We are going to have thousands, mabye even tens of thousands of planets in any starbound world. I suggest some main types that their can be variation on. Arctic. Frozen planets are simple, they are frozen over and very cold. You could find penguins and other creatures used to cold weather. The weather could be blizzards which cause damaging winds with knockback, hailstorms which send ice flying to the ground, cause damage if they hit you. A example of a block would be ice. It is very slippery and at can sometimes be very hard in the from of permafrost. Heat causes Ice and snow melt away. Desert. Desert planets are also simple, they are boiling hot with lots of sand. They have plenty of mobs adapted to them like giant sand worms among other things. The weather could be sandstorms which can blind you and cause damage. You could find sandstone, which while not a very useful block in itself, sometimes when mining it you will get some gems which can be used for laser. It is also a nice block for building. Death Death planets are some of the hardest in the game. They can vary from ever dark planets that are always cold to a massive boiling jungle. They do have a few things in common. All life their wants to kill you. Their are rarely Npcs you can recruit from these places. If you do find one, he or she will give you powerful skills that he or she got from that place. You can often find ruins with the remains of powerful gear on them. However these planets are defends by very power cretures that will not go down without a fight. These planets always 100 threat level due to the risks of traveling here. The rewards are great if you come. Oceanic Very simple, a planet which is mostly made out of water. The landing point when you spawn will often be a island in the massive sea and those other islands are rare. If you want to find foes, they are either flying or in the ocean. You would need gear that would allow you to breath underwater to maximize usage of this world. You would often find in worlds that are tamed already before you landed, that they often use boats, submarines and planes. They would sometimes let you buy the blueprints to these vehicles so you can travel the seas. Vehicles. We are going to get many types of Vehicles but here are a few spare types. Drillers, while they move slowly, can drill into rock allow you to mine better. UFO's are frail, but can fire either a offensive laser or a tractor beam.
Part 2. The Bastion. In the rare event that someone decided to invade your space station. The Bastion would be your best defense. It would be the first room in the station allow for defense. You could place traps in it for extra defense. The design of it is that you have some potions to snipe and defend the base with to prevent the mobs from killing all the Npcs inside. If you had enough metals of sort you could build turrets that some types of Npcs could use to kill mobs you robotic turrets that aim on their own. Sentry Sentry's are very useful robots. They can be made to be healers, fighters, or carry your stuff for you. For example a tier 1 range sentry could attack targets with weak damage, but not worry about ammo. You can upgrade them so they can fly, do increased damage, hold more stuff, among other things. They can only do medium amounts of damage in the end, but they can be changed in countless different ways.
Well on one world if you just keep traveling to one side the biome automatically changes. I don't see the point.
I like all of the ideas. I would add the broad possibility of Crazy planets. Basically, these are rare planets that are just plain weird and wacky. Possible examples would be a candy cane planet, a planet made of cheese(with monsters and people also made of cheese), a planet that looks like a peaceful meadow but everything (animals,trees, even some of the grass) wants to kill you. Programmatically, the way that the planet would be generated is to make parameters less restrictive than in other cases. When a planet isn't Crazy, candy cane and cheese would not be normally occurring things. Bunnies normally aren't deadly, grass normally doesn't spawn lava when you destroy it, ponies don't normally breathe fire or teleport. All of these restrictions would go away once the game decides that the world is going to be a Crazy world.
Take a look a Ratchet & Clank for planet examples, I mean I'd love a big swampy Planet like Oozla... Or a wasteland planet like Veldin. Or those big dark cold planets Like Rilgar.
Everyone needs to if they dont know allready, to look up ratchet and clank. best planetary travel game ever.
Liking the ideas, but i think it would be quite cool if there was a really rare heaven-valhalla-eden planet where a lot of the flora and fauna looks all ascended and ethereal.
I guess some planets are going to have lots of biomes. But some have just one. Tha ones thatt have one biome should be harder and have more of "what have on that biome". And also, we should have a fire biome. Lava all the way, red sand... And the possibility of transforming a biome into another. Like Terraria let us.
