The Universe and You.

Hi. This is the story of how I imagined the game, and what it really is.
Starbound is a game about space exploration. But the space is teared apart, and 100 pieces of coal is required to travel any distance. Come on, i know this is beta, but i afraid this is not going to change much. Some ideas:

Starmap. The biggest thing i can't understand is why the game needs 10 sectors. There are INSANE amount of planets no one ever will be able to discover. Just put them all in one page, add filters (star size, star color, planet tier, planet biome, planet size, etc.), and thats it.
Benefit:: The Universe will become one piece.

Fuel. Second, why do you mess with the ways of fueling the ship? Attach solar generator to it, which will power the ship over time. In addition make some real fuel to speed up the process (but for God sake, no coal). Also recharge rate can be dependent of star size and color.
Benefit: less headache about fueling.

Navigation. Considering said above, make fuel and time cost depending on the distance.
Benefit: The Universe will get real feel of size.

If someone need detailed explanations, i will provide them.

 

That is actually a really great idea. Can you post this in the suggestion board?

 

First : 100 coal is a long range jump, it cost less for closer planet (in same system)
Second : Sector is for separate game tier, but about filter, i think it is plan for in the futur.
Third : fuel is for to you got after it, so need to explore for find it.
Fourth : this game need to run on 32bit systems, so limited memory for do multi-layers background task (loading ship and planet at same time)

 

No harm in having a small amount auto-generate right?

 

If you're lazy about fuel, you can always mod the unrefined wood so that each piece gives 1000 fuel, would take only a couple of minutes, theres a video tutorial on how to do it and I'll find the link. We don't need auto refuelling ships.


Edit didn't find the video quickly: but copied from another thread:

and you can have fuel amount be 1000 if you're that way inclined

 

im not versus, if they can do it, do a bonus solar panel when they put the ship upgrade later, and should only work when you are in you ship (well right now ship and planet have 2 timer, so when you are in one, the time stop/reset on the other one.

 

You don't need auto refuelling shis

You* don't need auto refuelling ships.
I also don't want to start editing files, having a small, optional upgrade on a ship to auto refuel a very small percent is not a bad idea for a lot of people.

 

There's a RADICAL difference between making each piece of wood fill your tank instantly and desiring a weak auto-fill option. By Jackson's bloodied cane, we need a Wicked Witch around here or something, the strawmen are getting out of hand.

 

i don't understand whats the problem with the fuel... just 1 fuel is needed to travel to adjacent planets, 1 coal (a half actually) or ten wood, that's too cheap.

i can't find a reason why the developers should waste any more time with this fuel "problem", think about that, if your initial system has 4 planets, you just need 2 coal to visit everyone and return to your home planet, if you visit and explore all the nearby planets, you will most likely find enough coal to travel to another system even if you don't enter in any cave

 

That's good news, kemosabe, except for one little fact.

Last character I made spawned on a blue Dwarf with one planet. Period.

 

it would also help prevent being stranded on planets/solar systems!~

 

a better solution for that problem would be change the parameters so that the initial system for all new games would have at least 2 or 3 planets.

 

Completely agree with the starmap thing.

 

Getting coal is a part of the game, which is necessary because in reality, coal is a fuel. But I totally agree with you. If you were on a planet that you already explored head to toe in half an hour flat, getting 100 pieces of coal is pretty hard considering that you are still using the mana manipulator. These is not included other factors such as finishing missions, getting food, upgrading your pick, avoiding monsters whilst mining, and so on.

 

what if you could find like oil like substance underground build pipe system pump it up refine it starship fuel!! maybe you also need some extra ingredient in the mix

 

There's at least 4 mods in the forums that add biofuels because coal is just a ridiculous fuel for starships. Not so sure about auto-fueling unless it's a later tier thing, because you should have to put in at least some work at the start of the game; after all, the inital quest is "You've run out of fuel and are stranded".

<shameless plug> My take on this, for instance:
http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?resources/biofueld.89/
</shameless plug>

As to navigation, I agree that the costing is really weird. As of yet, I haven't found the code for it, but by damn am I looking for it

 

Personally, I don't mind the fuel requirements, but perhaps I've been lucky with my planets; most planets I visit have coal abundant in the surface/I don't need to dig far.

