The Tweaks I Would Suggest

Hey folks, I figured I would chime in with my 20-hour in take on the game in its current state. Some of my biggest peeves were already fixed, like being able to check the food meter. Here are some of my others. I'd love to hear feedback on if there is something I missed, or if other people had the same problems!

Interface Issues:
1. First thing I encountered in the game; when making my human character, there was no readily visible way to view underwear color. I could change the color, but not see what it was being changed to. The end result was a black and purple themed girl with . . . banana yellow underwear. If there is a way to do an underwear view, it seems to be too difficult to notice, so I'd suggest it either be added in, or be made more visible if it is there.

2. This may be a lack of understanding on my part, but it seems to me that in the Inventory menu, the Health (Heart logo) and Energy (Lightning bolt) do not reduce when you are below maximum health or energy. So either these are not functioning, or it means I don't understand what they actually mean . . . which leads to ->

3. The icons in the inventory menu, and many of the icons in general, are not always intuitive. The Magnifying Glass confused me a bit for a while, and the aforementioned Heart and Bolt are either broken meters, or they represent something I haven't been able to change yet (maximum health and power perhaps?). Similar to this, the "power" icon on the armors is vague. Do these armors INCREASE my power? Do they decrease it, a sort of "power the suit" surcharge? Either way, I couldn't tell.

4. One icon which seems to be missing entirely is your environmental resistance. Along with Health/Power/Armor/Attack, there should be a logo to represent the cumulative environmental resistance you have. This figure would be very useful for at-a-glance determining if a planet is safe for your character.

5. The 3D Printer. To be honest, I just don't understand this thing. The only item I've been able to scan was a generic treasure chest, which has a 500 pixel cost to make (whoa), and nothing else scans. I tried scanning a metalworking bench, and even though it showed a number to imply it was viable, nothing happened. It seems to me like its just broken or something, I really can't tell. I understand what it is supposed to do, but it just doesn't seem to work.

6. The warp-speed cut scene is way too long. I clocked it in at about 55-65 seconds. For something that plays EVERY time you change planets, that is a massive time sink. What is even worse is that it shows the same cut scene for travel within the same solar system. This was not only annoyingly long, but was visually confusing. It showed me fly through the depths of space with thousands of stars passing only to . . . end up right next to the planet I left, which was neighboring the one I went to. At the very least, have a reworked/shorter cutscene for same-system planets.

7. The interplanetary interface and options are dramatically underdeveloped. There is no failsafe on accidentally hitting "Set Home" on a new planet. I know I did, though it was fortunately on a planet in the same solar system as my starting planet. It would be way too easy to accidentally delete all record of your main world and all of its contents, never to be found again to the depths of space. So for starters, there needs to be a "Are you sure?" option for "Set Home" since it is right next to the "Go Home" button. Furthermore, there definitely needs to be a planet log system where you can add planets in, and maybe "name" them or write a note to keep track of them.

Another thing I don't understand about the spaceship interface is the fuel meter. When I plotted a course from Sector Alpha to Beta, my fuel meter changed to three segments, a green one, a yellow one, and a red one, with no indication of what this meant. When I engaged the warp-drive, I two of these three segments. (Either the green and yellow, or red and yellow, I don't recall). I don't know what these were supposed to be, and I had no clue how much fuel it would end up taking until it took it.

Balance Issues:
1. Boss difficulty. Please, hear me out, before accusing me of being "a casual" or me trying to attack a precious "challenge". My issues with the bosses I have fought so far (The UFO and the Robot) were that they were virtually unbeatable with top-tier equipment at that level unless you used cheesy techniques or very large groups. I am now aware that the UFO can't be cheesed anymore, but the Robot can and needs it even more.

I feel I need to elaborate; in my opinion, top-tier equipment is the highest level equipment that can be crafted in any way until after fighting the boss. This doesn't include chest-found items or anything you have to luckily stumble upon. For the UFO, this is Silver Armor and a two-handed weapon of your choice, and for the Robot, it is Scout Armor and a tier 2 two-handed weapon of your choice (the Steel Bow does 3 damage to something with what I suspect is around 1500+). I did not find the UFO brokenly powerful; it was more so that I found it to have absurdly high defense, HP, and was far too difficult to land hits on regularly. I could have the best armor in the world, but my sword at the time did 14 damage, and it took two minutes of non-stop swinging on a cheesed UFO to kill it. I'm not even including the dangerous but fair penguins in this (I like them. They are brutal, but killable). The UFO doesn't kill me too quickly, it was just not possible to kill in a realistic or timely manner. Some have thrown around the idea of using bombs, or rare guns and better equipment, but this is entirely luck based. If I can't find any of this stuff, then I am forced to use Silver Armor and a tier-1 weapon . . . which is not adequate for killing him.

