The Mining System, and why certain armor types will never be worn.

As it stands any pick can mine any ore. While I'm not apposed to this it does have the tendency to create this scenario:

While mining for Copper (tier 1) you simultaneously find Iron (tier 2), silver (tier3), gold (tier4), mining all you find. Because, copper and iron rarity is similar, by the time you have enough copper to make tier 1 armor, it's highly possible you have enough iron to turn said copper armor directly into it's upgraded armor version. Therefore skipping wearing the copper armor at all and essentially under utilizing that content. And this could happen at any tier really.

To prevent this from happening the mining system could simply only allow a given pick to mine one tier higher ore. That way you would never have enough of the next tier to skip directly over the current tier and thus be utilizing gear for that tier up until you mined enough for the next tier and so on.

Alternative solutions could include:

A rarity adjustment which could make it much more likely that you find enough copper to make your full set long before you find your iron set. But ultimately you could still be well on your way to skipping through the Copper armor entirely. Or any given tier

Monsters could have resources, like leather for instance that could also be tiered against that monsters difficulty and thus fighting monsters would be required between each tier, making it more likely that a person would desire to wear that tiers armor set so as not to die.

Or maybe nobody cares if you skip some sets? Let me know what you guys think.

 

I agree, the one limiting factor I have seen though may be how many pixels you have, but nonetheless I think each level pickaxe should be limited to what ores you can mine.

 

Currently the rate of ore spawning has been turned up to a much higher level than you can expect in the finished game. This is to allow players to run up the tiers faster and test out things like the new combat balance. In the finished product ore will be less abundant.
Therefor later on will come a game version where people use copper armor simply because they don't have everything to make iron yet. It is a matter of scarcity, and will be balanced eventually.

 

I'm not a big fan of materials being leveled and having a magic invulnerability modifier if you're using the wrong tool, so making it take longer for low level tools to mine higher level stuff would be my preferred trade-off, if anything along these lines is deemed necessary.

 

i would like to point out that you need 8 iron bars to make a anvil to even make copper armor

 

I have to agree, it's frustrating to just not be able to mine a lucky find at all. If it takes me longer to mine it, I'll spend the time, but having it immune to anything but a certain level of tool (whether I have the ability at the time to craft something better or not) feels tedious and frustrating

 

I agree with this.

 

I agree and I think this issue illustrates a fundamental concern with the direction of the game. The question of 'why wear copper when I could just wear iron armor' applies to the rest of the game as well. Albeit that's the purpose of a beta, but I think using old hat solutions (ie Diablo-esque progression) is the wrong direction for a game of this scope. Somewhere there is an artist out there that created the copper armor that no one uses but I think this same question can be applied to the rest of Starbound as a whole. Why stay in the first sector (filled with more stars and planets than I could ever explore) when the monsters are too easy, the items aren't useful, on and on.

Currently they have an amazing framework for a game that is beautiful, ground work for some really special. I 'skip sets' because it's easy to skip sets and the way the game currently progresses, I'm encouraged to skip sets to get access to 'better' gear kill harder monsters etc etc. Simple progression isn't enough. Armor, weapons, sectors, they need to be set apart from each other by something more than just levels. We should have clear, simple incentives to wear copper armor, use a dagger instead of a hammer, stay in the first sector. Gall's law comes to mind frequently when playing Starbound or reading the forums...

I realize that I'm not offering any solutions, but my suggestion would be to completely ignore an 'all encompassing system for progression' in favor of small meaningful incentives for each piece of the game for fear of creating enormous amounts of content, however procedurally generated, that are simply ignored and unappreciated.

Related to this particular post specifically. I suggest that copper is more common that iron, copper can only be used to repair copper. Copper works as a moderate level armor but only barely. Copper should be useful and I should want to use it because it's better than nothing and it's everywhere so it's easy to repair. Maybe iron makes me use energy when I swim, makes me jump slightly shorter. Maybe leather makes less noise and doesn't aggro monsters as easily. Copper conducts so I take extra damage from electric attacks, etc. There are other ways to balance items in the game without resorting to fiddling with numbers.

 

I think the strength of armor sets/pieces should work like this.

example: 20 gold bars + 5 silver bars(1/4) + leather = Golden Silver Cuirass

tier 1: cloth
tier 2: cloth + 1/4 leather
tier 3: leather + 1/4 cloth
tier 4: leather + 1/4 copper
tier 5: copper + leather
tier 6: copper + 1/4 iron + leather
tier 7: Iron + 1/4 copper + leather
tier 8: Iron + leather
tier 9: Iron + 1/4 silver + leather
tier 10: Silver + 1/4 iron + leather
tier 11 and etc repeats.

Cloth and leather armor of varying degrees can fit anywhere in-between tiers and may use other common items for the main materials. Trading defense for speed, energy, ranged attack power or other effects.

 

I agree more types of world gen ores should be able to be fount maybe some ore that is harmful to carry around like magma blocks that are still hot ore uranium for fuel ? Just to add more variety to the mining process.

 

atm you can just farm leather to skip copper and iron, because the trooper armour is the same but gives you the ability to explore cold snow worlds, and i would like to see the ability to upgrade your pickaxe to copper and iron first instead of going from stone to silver directly.
also i would like to see upgrades in the trooper armour sinds later on it's armour isn't enough to protect you on planets in the beta sector on cold planets.

 

I also was wondering where the copper and iron pickaxe's are.

I think the stretch between beginning ore and armor isn't streamlined enough. The early game feels very rushed and I would like to see low level cloth, leather, copper, and iron items last a little longer. This could be through set bonus, or being able to augment them through farming, rare item drops, or upgrades out of the 3d printer/merchants.

