My fellow Starbounders! It's time for yet another of my suggestions. It's been awhile since I've posted one, but an idea has grown in the moments between the waking land and the dreaming one. So, in haste I scribbled some notes and numbers. For most of my games, beyond game-play, I look for immersion. I believe having some form of hierarchy in the monsters would help significantly with the immersion on the worlds. However, this suggestion isn't just for having one monster attack another because he's a racist (or whatever reason monsters use to commit selective genocide... Survival isn't an option?) This mod includes the player in the food chain, probably somewhere near the bottom, since we're only as dangerous as our tools. Yes: I understand Starbound is in very early beta, but this is the best time for feedback and ideas! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this suggestion and as always (unless i just get too lazy) I encourage discussion and suggestions from you guys! One last shout out to Chucklefish because we love them! OKAY READYSETGO READ! Yes, that includes you Florans Description: Starbound has infinite possibilities. It has near infinite planets, monsters, and environments. With so many possibilities it would be nice to have some form of order in the world. By order I mean pecking order. For Monsters. To eat players and each other. As it stands right now, there are no monsters I've seen (besides the Heroic/Mini-boss ones) that frighten me in the slightest. I feel like I'm on top of the food chain already for each of these planets and to be quite honest, I want to be scared of something. It's one of the most exciting things to me when my buddy is like "Daitenshi... Dude... What is that? What is THAT!? OH MY GOD IT WANT'S TO CONSUME MY JUICY FLESH!!" And it did. He died. However, there was a goal then. A side quest for revenge if you will. We teamed up and tried again. Spoiler alert: We died. So it became a mission to absolutely destroy this monster that has made compost from our bones. We no longer were gearing up to just to get to the next tier. We were gearing up for the sole desire to decimate this horrifying creature and everything it stands for. Then, hours later as we stood upon the destroyed remains of our past nemesis. We felt damn Good. This is what I want from Starbound. I want to be a space explorer! I want to survive the ruthless infinite worlds. I want to Land on a planet, doing the run-of-the-mill "Mine and Dash" we do with planets we don't care for too much, and I want to run into some gigantic Space Dragon Satan Boar that hates my existence and (without being "one-shot-one-kill" overpowered) Beats me in a fight. Luckily for everyone I'm going to explain how I believe this will be possible. I'll explain the Food Chain and monsters that could fall within each section, possible creatures that a player can't kill the normal way but effects how the planet is played on, and more! The Food Chain: The food chain will, in my rendition, have 6 Sections: F Class, D Class, C Class, B Class, A Class and X Class. F-class is the weakest and poses practically zero threat to the player while X Class cannot be killed by normal weapons and must be killed by alternative means. Consider "baby" versions of monster one class lower and fully evolved monsters one class higher. F is the lowest. A is the highest. X is special. As pointed out in comments below, a C-Class in Alpha sector will be weaker than a C-Class in Gamma Sector. Monster Strength and difficulty will scale with sector. Thank You mawihtec F-Class < D-Class < C-Class < B-Class < A-Class < X-Class F-Class Lifeforms D-Class Lifeforms are the fodder of planets these monsters would include things like, Sheep, Chicken, Nerfs, Cows and whatever other "Space Livestock" Could exist. They hate nothing except the plant life (sorry Florans) and are there to be used. Everything eats them. Having this class enables the players to have a place to start for supplies. This also enables the players to have an option to capture them for produce. Nothing more to say. This class is the "Farmable Class" The only reason they're alive is their high reproductive rates. D-Class Lifeforms C-Class Lifeforms are the ankle-biters of the Environment. They pose a threat to the player, but not so much that they're scary. Small monsters would fall into this class and would be far more threatening in large numbers. Players would start off killing this class for money and resources if necessary. They are the easiest out classes that pose a threat to the player. C-Class Lifeforms B-Class lifeforms are a moderate threat to players. I'd IMO say 75% of what we have now fall into this category. They pose a threat but really don't offer much beyond getting annoying after awhile. As the player progresses these monsters will be less and less of a challenge. B-Class Lifeforms A-Class lifeforms are high threat monsters. They will always pose a small challenge and thus, will be less common. These Monsters are still common enough to encounter fairly often. They would be the "Veteran" monsters in the world A-Class Lifeforms S-Class lifeforms are the "Boss Monsters" you would find in the world They will always pose a challenge until the player progresses tiers. They are scary. They are meant to give you mild reoccurring nightmares. X-Class Monsters X-Class lifeforms can, well, define a planet merely by their existence. The best example I can think of for these monsters are the Sandworms from Dune. They would be Scary and essentially a World boss. They would be really rare, since they are so frightening and dangerous, however it would be possible somehow to kill them down the road and that would be a stellar achievement. I think these would be excellent additions to the game, we're space explorers/Survivors. We should start down the food chain. Added Monster AI Behaviors: Adding some new monster AI Behaviors would liven up the worlds. We would be explorers setting foot in fragile ecosystems and totally screwing with it. These would add much needed depth and immersion. Carnivores, Herbivores or Omnivores Adding this classification is essentially a way to determine who will attack whom. Unless provoked or threatened, why would a herbivore monster attack the player? However, Carnivorous monsters would attack the player, and monsters of lesser class. It adds an ecosystem and an order to the worlds. Herds/Packs/Pods/Murders/Gaggles Adding some form of herd mentality will allow for some monsters to survive, much like real life. Should a player attack a herd, the strongest of the heard will jump in to help while the weaker ones will flee. Just makes sense doesn't it? Survival of the Strongest Have some of the more violent monsters vie for "Alpha Male" of the pack. Monsters Grow and Age This will allow for monsters to have their own life cycle and not always be simply a "baby octo-gater-mouse" Doesn't have to occur on screen. But it would be important for farming and Livestock as to not simply get instant meat and or eggs. This is more for player owned creatures like cows or chickens. Just to add a flow to the process. As pointed out, there would be a limit to the amount of a certain type of monster. For example only 20 F-Class monsters, just to have some form of limitation from the natural monster generator. Alright I'm sure I will think of more, however this is it for now Please leave feedback and I'll adjust accordingly. Thanks for the read everyone!