The robot is even worse. Expecting a repeat of the UFO, I setup another arena. I had top-tier armor for tier-2, which is Scout Armor as far as I can tell. With that equipped, and at full health, I summoned him and he performed an AoE shock attack within a half second that hit me instantly and brought me from full health to 1 bar left. If I had NOT been using Scout, he would have killed me in one hit. My tier-2 sword dealt 14, my Steel Bow (which was one-shotting most enemies) dealt 3. Like the UFO, once I had him cheesed, it took me about 1-2 minutes of uninterrupted, cheap as hell swinging to kill him. I don't WANT to have to kill them like that. Insanely high defense is not a challenge, its tedium. Outside of "getting lucky with a treasure chest", I had no way to increase my offensive output and defensive capacity. Even a group would have had no better luck, because he could 1-hit kill anyone under 90% health. I simply don't know how this insanely high offense and defense is considered challenging . . . its an impenetrable wall unless you abuse terrain. I WISH I had stupidly not made top tier equipment so I could lay the blame on myself, but I didn't. There was nothing stronger I could make until after he was dead.

2. Fall Damage. This isn't an issue, so much as its a potential issue that I'm not sure of yet. But it seems that as your defense increases, enemy damage falls dramatically. However, fall damage does not seem to fall or decrease with that defense increase. So even on a tier 1 planet where you are completely safe, fall damage is still brutally dangerous even with short falls. I could be incorrect in this regard, but I'd like to see armor rating take a % off of fall damage. If anyone can tell me for sure if something like this is already implemented, please let me know.

3. Food. In general, the food system is pretty fair. But it suffers from a pretty serious first-day crunch that is really only avoidable if you follow a pretty exact course of action. By the time I realized I was getting hungry (about 6 bars out of 10), I planted all my crops and made a bow, but I starved to death before the crops grew or I was able to get a single piece of meat from an enemy. Either way, a new player is going to struggle to jump through the requisite hoops and get lucky before they starve.

For crops, this is:
Harvest trees->make a workbench->mine stone->make a hoe->plant seeds->let them grow before you starve

For meat, this is:
Harvest trees->make a workbench->harvest fiber, IF your planet has it accessible->make a bow->successfully get alien meat->mine stone->make a furnace->cook meat

This is 6-8 steps that MUST be taken within a fairly short period of time before the player dies. This is a pretty unforgiving system, but I actually am fine with the system as it is. The reason I illustrated it like this is because I think the player needs to start with a reasonable quantity of food. I don't know about other races, but my Human spawned with a decent quantity of seeds, but no food. Figuring out the direct course of action to get food is not necessarily quick or intuitive, and leads to cheap deaths early on.

Design Issues:
1. Item Drop Disappearance time. I just timed this, and item drops seem to disappear at or just short of 30 seconds. Twice that wouldn't be close to enough. Two minutes at least would be feasible if a bit short, but as it stands, I've actually LOST items that I mined because it took more than 30 seconds to mine my way through the rock to get it (usually ore inside of Magmastone).

2. I'm at a sort of confusing junction in the game. Being in tier-3, EVERYTHING needed to progress requires Titanium. I have no idea how or where to find or make this ore, and I'm at a sort of loss in terms of direction. I'm sure this may be alleviated with the Quest/Goals system, but I'm not sure if I need to just raid random planets or what. I also can't seem to find Platinum, which is needed for my next tier of pickaxe. Unfortunately, my current gold pickaxe is pretty slow for digging into the cores of planets to find if they have my needed ores, so each planet I check is a very slow process with no rewards when I find nothing.

I'd love to hear feedback from other players. If you disagree, please explain to me why you do, and if you agree, I'd love to hear if you had similar issues in any of the above categories.

 

Another good one is when dropping from one set of stairs to another instead of landing on the set below I end up falling all the way down and getting fall damage, another odd glitch is when I was under water and swung a weapon at an ore I could see the weapon clip over the ore image and be behind the foreground image.

I am sure they will fix the bosses.

 

i rilly hope they make that robot like 1000 times easyer
if not easyer then easer to make that bitch takes like 1000000000000000 steel ingots to make

 

Regarding cooking, even a campfire will suffice, but everything else that was said was spot on. I have to admit that at this moment I feel really cheated by what was promised versus what is already there, even if some features are disabled this early in beta.

 

I'm pretty sure the warp is just a loading screen, so that's why it takes so long.

 

Just a thought but #6 is because it is generating the planet.

