Some rather interesting changes to progression in the nightly build

Please tell me the real life properties of Dilithium and it's uses to power a starship.

EDIT: I assume also that Farscape isn't science fiction because Wormholes don't work as they did in the story.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, people controlled beams of spirit plasma and manipulated the physical universe with their minds. Do you really want to be that guy that says "Nu uh, plasma doesn't work that way"?

My point is, reality is second-fiddle to a good story. For centuries people have been able to use suspension of disbelief in the effort to enjoy a good story. How do you know that in this universe (populated by sentient robots, futuristic space-ships, and faster-then-light propulsion fueled by magical mystery moon liquid) our chemical and physical model holds any relevance? How do you know that what they call Copper is actually Cu and that Iron is actually Fe? How can we be sure that anything in this game is what it's labeled?

 

And you are bringing up these examples when I am not criticizing Starbounds use of Faster Than Light technology... why?

Sure, there are some leaps in logic to tell a story. Plutonium, an unstable radioactive material, can be found and mined easily on "moon" biomes (recent name change aside) for example.

None of those issues actually rewrite the science of the matter to the point where we get magic steel.

 

You seem to have missed the point I was going for. Star Trek and Farscape are science fiction in spite of being, at times, wildly scientifically inaccurate (Hence, Dilithium in reality is a specific formation of two lithium atoms, not "Inverted Lithium" as it is in the Star Trek series). With Starbound this inaccuracy is with metallurgy in a fairly simple way. It's not specifically about FTL. It's not magic steel, it's just their version of steel.

Another example, it would be readily agreed that the "Hitchhikers Guide" series is factually inaccurate and preposterously absurd, but still "science fiction". Labels like "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" arbitrarily obscure the simple point that it's all fictional and nothing HAS to be what we expect. If everything was exactly what we expected, it'd be more like a text book than a story.

I do understand, to an extent, the want for a more complicated, and factually accurate

I'm just curious why this, in the massive collection of non-real things in this game, bothers you (and the others who've expressed so in the thread) so much? Why is the metallurgical formulation for steel your "line in the sand" so to speak?

 

Most of what we call "science fiction" is more technically "science fantasy" anyway.

 

The differences between what you are describing and what we're complaining about are vast and I will summarize.

Science Fiction takes liberties in describing things that are vastly beyond our knowledge.
FTL doesn't exist and likely CANNOT exist so Sci-Fi writers are forced to invent ways to circumvent this problem.
Notice - no one here is whining that Erchius isn't real and therefore shouldn't exist in the game.

Steel - on the other hand - has been known to metallurgists for possibly 4,000 years.
While there are many ways to make Steel - a fusion between Iron and Copper really isn't one of them, this it conflicts with our ability to suspend disbelief.
It's not game-breaking, but it is annoying. It's not like we simply CANNOT play now because it's so vastly unrealistic and unbelievable.
It's just a minor annoyance because steel is a real thing that has been around for a long, long time.

Hitchhikers Guide, in particular, is tongue-in-cheek and in many circumstances Starbound shares a similar vein of humor, but because there's no glib dismissal of how preposterous Iron + Copper is anywhere in the game Codex or investigation dialogue, you can't really compare the two. Yes, they could easily gloss over this recipe with some witty line of text, or some "metaphysical Sci-Fi mumbo jumbo" but since the game does not hold our hand through this our rational minds tend to reject it.

Again, no one cares how wormholes really work because how they really work doesn't influence our lives and isn't something that's been "a given" for thousands of years. It's something still being explored and defined and (among the laymen) imagined.

So I get where you're coming from, but I hope you can see there's a difference between taking artistic liberties and blatantly ignoring known science for game mechanic and progression purposes. That said, I assume this is only temporary - or that it will be explained or amended later.

Personally whenever reality conflicts with Starbound, I usually write it off as one of the special nuances of a Matter Manipulator. "Trees grow overnight?" "Well, if you manipulate the seed matter, you can accelerate the growth rate just by planting them with the Matter Manipulator!" See? Now everything is right in the universe.

 

Because I am knowledgeable regarding chemistry and there is a line which I am mentally unwilling to cross which involves rewriting my knowledge of one of the most commonly used structural materials in the world.

There is more to it than that (considering I also have discussed my issues with the other aspects of Pleased Giraffe's "progression changes"), but Kirumaru is correct.

 

At what point though does it become just too much. Your furnace you're using is made from stone and a camp fire, no other fuel was added (as per the recipe). An average sized camp fire produces temperatures in the 1500F range at it's hottest point. So let's say you've got a vessel that can withstand said temperature which you could use for smelting ore (which isn't specified or created by the player), that's still 250F short of melting silver (much less copper or gold which have higher melting points). I guess we'd need a bellows (which is absent from the sprites and isn't created by the player) to provide more oxygen, to produce more heat, to reach the melting point to produce the ingots (of which we have no molds)... You see where I'm going with this, I hope.