 

Oh yes, true. The fact is even with that additional cost in Iron I still had enough the moment I made copper armor to turn it directly into iron armor.

as for materials having a "magic invulnerability modifier" An ideal scenario would be that the materials are organized by hardness. So that you can't mine Iron with a copper pick because it's softer than the iron. However Gold frustrates the issue since it's so soft.
And I totally agree that there is a larger issue here with the way some of the content is so skip-able etc.

One possible solution could be a leveling system for characters. Might give you a reason to stop and smell the roses at a few more planets etc on the way. You could gain levels by fighting / mining / building / exploring. Every time you discover a settlement or learn a new codex etc. Just a thought though. Then you could mine all the ore you wanted but you might need a certain character level to craft the armor. Thus giving you ample time to wear lower tier armors. This could be the wrong approach though if the average player is not interested in this. But I just think there are too many ways right now to rush through the content and miss the grandeur of the game especially early on.

I don't really know what the exact solution should be either but currently there is no reason to explore more than maybe 3 planets in the Alpha sector before moving on.

There is one additional use for copper, I think at some point you can make wire with it. Though I haven't messed with this myself yet.

 

I don't think levels are the way to go. If I can hunt down an armor mod, or grind one out through mining or defeating enemies it would be a nice way to iron out unlucky ore streaks and hold onto armor/weapons a little longer.

 

maybe if you could build a refinery for dirt blocks and stuff that gives you random pixel's , coal , copper and iron ore for it would be a nice idea.
buildign it form copperbars ironbars and some coal this could help the beginners.

 

I would like to see many units of dirt being used for some sort of terraforming device rather then being chest and trash fodder. Something like 3000 units of green dirt to change all the dirt of a planet to green, or something like that.

 

I think a big problem with the system that you are suggesting is that you have to have the previous tier pickaxe to make the next tier. Which would make it really difficult to get access to higher tier content. You would be wasting allot of time just grinding out the raw materials needed to build the lower tier pickaxes before you could even get access to higher tier. I can foresee it almost being required that you carry one of each pickaxe to spread out the durability so that you don't waste a higher tier pickaxe's durability on lower tier ore. The constant switching between pickaxes alone would drive me insane. If they were to implement what you are suggesting, they would either have to remove the durability from the pickaxes or make it so that you don't have to have the previous tier pickaxes to make the next tier. Otherwise, it is going to make mining really frustrating to do.

 

Firstly "you have to have the previous tier pickaxe to make the next tier." That is the whole point. If the game let you grab the last ore first so that you didn't have to "grind" then there would be no "gameplay". You'd just skip half the content. The whole point is to get people to appreciate the content step by step without skipping over huge swaths of it. If the mining feels too grindy or tedious than those are sideline issues that need to be fixed by adding more interesting aspects to the mining process and more content to explore underground during mining.

Sometimes when a part of the game feels too grindy it can actually be because it is too simple. Making that system more robust can cause it to be more rewarding and so rather than skipping through all the content so as to not feel like a grind it could help you appreciate that content instead.

As for the multiple picks thing that doesn't make sense because higher tier picks are currently more efficient for everything they do. Also since any higher tier pick could mine anything below it would not necessitate using multiples so no need for pickaxe switching.

If only there were a game that demonstrated successful use of this system? Oh wait, it's every mining game ever except this one. Minecraft, and Terraria to start with.

 

I think you misunderstood me when I said "have the previous tier pickaxe to make the next tier." Each pickaxe (from copper on up) have the previous tier pickaxe in their build recipe. Meaning that in order to make a gold pickaxe, have to fist build a stone pickaxe, then a copper pickaxe, then a silver pickaxe.

Neither Terraria or Minecraft require that. The system you were suggesting is a nerfed version of the Minecraft mining system. Building higher tier pickaxes would be so expensive and time consuming that using it on lower tier ore or blocks would be a huge waste of resources. But since you need to have the lower tier ore to build the next higher tier pickaxe, it only makes sense that you bring along an additional lower tier pickaxes to mine that lower tier ore.

Mincraft can get away with durability on their pickaxes because there are only 4 useful pickaxes and each pickaxe doesn't have the previous tier pickaxe as recipe requirement. So having a pickaxe break isn't that big of a deal since making wood, stone, and iron pickaxes is super easy and the only thing you need a diamond pickaxe for is obsidian. Terraria has over 20 pickaxes (not including drills), but they can get away with that because their pickaxes don't have durability. So once you get the next pickaxe tier, you can stop using the lower tiers.

The way the system in Starbound works now is that any pickaxe can mine any ore, so upgrading the pickaxe is more for convenience then a requirement.

 

IMO, the "previous tier tool as a recipe component" isn't bad but should be tweaked.

The first time you build a new tier tool, the previous tier tool is a firm requirement.
That makes the recipe easy to read and understand.

When you craft the new tool, this recipe is lost forever and you gain a new recipe which only lists all base components.
Yes, this can be quite long but in order to build a replacement tool, you don't have to craft this, then that, then the next tool...
One list of resources. No mess, no fuss.



@ Philbot3030

You want a stricter gating mechanism.
In what amounts to an open world game, that goes against the grain. =)

As for armour types: Right now they have very few stats, making it pretty much impossible to balance all of them to be useful.

However, there are other possibilities.
For instance, the leather armour (if wearing the full suit) grats you an infinite use grappling hook. (with a cooldown)
Copper armour includes an always-on flashlight.
And so on.

If the "bonus skill" of an armour type is interesting enough then there is a reason to wear something other than iron armour.