This game has become near-impossible to start

Except that the skills needed to be effective at Tetris aren't the same needed for Starbound. Don't cross genres with your "gitgud scrub" nonsense. I saw the Dark Souls community go to shit because of that.
I'm having difficulties and the only part of the original Castlevania that's a minor challenge is the final stage. You know why? Because Castlevania is balanced properly. If you want a modern example, Dark Souls isn't hard because it's *gasp* balanced properly in a sandbox setting. You go to the wrong place, you're going to get killed. But if you find your way to the correct paths, you have a relatively easy time with the game.

That said, the way starting planets are selected is you're sent to a random level 1 planet. Which means anything in Alpha Sector due to the scaling patch. This can be especially brutal if you're dropped onto a snow or poison biome planet.
The long range mob damages need a bit of work still, and birds need their AI to be cut down on aggression. Maybe have the radius cut in half.
I was a big advocate of the game being just the right difficulty at the start, with Armor Pen needing tweaked a bit, but it seems the balance has been skewed due to the change in planet levels and removal of mob levels.

 

I'm an advocate for this patch being made a teeny less murderous, but I love this idea. TWO loot pinatas?! Heck yes.

 

This is needed urgently, would certainly make combat more interesting.

Dark Souls difficulty is overrated. It's only hard because of horrible controls as they're built around the limitations of console gamepads. After it came out for PC some people on the steam forum modded proper KB+mouse camera control and the game becomes surprisingly easier.

 

I haven't really had a problem. I've had one death from a shrine and I'm nearly geared in full iron with an iron bow. I've found 50 gold and more than 150 silver so I'd say I've progressed quite far. I've had one run in with the birds but I still managed to make it out alive. There has been nothing I've seen that can't be avoided by smart play except the insta-kill shrine (though -don't use shrines- might qualify as smart play at this point ).

 

Not using instant-death-or-pointless-buff shrines is pretty good an idea, yea. Still, your experience =/= everyone else's experience. Remember that people have different levels of skill, and as a randomly generated game, there's a lot of things you might not see that are plaguing other players. And considering the amount of topics about this, the majority of people are having massive problems with doombirds.

 

We already have Artificial intelligence that out classes Starbounds AI. Fun fact, adding extra moves mobs can do does not make them advanced and no one would cry over it.

Get off your high horse.

 

a) its not hard to wait for the bird to attack then move in to hit it

b) if night is hard for you at that moment, spend it digging in and get yourself that tier's armor

c) more monster attacks are a bad thing because....? if you are getting hit by melee monsters, it means you messed up. sword knockback is just fine where it is, you just have to walk backwards as you attack the charging monsters

d) so, having to move around during combat is your main complaint here? i think i found your problem.

e) more minibosses are a bad thing because??? you can just skip them if they are too scary for you. the first 30 seconds of the new patch i beamed down on my new character and had an epic fight with a miniboss bird that dropped a purple broadsword for me, it was scary and exciting. dont take the miniboss battles away from epople who enjoy them

 

I'm not denying others might be having a problem perhaps even encountering a few bugs that restrict them in ways I haven't faced. I'm just throwing in my experience which has been a very balanced game with an entirely reasonable difficulty curve. The only thing that seems a little off to me might be that I've found quite a bit of silver and gold yet am short on iron on the first planet. I might guess that is because of quickly digging to the deeper layers though.

 

Just wanting to make sure you didn't turn into another 'gitgud' idiot.

a. Yes, it is. Especially when it's ready to attack again as soon as you get in close, or actively dodges your attack then counter-attacks. I've seen these birds dodge attacks. They do it constantly.

b. Going underground to get armor doesn't help because monsters are still down there, see answer c.

c. It's not a bad thing in general, it's a bad thing for a starter planet, which should be simple and easy. Having ground enemies that shoot lightning at you, doing 80 damage and possibly knocking you into a pit so fall damage kills you is not simple or easy. Charging and bodyslamming worked just fine as a threat for a starter planet.

d. Nice strawman there, that's not what he was saying at all. He said moving around and trying to escape made MORE things aggro, thus making the problem worse.

e. This is in no way a bad thing and if I had two minibosses on one planet I'd be excited to take them on.

 

The choice of weapons needs to be balanced a lot too. your choice for melee is huge 2handed weapon that does massive damage in a huge arc or a 1handed that does less damage in a very small area.. hmmm choices...

Sadly i doubt this will be addressed since it is how a lot of other games work.

 

b. Its extremely easy to avoid monsters underground using dirt / other blocks, since it's in closed spaces. If you reach a cavern you can always build tight walls and move under cover. If you want to kill the monsters too you can just mine one block out of your wall and shoot arrows through it. This is called a kill hole. If you are getting murdered by birds at spawn, build a roof over the spawn and problem solved. If you cant travel far from spawn, create a tunnel, if you die you can use the same tunnel over and over again.