So what is your solution? Like with your other criticism you've yet to offer a viable alternative? Would you add more types of low level ore, maybe swap back to coal or oil, what?

 

Yeah, mining can get boring after awhile, but what if there were other ways to earn the ore that added variety? What if there were cool ways to earn ores like doing missions or flat out purchasing them? One of the things I like about Starbound and Terraria are that coal/slime is always used even late game. Coal/slime are used for torches all game long. Coal used to also be used for fuel and stuff, but I won't get into that rant here.

I think a better idea for CF would be to stop looking for ways to help people not go the extra mile but instead look for ways to make people WANT to go the extra mile. A balance of intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards.

 

I believe I have outlined at exactly what point it becomes too much.

Iron and Copper do not make Steel. This is too much to believe without some kind of in-game joke or text about it. If the tooltip or investigation info of a steel bar said, "Just combine iron and coal... or was it oil? Oh, well, let's just use copper." I'd laugh and realize the devs know this is ridiculous and are able to joke about it. Because no such amendment to known physics exists within the game, it's much harder to swallow.

The campfire is made of wood, which is a fuel. Yes, campfires don't produce enough heat to smelt most metals, but I can suspend that disbelief because fire in a furnace can. In my mind, a furnace isn't a handful of cobblestone loosely gathered around a campfire. It's the act of building a working furnace using the materials of stone and fire. I don't think a little campfire is burning in there. There's enough information for my brain to make a rational leap to the next step - which is that the furnace IS hot enough to smelt iron.

Hey, man, torches burn on air-less worlds, which has bothered me since the very first time I visited one.
As a result, I simply do not use torches on airless worlds (formerly known as moons).
The game allows it. It annoys me.
I circumvent it by going largely out of my way to make alternative lights, or just stick to my flashlight.

There are certain physic-fails that bother me, and others that are more forgivable and the distinction may seem trivial, but obviously there is some guideline that dictates what is believable and what isn't believable - which may well vary from person to person, but I think most of us can agree there are some things we simply cannot believe. It ruins an entire immersive experience in film, game and book.[DOUBLEPOST=1439934253][/DOUBLEPOST]I thought about it for 5 minutes and I'd like to add...

If you could smelt iron on the campfire, I'd have a serious issue with that.
It requires that logical step from "unbelievable" to "believable" because a furnace can smelt metal, but a campfire cannot.

 

I don't think that way, we'll have to agree to disagree. Maybe I just don't care about feeling "immersed" in the experience or I'm just too jaded by seeing the other side of game development too often. I don't (and most likely won't ever) see this as an issue, much like calling the airless biome the "moon" biome, or having golden pickaxes work better than copper/silver, or having torches burn on airless worlds. It just seems way too nit-picky to be important.

 

Well, it was an interesting discussion for a minute.

It was fun to explore the lines between what is and isn't acceptable inside the realms of believably.
Agreeing to disagree kind of puts out the proverbial spark of conversation and debate, though.

I'll probably always call it a Moon biome, just like I'll always consider Pluto a planet (even if it is miniature!).
Another thing my brain doesn't like is take-back-sies!

 

Right, I'm just saying that DF sets the bar. I do understand the desire for real alloys to have a somewhat plausible formula.

Though it could be interesting if I had to locate a layer of flux stone to make steel in StarBound and if there wasn't just 'stone', but granite, orthoclase, churt, microcline, marble, chalk, conglomorate, shale, etc. and dirts became mixes of loam, silt and sand.

(Why yes, I did help them figure out what the solid density should be for things like 'loamy soil'....)

 

Don't confuse complexity OR depth for quantity. Really, if the goal is to make (an example) "angel bars" and it takes 4 steel bars (2 copper and 2 iron ore,) 4 coal, 8 logs, and 1 glass, that isn't depth - it's a grocery list. Having a player race around looking for this stuff isn't making the game any deeper than simply asking them to find 4 angel ore per bar.

What adds depth to the game are the mini dungeons, unique enemies and weapons, exploration, etc. Actual game play mechanics and discoveries amidst performing the simple and mind numbing task of looking for ore in cavern walls. The one thing to remember is that crafting materials will always be a grocery list in the end. How people acquire them might be different, but if acquiring each and every one is essentially "dig in the dirt" all you've done is ask the player to look for multiple resources for no better reason than to look for multiple resources while performing the same mundane task. This grocery list can be trimmed down to a few essentials that can cover everything and no one's going to bat a lash except the people that don't quite get what depth really is. "Less is more" in this case. Picking up ore is best as a perk to exploring the underground, even if that ore is the intent of the player going underground.