That being said, I'd have no problem with an unlockable auto refuel system (maybe Tier 5?). I don't want to lose it completely because scrambling for coal or wood feels like an integral part of Starbound. It is, at the core, a story of survival. You've barely escaped the destruction of your home planet. You didn't bring enough fuel because there was no time (same for food and weapons, etc).

Still, it's unfortunate when the RNG spawns you in the beginning on a remote planet with few resources. It absolutely sucks. The planet you spawn on should have more resources available to you. Maybe if you always spawned on a forest planet, where wood, plant fibers, and plants to eat are predictably available?

 

I somewhat disagree w/ the starmap thing. The game has 10 sectors because there are 10 tiers of content (in final) but if you know where all of the planets are... then it would have to explain some dumb reason why you can't get there before. Upgrading a starmap makes sense because you need to be able to chart a course to avoid slamming into the a planet along the way. It's also a way to unlock new planets along the way up to tier 10 which provides incentive to keep playing. This is really gamey but gives more options as the game progresses which gives the feel of progression. If everything were available from the get go the game would feel samely relatively quickly. However, with multiple starmaps you have a clear and defined goal. You can choose to ignore it if you want and stay on the starting area, explore tier 1 planets and do whatever you want but there is reason enough to progress. However, I would like to see options to filter planet size, color, biome, etc etc when searching rather than random.

Solar generators.... well, I think wood/coal powered spaceships make slightly more sense (not that either does) but I don't think the current system is final anyways and I think it's just a placeholder for testing. I think it's very likely because they haven't added a story yet that the whole crafting of star map upgrades is just a placeholder too. More than likely they will add various fuel components to early levels and have them be used to travel all around. Things that make somewhat more sense like plutonium and uranium or perhaps even a few made up ones. As of right now, finding fuel is an obtainable objective and you're capable of finding enough coal on pretty much every planet. That is unless for some reason you farm the planet dry, waste all of the coal, and it just happens to be a planet that no trees are on... but in that case you probably deserve to be stranded.

As far as fuel/distance changes, I think it would make sense but only if there was a reason to travel further than the closest planets around you. This would require changes that I think would impact multiple worlds and multiplayer though.... because distance is related to where you currently are and there would be no reason to travel very far it seems. I think that kind of change would be basically confining yourself to one small section of the galaxy which seems somewhat a bad idea.

 

A purely solar powered ship actually manages to make less sense than a coal-powered one, which is impressive.

To move, you need reaction mass. There has to be something, no matter what, flying out one end of your spacecraft to send it flying off in the other. In real life, we usually use gases - liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. There are also monopropellant engines that don't rely on chemical reactions (like an LH/LO engine does) that still have a mass of something coming out the nozzle. Even ion engines (which are real, look them up), which appear to rely on technobabble, still simply revolve around taking particles and making them move really fast to drive the spacecraft forward, though extremely slowly (ion engines have acceleration measured in millinewtons, but they're absurdly fuel efficient).

Now, the reason coal makes more sense than pure solar power as ship fuel, somehow, is that coal has mass, and solar energy does not. You can burn coal and send the results (carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, various other greenhouse gases, along with water) flying out the back of the ship to move yourself forward. You can't send solar energy flying out the back of your ship.

You can have solar energy push your ship around (look up radiation pressure), but you need a huge solar sail to do that, and you probably won't be going the hundreds or thousands of light years that ships in Starbound can do.

Of course, there's still the issue of how ships can accept coal, uranium, plutonium (which, mind you, doesn't actually occur naturally) or solarium without any modifications between using any one of those fuels. In fact, you can take the plutonium and throw it in with the coal and just keep on keeping on. However, this is also a game where birds shoot lightning, swords you find in chests thousands of feet underground can shoot fire, and a pickaxe made of gold is better at mining than one made of stone or copper.

 

You're missing an important factor: this ship travels FTL. There's no way a reaction drive could propell a ship FTL, which implies its using some exotic physics that requires energy to manipulate space in some other manner (alcubierre drive, wormhole creation, etc). In that case, the only reason coal or uranium are used as fuels is because they're processed for their energy (in some all-purpose combustion/fission generator? MAGICAL SPACE MAGIC). Solar would be equally viable in that case.