The erchius ghost is not pants-wettingly scary and I hate that

The erchius ghost is one of my favorite features in starbound. It makes you conserve fuel, not because fuel isn't fun to get, or is actually difficult to get, but because you're actually scared of getting it.


Well, you should be.


The erchius ghost is, for all intents and purposes, a slower-moving version of a water balloon that was castrated with a pair of pattern safety scissors (you know the ones, they make little zig-zag patterns where you cut) during puberty. That's all it really is. It's not that hard to avoid if you skim the surface, and even when it gets fast enough to catch up to you, you already have more than enough fuel than you really need.

What if the ghost was, say, a random event that forced you to drop what you were doing and book it out of there? What if there were multiple tiers of ghost that got progressively harder to avoid, more powerful, and scarier looking as you get more erchius (sorta like how it gets faster, only less walk-away-until-you-have-to-beam-up-y). What if the ghost didn't look like you dunked the average Walmart customer in a vat of magenta paint and it looked more looming, ominous, and dread-inducing? What if it prevented beaming up in a certain radius from it? I'd love for the devs to find a way to make it seem a lot more like an inescapable force of pure dread that you can't avoid due to the necessity of fuel.

Also, nerf engineers dude. I want an excuse to be spooked. Maybe add some moon-specific items and structures or somethin' if you like not having to use ten brazilian kilos of purple stuff.

 

w/ this suggestion, i'd love for there to be a neutral option, as i do want fuel, but most people could buy it from the terramart anyways?

maybe there should also be periods where the prices for fuel go up due to miners (like the erchius horror mission) getting scared of these ghosts? just a small thought.

 

Few fun things to try;
If a player leaves with very little fuel (Say, >500 units, a little ghost will appear on their ship, spawning in the cabin and not leaving until it's done say, 1/4 of the players health, whereby it will fade away.

And while on the moon, there will be an escalation with every such and such amount of fuel collected whereby the ghost will begin getting scarier - Physically growing limbs or the expression changing - Mouth opening wider, more teeth, IT style. The background noise gets more echoey, tinny. You start hearing sounds like your character is getting hurt, effects on the screen as if you're swimming and drowning in an Erchius sea etc. You see bubbles coming off of your character to go with it.
As if you're hallucinating, or your mind is being fed these ideas as the ghost hunts for you.

 

Yeah, i suppose more tiers of erchius ghosts would be nice, still, the first time you get to see it it is somewhat of a spook, i mean, you're alone in a small cave, with a thing that can't die, can't be stoped, slowly chasing you and draining your life away, and if you're playing with a friend that used the staff that creates a small box to trap people inside, well...all i'm going to say is, it was very fun last time i did it

 

I like the idea of it getting harder to get with different ghosts on the different tier systems like the cold, radioactive or hot system, but many casual players might disagree on that so if it would be added it would probably have to be added on survival.