 

i can only agree with all of your points. well said!
to your point 6 (warpspeed): i´d guess it takes the amount of time to create the planet itself and they have to generate everything, so people have to wait. just close the window and craft away in your ship, or organize some stuff in your chests. the ship won´t stop travelling after you started the sequenc.

 

Wow, that's very useful info. Thanks for the heads up.

God I hope not. If that is the case, the load time is horrid.

 

I don't think you are understanding. It's not loading a preconfigured planet. The universe folder would be massive if every single planet was pregenerated. It's taking the planet blueprint and adding in creatures and other procedural generated assets to that blueprint.

 

No, I get what you mean. But the cutscene isn't any shorter on the second trip than it is on the first. If it takes a minute to load each NEW planet, I could forgive that. But transporting something between two planets that I have been to would require less load time, because it is only loading up the now generated planet. Of course, that SHOULD take some loading time, but I suspect it is less than the initial generation, and it would be nice if the cut-scene placeholder reflected that.

 

Ah I see what you are saying. I have been playing on a server with friends that we set up. We only get the longer loading screen when we go to a new world for the first time.

I'm guessing here, but they probably remove the planet once everyone is off of it to save space and only keep a "changes" type file to re-generate the planet with what you did later on. Otherwise like in my previous post I think the space considerations would get out of hand.

 

Could be, and I guess that makes sense. But its a pretty crucial load time, and I hope to see it get shorter as development progresses.

 

Nice comments, here's my thoughts.

Drawers - The underwear color thing is true, but I can't say it bothers me much. First time I took off all my clothes and found that I had neon green underwear was kinda funny to me. ;-)

General Interface Issues - I agree the interface in general needs some tooltips in some areas to better explain the meaning of certain icons. Your environmental resistance does show on armor (the sun icon), but I'm not entirely certain what that even means.

3D Printer - Ya, this doesn't seem to have many options at the moment short of finding schematics in the world itself. You can also scan seeds of pretty much any type, and remake them at a cost of one pixel. So that can be useful in that you don't really need to keep a stock of seeds on hand. Whenever you travel to a new world, just print some up and create a little farmland on the surface. I assume this will be fleshed out much more in later patches.

Warp Speed Animation - This a personal preference thing, but the cutscene length doesn't bother me really. You're free to move about the ship and do other things while it's traveling, so it's not a hindrance to me. That said, I could see it being a bit shorter than it is now, perhaps 40 seconds total (10 seconds to leave orbit, 5 to get up to warp speed, 10 actually in warp, 5 to slow down, 10 to enter orbit).

Interplanetary Interface - Ya, this could use a little tuning. Again, a tooltip on the fuel bar would be good, as well as some indication of how much fuel it takes to get to places. If I have 200 fuel in the tank, and it takes 210 to get somewhere I want to go, that would be helpful to know.

Boss Damage - I haven't fought the robot yet so I can't comment, but I agree the UFO is kinda OP. I'm not a fan of bosses that need to be cheesed in order to beat them. They should simply be balanced in such a way that having the "correct" tier of armor and weapons (as well as proper "buffs" and some degree of dodge skill) makes the fight survivable.

Fall Damage - I agree this caught me off guard a bit, but I think what was more disconcerting was how easy it was to accidentally continue falling through wooden platforms when jumping down from the first one. This has apparently been addressed already though in last night's patch though

Food - I have no problem with the food system at all. Yes, when you first start the game you need to make it a priority to get a food supply going, but that seems perfectly fine. Spawning nowhere near plant fibers could indeed make it challenging, but as of last night mobs have a low chance of dropping meat even without a bow. I dunno, if this needs any tweaking at all, it isn't much in my opinion. Maybe I just got luckier. :-/

Item Disappearance and Later Tiers - I haven't noticed the items disappearing, but that's just likely because I haven't found myself in a situation where they were onscreen for more than 30 seconds. I agree that's a little light on "time to live" though. As for the later tiers of progression, I'm not quite that far so I can't offer any thoughts on that. However, the patch notes state that some methods were included (for testing purposes) to allow for the easy creation of tier 4-10 gear, so hopefully that'll help. I'll find out tonight!

 

Beat the first boss not really as hard as people said it would be, just use thee colored syringes and silver armor I did not even have a gun had to use melee weapons, also alot of bandages.

 

I hadn't found any colored syringes when I fought it. My worry was that it would actually leave before I killed it. I've heard some reports of people's UFO despawning after DAYS in game fighting it.

 

I heard that the latest patch fixed that, turned out the ufo was chasing bird mobs. I got syringes just from exploring planets for material and running into cultists and a apex lab let's just say that lab went dark.