The difficulty is through the roof

I just dont understand how people are complainign about difficulty and progession when its 75% not finished, just enjoy the bits you CAN play and leave the high end testing to those who have the will and brains to bash through the brick walls

 

I don't want everyone to have a uniform experience--I said there was some merit to suggestions that would create more uniformity with relation to the difficulty of early game.

A nice middle ground would be to implement variable starting parameters that allow a given player to tweak their starting locations. I don't know how that would work given that coordinates are seeds that reliably generate the same environments--thus the ability to share coordinates in a meaningful fashion. Given the sheers number of potential seeds, however (i seem to recall their being as of right now somewhere in the area of 14 quadrillion), I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to allow a new player to specify that they want to start on a planet with X environment and Y features and so on.

Also I heartily resent the idea that a game explaining its mechanics is in any way "dumbing down." The difficulty of a game should ideally be due to the gameplay proper, not the abstruseness of the interface or the unintuitive nature of various mechanics.

 

I hear you, I love DF but it would be nice to have a little more direction and explanation, but that is also an example of the extreme. All I'm saying is that it can go too far in the other direction and that is where you get the hand holding and spoonfeeding that we have seen time and again in popular games over the last few decades and I thought(and hoped) that Starbound was part of the new wave of awesome indie titles that are what they are, unapologetically, like Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain etc..

I do agree though that having variable starting params would be an excellent idea. Don't Starve has a similar mechanic in it's world creation that works brilliantly if you want that added difficulty or even a casual experience.