This may have been suggested already, but I gotta mention it.

Requiring the previous tier item to craft the next one is an awful idea. I spent hours digging as deep as possible and managed to find a number of diamonds down there, but can I make a diamond pickaxe? No. I have to waste time collecting every other ore in the game and making every other pickaxe first.

Anyone who has played Terraria will probably remember that the Hallowed Armor required an entire set of Cobalt, Mythril, and Adamantite armor to create it. There's a reason they changed the recipe in a recent update.

 

Having gold, silver, diamonds, etc. being crafting tiers at all is absurd. Hopefully Starbound will learn to drift away from the more dull, nonsensical elements of Terraria as it develops and we can abandon the mess of a progression system in its entirety. Hell, even Minecraft has a more sensible progression system in crafting, it recognizes that gold is TERRIBLE for practical purposes like that.

Retrofit Gold, Silver, and Copper as tools for constructing circuit boards and the like and have tiers be actual scientific advancement rather than a bad Terraria clone.

 

Honestly I'm on the completely other side of this.
I do believe it is a fantastic idea, and it stops tier skipping.
Terraria suffered heavily from this making Copper a next to useless resource throughout even the early stages of the game.
Besides it also serves a secondary purpose. You don't save up your iron because you would rather make a Diamond pickaxe for example, so you end up going through several tiers with a horrible slow mining tool.
It also serves another secondary purpose. When you craft the next tier you don't necessarily feel it was a waste of resources that you crafted your iron pickaxe and then you find a ton of gold and 5 minutes later you craft a Gold Pickaxe.
Think of how it is in MineCraft, you have your wooden pickaxe which INSTANTLY gets replaced by a stone pickaxe, then you find iron, then you craft an Iron Pickaxe instead. and now you have three different pickaxes where two of them are now basically useless. Here the old is directly replaced by the new and doesn't require you to trash the old ones to save inventory space, or save them in a chest just to free up inventory space.

Sometimes you get lucky and get the higher tier resources faster than the lower tier, but then just consider yourself lucky.
And to TheSlacker, just because MineCraft decided to say that Gold is the poor mans Diamond (Which is exactly what it is in MineCraft, just as good as Diamond, just way less durability) does not mean we should think of it the same way in StarBound, the materials used should not necessarily make sense realistically, because again, this is a game where we are mining small deposits of iron... We don't find an iron motherload and is set for basically life (Like in the real world either).

About stuff being a scientific advance can also become quite tedious, look at MineCraft IndustrialCraft. Having to craft the circuit boards to then craft the next tier to then finally craft your item, or in the case of truly high tier stuff you end up crafting 3-4 layers of items before you can finally craft the item you are looking for. Although it does make sense in MineCraft as you are restricted in the amount of resources that you can place in the Crafting Grid, we are not in StarBound, therefor an item can just as well just include all of the stuff needed in one go of crafting.

 

You burn the wooden pickaxe in a furnace, and use the stone pick till it breaks, which takes a couple of mins at most!

I personally would like to see something different from Minecraft or Terraria. Maybe a set of amour and tools that you keep long term, but upgrade them with the different tier ores. Make the amour completely custom, so you would 'spend' ores, pixels, etc to upgrade different aspects of it;. You's also be able to do cosmetic changes as well, to get the look you want.

 

That is what you do right now, get a pickaxe and upgrade it with different tiers of ore.
This is different than MineCraft and Terraria and still you don't like it?

 

You seem to equate "different" as being inherently "good" or "bad."

Different is different. Right now the current system is slightly different to Terraria and Minecraft. That doesn't make it a good system or a bad system. What makes it a bad system is it's excruciatingly linear and uninspired. Gold Pickaxe. Are you fucking kidding me?

 

I never said I didn't like it, I just said I'd like to see something different. The fact your old pick is 'destroyed' when you make a new one is kind of irrelevant, it's still the same old stuff. I'd actually like to use the matter manipulator, and be able to upgrade it by spending ores and pixels. That would be cool.

I was thinking more of the end game amours though, where you just make the next tier amour with the current tier 'Iron'. Got very boring.

 

Remember that game mechanics and how you progress through the game can be very crucial, and players should not be confused about the very core mechanics (Mining equipment)
What this linear system adds is a system where there is no difference but boosted stats between each tier of Pickaxe and avoids frustration.
It also makes it very intuitive and avoids a lot of confusion for new players, this one is better than the previous on a simple mechanic as mining is honestly just fine.
I know that more experienced players in these kind of games tend to want more and more advanced mechanics, but an advanced system for mining tools without a simple to progress tier system can become quite confusing.
So honestly I say the devs should leave it as it is, and if it really bugs you this much that is why Starbound features a fantastic Modding system, there you can add, remove, create, diversify, and otherwise make as an advanced and complex mining system that you please.
The idea of a completely non-linear mining system is not bad, it is just something that should be left for modding.

(Also on the note of Gold. If you want it removed as a material for armor and tools, what about the fact that Uranium is not really green in real life, Rubium is non-existent or the name is taken from Rubidium* and that does not seem like a proper tools material either.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubidium *

About the Matter Manipulator, yeah everyone wants it to be useful, but on the other hand I would much rather have the Matter Manipulator as the highest tier of mining equipment, so it goes: pickaxe -> (Maybe?) Drill -> Matter Manipulator, so when you finally reach it you will have that feeling of satisfaction.
On the note of armor.
Remember that they are still working on late game armor, racial and role specific bonus armor, so I'd wait to see what they have in mind.

 

I would be A-okay with the removal of Rubidium, Impervium, etc. I'm not asking for 100% realism, either: Maybe 50-60% realism. This is a Sci-Fi game, after all: You can't have science without some semblance of logic.