This is coming from someone who beat all of terraria 1.2 including hardmode and bosses using a hardcore perma-death character. Make sure you are always stocked on bandages (plant fibers are all over the place), and play extremely safe and methodically for the beginning of the game. Use all the dirt you mine to build safe passageways. Stop trying to explore the overworld and create a underground network near the spawn so you can use it again and again if you die, going further and further down each time. Eventually you are going to find the goods. If the worst case scenario happens and every monster is jumping around breathing fire and bouncing projectiles and you simply cannot survive. Dig until you get coal and leave the planet.

 

If the elite doesn't have a breath attack, then it just easy loot. I've had them spawn near the start point right off the bat, and they have really relaxed aggro, so you lure it in a fort, box it (or yourself) in, and kill it with a bow or something once you are ready, and collect nice loot.

The NPCs also need a stronger defense. They get 1 or 2 shot on tier1 planets, and instakilled on anything higher then that. I mean if they live in the sector with the tough monsters, they would logically have defense and offense to compensate. Also, I once lost an npc that I've got from chef spawner due it dying oneshot to a starter weapon, and on my ship, no less. I hope some of npcs would either respawn or be set as untouchable with weapons, otherwise you come to them just to see them die to a bird or some such.

 

This will be less of an issue once weapon aiming is added.

 

I don't usually have a problem underground, but obviously the OP does. Thanks for the advice, though! It'll be useful for later. It's just those darned lightning spitting monsters. They love to edge hog.
At least you're nice about it. I'm sick of people insinuating I only play easy games when I usually play Roguelikes, and start on Hard on any game that has a difficulty selector.

Nethack4life!

 

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Yeah spears are useless when you cant even aim upwards or downwards.. Almost a pointless weapon when your completely hindered by all terrain

 

Has this been announced? I suggested it earlier (swinging melee in any direction)

 

That classifies a high horse? That is exactly why it is sad.

When omni was streaming it was testing it with spears at least.

 

Post-Annoyed Koala, in an hour last night, I made it to Steel tier with Matter armour.

Before fighting the Tier 1 boss, I cleaned out a dungeon and obtained some Matter blocks, to create a helmet. I then destroyed the boss with an Iron Hunting Bow in 3-4 minutes, only using a single Red stim to heal.

Birds telegraph their attacks. It really isn't hard to avoid them with even the most minor effort.

 

People who are "turned away" by balance issues in a product which hasn't been released, where devs have repeatedly said that THE GAME BALANCE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS aren't needed by the community.

These are people who would move into a house immediately after the frame was built, then whine about the lack of a roof.

 

I want to agree with the op about the starting planet seem to have difficulty increased. I'll explain my points. I started playing this game with the previous version, annoying koala, a couple days before the patch that made ore abundant, so I am not trying to show myself as very experienced, jujst in low tier worlds.

After this last patch I created a new character (a floran, in case that matters) and as I already had some experience with the basics I went straights to the things I needed to survive (fibers,wood,coal,iron..) what I found out is that unlike before this time every mob in the planet (not counting NPC, there weren't any anyways) was aggro with me unlike before where some would be peaceful if left alone.

Daylight mobs seemed stronger, there was a very dangerous aligator like creature that spit some acid straight forward that did a lot of damage, there was the usual small rammer that was easy to dispatch and the third mob was an ultra fast/agile rammer, fortunately it was rare.
To them I had to add 3 different birds, all shooting high damage bouncing projectiles that normally where not bothering me much, but should I find myself climbing some cliff or something high I would soon have about 6 of them appearing out of sudden and attacking (besides the ground mobs). It wasn't impossible to deal with, but I died every time I was a bit careless and made exploring the surface long and tedious, In fact, to the point it was easier to do so during the night, as the only really dangerous mo was an uncommon bird.

So I got tired gathered all the fibers I could, some meat, as much coal as I could find and decided to attempt to find a better planet to land in the system. I found a dessert world with an arid and a forest biome satellites, so I said, why not, I should gather some resources fast in a desert world thanks to the sand. This world was more easy, the mobs weren't all aggro and were far less dangerous and besides the unusuall ammount of gold and silver and the low ammount of coal in surface that I've been finding since last patch, everything seemed normal.

After a while I had an iron bow, and almost full copper armor and the highes trate 2handed sword you can make with the regular anvil that I had brought from the starting world and decided to visit the forest biome satellite and I found the same difficulties than in my starting world, so maye forest worlds are more dangerous now? Or maybe it's just bad luck.