I like a lot of this, and would definitely prefer it over the system of monsters being determined by depth and time of day (although depth should still be a factor for different types as some creatures do not go above the surface). The main issue I see is trying to make it work. Currently monsters just spawn if within a certain range of you, but things like Alpha Male and Herds don't really work with that system, as they spawn and despawn too frequently. If they changed it so the animals are generated based on the "seed" when generating a universe, that fixes those problems, but a set amount of monsters would die too quickly. What it needs is a mixture of those approaches. Animals generate with the planet, but each Class of life has a minimum and maximum number of creatures for that class. For example, D Class life could have a minimum of 20 creatures and maximum of 60 creatures. If it drops below the minimum it will spawn more of that Class of life, usually near herds that already exist (to simulate breeding). But if there are ever 60 Class D creatures, they will not spawn under any circumstance. That would make this system work better in my opinion, I would even say it is necessary for a realistic ecosystem. One other change I would make is to make so herd mentality for species to be percent based, with Class playing a factor. Lower classes rely more on each other for survival so they have a higher chance of having herd AI. But higher classes are able to defend themselves better so some of those species will be more likely to be alone or in pairs (just a creature and its mate and/or offspring).
Two things I'd change. 1.) They way you've got the tiers labeled is a bit counterintuitive D > C > B > A > S > X ...it's like the alphabet fell into a blender. Why is A better than B but worse than S? I'd suggest making the weakest a "Class 1" critter and the ankle biters a "Class 2" etc., possibly keeping X as a class for 'special' mobs. This would also allow for infinite expansion; they could make up to class 20, or 100, or, you get the point. 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > ....... > X 2.) Scrap the age thing. Mobs pretty much only exist while they're on screen - they're not like the villages populated with humanoid NPC's; they're basically infinitely replicating filler. There's no attachment to them, and when you beam up to your ship, the critters that were around you a second ago are gone forever. So, there's no reason to give them a lifespan, cuz they're so extremely temporary in the first place. Other than that, all sounds bueno to me!
1). Makes sense. For some reason I was thinking back to Yu Yu Hakusho's Demon Class list.. I figured having it limited would allow for there to be consistency between tiers. I did adjust it to match the US grading system. Simply because that's where I am from. Should seem to make a bit more sense. 2) As for Aging it was more for the "Farming" livestock and such. Monsters already evolve when they are with they player, or it is planned. It's just to have some form of flow/time between having eggs and full grown chickens. I agree. I do try and avoid too many specifics though. Programmers will do that
1) Not familiar with the Yu Yu thing, or the US grading system... which, uh... I should probably know, since I've never stepped foot out of the US '>_> ...we have a grading system for critters? Anywho, I was shooting for simplicity more than anything else, but I suppose one question would be whether or not these figures actually make it in game, or would it be more a behind-the-scenes thing in the game code? It seemed like you were trying to set the tiers up for some kind of pokedex like thing that we could prod an animal with and it'd be like "That's a Class 15 Space-Balrog ...fly, you fool!!" - but if it's just a code thing, then I guess it doesn't really matter anyway 2) Oh, gotcha. Yea that makes more sense. +1
Maybe replace the word "Class" with "Rank"? Then you'd be following the "S-Rank" naming convention a lot of games use (RPGs in particular). Also your headers appear to have been slightly mislabed? Possibly when the S was inserted?
i like the sound of the idea i agree not so much with the aging thing as they are temp except poss for the farming class animals the ranking up to s-Class reminds me of ffvii as that was the uber chocobo but i am still smiling at Daitenshis comment ".it's like the alphabet fell into a blender" but overall i am in favour of it
Is this supposed to scale with the current threat-level system? So C-Class creatures are more powerful in late-game than early (but does not necessarily pose a greater threat to the player). Or would this be a replacement of the current system perhaps?
i would hope that it would scale dependant on which system you were in so an alpha system C class would be proportianally weaker than say a gamma system C class
High view density for insanely low and simplistic comment density. This is borderlining along Bethesda's radiant AI, and would be rather hard to pull off in Starbound HOWEVER would be insanely rewarding. Yes like idea, yes it needs improvement. With time I will likely have suggestions on how exactly to improve.
Thank you for your support! But sheesh that's a large picture. Perhaps drop it in a spoiler for me Please?
I wasn't sure how to do that .-. so I dropped it in a quote post. Apparently that works too, cause it doesn't show it in full resolution until you click on it.
So my first improvement comment would be- likely scrap the Alpha male concept on this one. The growth is good and the diet orientation is good, but I just think the coding for the alpha male would be overly cumbersome and time and data consuming. I'm not a coder though and the little bit of code I've tinkered with has taught me, if anything... that I know nothing about coding.
If anything, I'm mostly excited about the concept of a giant sand worm erupting out of the ground with horrifying death screeches on a desert planet and running for dear life to escape it.
I don't think it would be that hard if you have the herd thing set up. If the game already identifies a herd it just needs to pick a monster at random to make the alpha, which would just set a flag to true. Then if that creature dies or is captured it chooses a new one from that herd.
