The slowly dying sandbox

because koala was the truth of a huge and endlessly unique sandbox.

 

I remember it having so little substance that i got bored very quickly.

I wouldnt say no to Variety like in the Koala days, but in 1.0 i feel like i have more things i can actively do beyond exploring.

 

which are? aside from housing tenants and NPC's giving you quests and rents there is I think nothing really new except also expandin gyour ship. Also challaneg rooms, but seriously, they aren't a challange. YOu ahev ships and overbikes, which simply replace the old techs makign you go over planets quick. so that basically evens itself out.

Koala had spawners for various NPC's they jszt didn't pay rent.
koala had hunger and heat.
Koala had mechs

So both differ int heir explorability, btu the most other stuff isn't new, the last 2 years have not brought many new features. There were just a laod of changes on things added and removed.

 

The hunger and Heat mechanics werent for me, though i can see why they are enjoyable, i just didnt enjoy them.

The Colony and Crew are big parts of the game for me. Spawners (if i am remembering them right) would not scratch the same itch as the current colony system does, because the tenant is tied to the things inside the building you place the deed. The crew system i enjoy travelling and helping out locals. It feels good to me to find an apex apartments and "save" one of the NPCs from the Miniknog. Its just that little extra bit that makes me enjoy the game more.

Challenge rooms are really silly. Spike ball tech makes them pretty pointless.

My main attraction to the game is the Colony and Villages.

I feel that you and I ultimately want different experiences from the game. I am pretty satisfied with mine right now. Hopefully improvements come that will give you the experience you want and we can both enjoy it.

 

I am a bit unhappy with the new spawner system because they don't allow families, every spawner needs an own room and they are quite big. which means they visually disturb a lot of the builded esthetics. Would be nice if CF made a 1 tile sized spawner. because all the spwaner shows is 3 states, the X the present and the normal one. That could also be expressed by a one tile sized one. The normal NPC housings are a lot more beatiful due to not havign that ugly spawner everywhere. Imagien all the apex complexes you come across would have one of these spawners per inhabitant. that would look very ugly. The old spawners were one shot items that didn't visually disturb the area. Also the old ones made "protecting" your villagers more interesting as getting one killed meant ti to be goen forever and not getting it simply respawned.

Would also be nice if CF entirely gives us one shot spanwers again with inhabitanst giving us more rent but being able to die forever. They could make indicators of them being unhappy or having a gift via a similar signal above their head as a quets item.

Also CF said at some points rent shall be related to the rooms quality, atm it is simply a droptable with % chance based on biome.

The current system doesn't itch me as I consider it half done and made very boring compared to what was planned and visually really annoying..

 

In fact you can have 'families'. Just build a house with more than one room (since NPCs wander off from their rooms you won't end up with bunch of NPCs sitting only in their rooms).

 

that just multiplies the problem, as this means multiple ugly spawners in this house. Also they consume quite a lot room, so making a family of 6 together with th entire decoration makes suddenly require some larger houses

 

Well, family of 6 six deserves a bit larger house

 

not if you generate a slum like urban area Not everyone can afford shiny huge houses and stuff.

 

Can't disagree with this criticism.

I can only say I'm getting a good chunk of enjoyment out of it right now.

 

Bumping this for justice. I was -so- excited for the 1.0 release after reading what was added. What the patch notes didn't include was what was removed. Every single character is now a Big Damn Hero that are the last of the space police. You can't even leave the very start world until doing the first mission, which you can get to in less than 10 minutes now, since the asteroid mining station now apparently has air, and you don't need to have gear you actually need to survive there to go. Hell, You don't need to pick up a single piece of wood, dirt, or stone and can still go to the mining facility. I don't give a damn about this dumb protected missions crap that's been put in, I play for a rich sandbox and for RP and building. I don't -want- to be a Mary Sue space-cop tasked with saving the universe.

The way I have seen game development is as follows: Removed: Countless biomes, actual variety of lifeforms between day and night. Night being more dangerous, and monsters being tougher the deeper one dug. You could go to any world you liked at any time, if you were willing to risk the danger of it. You could go to an ice planet before super warm armor and make mad dashes between placing campfires for warmth to stay alive. If you saw an item, you could take it, scan it, and print it. And looking around, even some -clothing- has been removed, and several dungeon types.

What was added: a handful of missions that are shooting platformer challenges with zero sandbox gameplay, everything inside it is unminable and untakeable to scan.
Weapon combos. Now I can swing my sword once for full damage, then twice more for half damage each time in a MUCH smaller hit area, and then have a long delay before I can swing again, instead of swinging twice for full damage and full attack reach in the same amount of time.
A "new and improved" item bar that halves how much I can hold without manually shifting it to another row, doesn't show numbers for slots, and honestly just sucks and looks bad.

Hylotl villages/dungeons: Something that should have been there from the start as a land-based area, and then worked on to make it aquatic.

NPCs now grunt when talked to. (Yay?)

"scary" monster sounds replaced with "Boop!" when seen.

All random monsters lost all special attacks and just try and ram you now.


I don't understand how so, so much content has been removed, mission-gated, and simplified, replaced with such comparitivly little, then called a full game. I don't mean to say what has been added was easy, it took a lot of work for a lot of these things, but why did anything that has been removed require removing?

You built beautiful, if rough construct with alpha/Koala... then hacked it apart until all that was left is a skeleton, then polished that and are calling it finished.

If you refuse to change anything from here on, could you at least do what Minecraft has done, and let us choose which version of the game we want to download and play?

