magazines" (I believe someone mentioned them earlier) which you could craft and which would have unlimited ammo BUT require periodic reloading. More advanced magazines would have special weapon effects as well as slightly increasing ammunition size before requiring a reload, thus creating an incentive to craft but not forcing one to hoard ungodly amounts of ammunition.

 

I think having bullets would make tech progression more "reasonable." If we have to use pickaxes before we can get super laser mining drills of doom or an upgraded matter manipulator that literally excites matter until it crumbles into raw blocks, why not have low-tech ballistic weapons. We could start off with a simple musket or something..Craft an iron tube, turn woodplank or unrefined wood into a stock. Maybe crush up blastrock, which is in game, and use that for gun powder? Could lead to eventual assault rifle and sci-fi looking gun progression and energy weapons can follow a similiar progression. Maybe a primitive stungun and work our way up to beam weapons or plasma weapons? I dunno. I Get that the bullet idea seems like a cheap way to make use of ore but if it's complimented with blastrock ..and maybe we can use different blocks to modify like magmarock for flame-DoT bullets it could work. Gives me a reason to use all my uranium rods laying around to build a reactor and have some DU bullets.

 

We could incorporate all the ores and such into magazine crafting. Maybe require a certain number of uranium rods to produce DU magazines.

Something about having to hoard ammunition just annoys me. I mean it's not difficult once you get a system going, but it's just tedious to carry stacks of bullets around as opposed to having a streamlined system.

 

After reading everything in topic over again, I think the magazine feature would be more workable. Could be easier to make weapons if we had a modular crafting system..barrel, magazine system, and maybe frame. I agree that having to hoard stacks of x999 Newb Shot 500 would be annoying and maybe require an inventory change on character panel as ammo would have to be an equippable slot. Imagine having to hit "E" if weapon stops firing to reload or hitting a hotkey to reload if they're on the 1-10 slots. Could kick it old school and draw from XCOM, and have magazines that need to be dragged and dropped onto character paper-doll to reload.

 

"I know people like this but I like this so wouldn't it be great if it was the way I liked it instead?"

 

I don't want to presume, but I think you're deliberately misinterpreting my statements. Of course crafting is a part of Starbound. I'm talking about crafting that you need to mindlessly repeat over and over again-- the sort of thing that needlessly adds steps in an artificial bid to increase... I don't know... immersion? Difficulty? Problem is, it's not immersive to me because it's so tedious. And it doesn't make it more difficult because it's just so mindless.

So, not to prove a point, but as an honest question to further the discussion: what do you believe ammo would add to a game?

 

What about soup mana? Man if pho gave you mana I would be casting tons of spells. (And making more pho)

 

This might be that compromise that I was talking about earlier-- it's not a repetitive craft, but it gives you your limited resource feeling. I think you'd have to reduce energy costs, though, to make it so you're not just constantly gobbling batteries like candy.

 

God no. The only reason I didn't use guns in Terraria is because they used bullets. I want to be able to play as long as I want - not until my bullets run out.

 

that's a pretty stupid reason to not use guns, considering there was a merchant that sold bullets and 1 gold coin could've gotten you enough for a few hours of gameplay unless you shot at the floor non-stop.

 

Maybe he didn't like the feeling of being limited when he uses weapons that consume ammunition on use?

At least, that's one of my reasons why.