 

I agree for the most part; in the sense that having to go seek out resources just to make resources is not depth. You listed a few example of depth, but you left out building, which is a HUGE reason a lot of us play. When it comes to building, more options, more variety, more blocks, walls, decor, etc is very much depth. My point...nixing lower tier resources and streamlining aren't mutually exclusive. I'm all for streamlining if a resource is going to remain useless.

You mentioned in your first post how you pass up copper/iron/silver/gold. They may be useless to you (to anyone on stable really), but that doesn't mean they need removed. Instead they can be useful for builders. You can continue to ignore them at no consequence to you at all, but for a builder who wants a Steampunk themed city, it's depth (see the copper building stuff in the last livestream...awesome!). So yes, essentially we agree that quantity does not equal depth. I'm all for nixing resources they don't plan to have uses for outside of being one-off resources to craft a mat you'll only use once. Or nixing any redundant resources (tin/lead in Terraria being the exact same as copper/iron). EQ2 did this amazingly well. When they first started you had to craft mats to craft mats to craft mats to finally craft your item. Initially it was "wow this is a deep crafting system". Then it quickly turned into "this is so so so tedious". They revamped the system, you could still craft all your final items...they just nixed out all the mat-making-mats crap in between.

We're basically saying the same thing ("Unless they're planning on alternative uses for resources like oil, uranium, etc. (the alloy creation resources) we just have extra resources eating up space.") I just gave an example of alternative uses for copper/iron/silver/gold outside using them in alloy creation. An example that provides depth for builders.

 

I don't think depth for builders is good enough unless the reward for building with those mats has a greater incentive. If you need a special kind of alloy to build some furniture that'll attract a specific kind of NPC that sells a super cool something then that's great. If it's souly a block skin then the only people who want particular kinds of ore are those who currently want a particular aesthetic in their base. If it's purely aesthetic, then those skins can be locked away behind treated versions of other resources, by that I mean like how there's no steel ore, it has to be made from a combination. If it's something you'd need to get out of the ground like copper you could make it with some kind of alchemy out of something else.

But really, they should extend the lifetime of stuff in the ground.

 

I sense you are not a builder, friend.

I get what you're saying, but for a builder building is its own reward.
If they want to add a new texture of wood (Log Cabins) I don't need the log cabins to "do anything."
I just need to build them on forest moons and populate them with Ewoks and I'm happy.
They don't need to produce an Ewok costume for me or anything. They just need to look cool in the theme I'm trying to build.

Vandrick is saying to add depth to building (rather than adventure progression, or character progression) you just need to make more combination of parts available to the builder which really is quantity over quality. The quality issue would be more like if you needed to chop down 10 different types of trees to produce "red" and "blue" and "green" (etc) rather than just being able to paint them like a normal person would. That's a quality of life and unnecessary quantity of resources to do the same function issue.

 

I get it, but the thing is, you have to compromise with the diggers about inventory. For builders you want skin options, that's reasonable, but what's also reasonable is that the digger doesn't want a whole inventory slot dedicated to yet another kind of dirt, for all they care. But, if you make that new kind of dirt have some appeal beyond aesthetics then diggers feel alright about carrying it around.

 

In truth, a single resource can cover for everything in the game if it were coded as such. Your list of crafts is literally a vendor shop, with ores and woods as the currency.

I wouldn't call extra materials existing for the sake of more constructions "depth" so much as just "gated options that solely exist for taste" but then this teeters too closely towards arguing semantics and really is a null point to the topic of actual game play depth of additional resources, so I'll say no more towards that subject. What I will say is that requiring multiple ores to make hybrid ingots cleverly gets players to mine both ores with urgency and so without thinking about it, they may find themselves to have the resources to make multiple themes of furniture and blocks. This didn't really happen with oil being a requirement for steel, even if copper were to have furniture in the current stable build. Game play/progression goals and building work in concert with each other on the unstable build in this regard.

 

The builder doesn't either! Cause all that dirt turns into is packed dirt that all looks the same!

It's funny because what I think builders want is more variety of things to build and customize, but what the game already has is all kinds of dirt and rock that do absolutely nothing but are reskins of other dirt and rock. I like that some planets have brown dirt and some have green dirt, because variety of planets is neat - but also ... I end up just throwing most of that dirt in the garbage bin before leaving a planet, cause no reason to drag green dirt all around the universe. There's no shortage of dirt.

 

Progression has been gutted IMO. There's no complexity, there's no hunt for resources, and mining what you need to advance takes less than 5 minutes in any random cave near the surface. The game is one step away from removing ores and mining completely, and just giving you items for free every time you kill a boss.

Iron + Copper = Steel purely to make it faster, to remove as many steps as possible from progression, not to make copper more useful. Streamlining.