 

The problem is that the community is more builder and RP filled than adventer-ish filled
it's like turning Terraria into 100% RPG Terraria (no sandbox no building) just missions and bosses
Chucklefish is doing this right now with starbound ^^^

 

Not really? Your post implies people who like adventuring have it better but in this version of the game there is like no reason to go to planets different than "volcanic" and on those you only find the same structures and same mobs if anything exploration feels pointless now post game and building... It's okay I guess aside from the dirt and sand all being the same color

 

no, epxloration was a huge advertisement. and a huge part of them community wanted it. it just seems a big chunk of that former community laready wet on exploring and adventuring in other games due to how SB lakcs that "infinite" exploring they once spoke of.

 

Starbound's main issue, in my opinion, is that it's impossible to stretch a finite amount of variety into an infinite space, and still have any given bit of space be interesting. In other words, Starbound-verse is too rich. Anywhere you go, is a whole host of planets you not only can land on and explore (which is fine), but also each is home to several kinds of creatures, multiple biomes, NPCs, etc, etc. Perhaps it could be better, if in any given star system the chance of finding an interesting planet would be relatively low - but then, the occasional planet that life and NPCs and things actually exist on, could easily be made as rich and diverse as a world in Terraria, and the sense of exploration would be preserved much longer. Of course most of the "filler" planets would be uninteresting - in the spirit of actual space, most would be airless, frozen airless, gas giants, etc. But it would not preclude them from having rare ores one might prospect for, or the occasional offworld research lab, ship crash site, or odd and hostile alien lifeform. It would, in my opinion, make both the exploration and the building aspects of the game that much more interesting - after all, you would have a much greater selection of places to more or less freely build on.

 

I like that idea, but some players wouldn't because it would take a long time to find dungeons and npcs.

You know what would be cool? If we could zoom out the galaxy map and see the milky way. Then we could choose a sector to explore and if it was far from Earth/the Protectorate, it'd have much less chance of finding intelligent life. This way we could still go to systems with lots of dungeons.

 

I think it is a major problem that Tiy announced back in Dec. 2016, that we would have major instruments to affect terrain and weather on our planet. Yes, it was announced! If they only added it, we would have at LEAST some instruments in our hand to paint the dirt, to change the weather and so on. Unfortunately, Tiy annoucned it, later they talked about a mechanic for "homeplanets only", than homeplanets were removed and no one never ever talked about it. They took the randomness away without adding something for the Sandboxers.

Remember the days on nice planets, which had ONLY sunshine. I miss them...

 

Yes, that is something I'd love to do. Sometimes you find a nice planet to build, but you don't want snow covering everything.

And if we could change the appearance of the planet, maybe even the monsters, making a colony would be much more interesting.

 

Personally I'm torn on this.

On one hand.... I did -sort- of love Koala's randomness.

On the other? Sincerely, a bunch of it was randomness.... but without substance.

So what did it matter if a tree had brains instead of leaves? Nothing. All it ever gaves was wood. Heck.... -tentacles- would provide wood logs as well.
We had randomness.... but mechanically it barely meant anything.

The way I see it, the "downgrade" in randomness that was lost since Koala has only proven to be a slowly, and steadily still building itself. upgrade. Especially looking at the Daily Assets Differences webpage cataloguing the apparent addition of Novakids villages/constructions/villagers/colonists to the nightly branch of the game(yes, it IS still worked on even with 1.0).

Alien planets are there. Those trees with eyeballs? They don't just drop wood anymore. They drop actual eyes and flesh strands last I recall. Metal trees? Drop actual unique "metal coated wood". Same for the rainbow and striped trees. In fact, alien planets striped trees even drop alien fruits too now!

Sure it is currently categorized in strict biome/planets separations. For now.
But there's no indications it'll always remain such, and plenty of indications they'd want to reintroduce more randomness in the future.

The way I see it.... they cut down on the "randomness" of procedural generation to instead rebuilt it up from the ground up and ask themselves "Okay, how can we give actual -substance- to all these crazy plants and things?". Like said, in particular with eyes and alien biomes stuff, this is something I'm already seeing. Heck, even poison planets now give you a reason to visit them by not just making poison a danger anymore.... but a resource all of it's own!

Sure Koala would spawn a lot of -very- random planets..... but at the end of the day, except when weather was included, it mattered very little because most of the time it would be purely cosmetic.
One of the thing that devs did say regarding biomes now though, is that they wanted to make sure to properly flesh out "normal/earthlike biomes" first, and then go more wildly crazy with unique biomes or even planet types once 1.0 was out. One of the big challenge they did with 1.0 is in fact just that: allow you to keep your character even if they add entirely new planet types, by simply allowing worldgen to generate new planets only as you actually go exploring them whilst saving those you have already encountered "as is".


So they could literally do something like ad "nebula stars" chock fulls of completely new and random planet types later, and you'd thus just find yourself with yet another reason to hop back into your ship to do that "exploring" thing until a new chunk of starmap generate with the new stars and planets.

Sure the current content feels limited in scope and perhaps a bit too neatly grouped into distinct categories.... but right now that's just the foundation and I've already found multiple reasons to keep exploring just due to NPC villages and new additions like those Fenerox, ruins to use as foundations for new colonies or outposts(especially since the ware of merchants increase in quality with planet difficulties) or just new uncommon building materials to learn the recipes of. To not mention making discoveries of minibiomes like rainbows/eyes/rust/etc minibiomes and the rare crafting recipes found there. So I can see they have gone out of their way to flesh out what is there over trying to overabitiously try to make "everything" with a completely random system only to be unsure how to then "flesh out" everything individually within it.

So if the current worlds seem like a "downgrade", the way they've reworked systems and fleshed out what is... I can easily imagine it being the foundation for a future "upgrade" that could blow Koala's works out of the waters.

 

Exactly how i feel @Ludovic Glad im not the only one.