 

Well you can make Gold alloys, and make a mining pick out of that... When you craft the iron Pickaxe into the Gold Pickaxe you alloy the metals together, and the reason why the new pickaxe is better is because it is a lot more rust resistant?

I don't disagree a semblance of logic is required, but I will much rather have logical tier progression and proper game mechanics than realistic uses for Gold.
Do remember this game is a game. As long as it is intuitive it does not need to have a realistic feeling about it, unless it is a game like Mass Effect where they base the whole lore around having everything make sense, at least in terms of the games own logic.

That reminds me, Starbound just have a slightly different logic than reality, here Gold is a stronger material than Iron, but it stays consistent within its own self constrained reality which in my mind is fine.

 

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that not only does a gold alloy of the sort not make any sense, but it's very difficult to make a DIAMOND ALLOY considering diamonds aren't metal last I checked.

And, all of this is secondary to the big problem which is to say purely linear, vertical progression is anathema to every exploration game ever. If your old equipment is becoming 100% obsoleted every time you encounter new equipment, nothing you make ever has any weight because you know you'll just be replacing it in an hour. And this all culminates in...Tier 10, where all progression stops and there's no real REASON to explore anymore. That's not good game design. I know we're in early beta right now, but honestly, the entire tier system needs to be scrapped. SOME vertical progression is good: People need to feel like they're getting stronger. But if this progression is only in the ramping up of damage numbers or mining speeds, you're creating a skinnerbox, and skinnerboxes are never truly sustainable or engaging.

 

What this game feels like they are trying to do is firstly having what feels like a normal linear RPG at first, which will attract the players who enjoy that, and as people can play at their own pace, people that does not enjoy this linear RPG part can either Mod it away or run through it very fast. And no matter how you look at it, progressing through the tiers does not take very long at this point.

I am most certain that exploration will still matter even at higher tiers, and I even posted a suggestion to further the incentive for exploration.
And MineCraft does about the same, when you get your diamond gear you are going to run around with that for many many many hours and the old gear is now 100% obsolete, so was it in Terraria, every tier your previous tier became 100% obsolete (Remember that Terraria was also a game about exploration, and this mechanic of obsoleting previous tiers is actually a good incentive to go out and keep exploring, keep finding the next tier and so on)

The other games in the same genre of building and exploration is using in many cases the very same system, because it is tested and tried, people enjoy it, and if you can truly think of (In the terms of progressing through gear) that includes more than just ramping up numbers, and is not overly complicated, I'd be very happy to hear it.

Honestly I can't think of any real RPG's ever that didn't keep ramping up the numbers and added more stats the equipment... Oh yeah, sorry, Vagrant Story was not particular Heavy on that... Great game that is, but that is also a completely different genre, focusing on narrative and not progression in the same sense.

I do feel like you have played MineCraft and Terraria, and I bet you felt the progression felt nice at the start, but as most likely have completed the tier progression several times you now feel like it is a grind and desire something more complex. And again I am all for complexity in this case, I'd love a non-linear progression system, but again, those are something for the modders to do, and should not be present in the core game.

 

Personally, I think it should be:
Stone Pick
Copper Pick
Iron Pick
Steel Pick
Titanium Pick
Durasteel Pick
All the picks are made with 20 of their material, x amount of pixels and 20 wooden planks, and is unlocked at the tier you get to the metal.

Durasteel Drill
Aegisalt Drill
Ferozium Drill
Cerelium Drill
Violium Drill
All the drills are made with 20 of their material, a circuit board and a wire

And then some kind of mining laser out of rubium and impervium ;p

 

The problem we get with this is then we should also apply it to armor progression if the system needs to be consistent and then we have a mostly redundant resource (Gold and Diamond), which again I don't get why people have a problem with Gold tools, armor and weapons just because Gold is not realistically used for that.
It is also about gameplay mechanics.
Nobody complained about how Gold worked in MineCraft because it had a downside, but it was also utterly unrealistic. (Even the concept of Diamond Armor and Weaponry is as well)
It basically stated that Gold was just as hard as Diamond but less durable.
Keep Gold and diamond in the tier progression, it is all but a name that is easily identified by people.
For game mechanical sense there is no reason to change how it works right now.

 

I can see where this is going. For the sake of all that's holy, I implore you to stop. I've written some of the most in depth answers to these questions in a topic that has long died.
Reason being fighting. This subject might as well be about Jihad, it gets nearly the same sort of response. Its best to just be a non-partisan member of this argument and run
away for good.

 

Hah, I know that feel bro. I hate it when the internet goes to sh!t out of complete disorder and people throwing their ideas out of contrast. But if you don't want to be a part of this then why didn't you just leave it? you could've FORGOTTEN ABOUT IT AND NOW YOU'RE GOING TO GET ALL THE ALERTS. Too late.

 

Honestly i like the system of upgrading previous items. The point of the system is to get you to explore, you gotta work for what you want ;3

Plus late tier armor and stuff can be easily skipped and require only ores

 

Ive never played Terraria, but I think that you should be able to craft higher tierd stuff without requiering the previous tier

 

upgrading a tool is fine.
just think about it: in minecraft you can build every tool without upgrading it.
BUT: you need a certain tool-tier to mine the needed materials. you cant mine diamonds with a wooden pick. also the tools can break.
here you need to craft your tool only one time and repair it with cheap copper, you can mine everything from the beginning.
wouldnt it be a bit broken if you could skip every single tier by just farming enough diamonds on a tier 1 planet?

 

For starters, the weapons in starbound DO break but they have a more realistic durability. Second of all if you were to go down to the core of a planet right off the bat, as soon as you got a pickaxe
of any kind, you probably wouldn't have good enough weapons to go that deep under ground and if you wanted to get like rubium then that'd require you to beat bosses first. So there are limitations in the game so you can't just go straight to impervium armour but I get your point.