I don't know why it's legendary, I trash it 10 minutes after every time I make a new char. If you want it to play a main role in this game, it must be upgrade-able.
Agreed. In a game where hotbar real estate is at a premium, a core item that has a 5 minute life span seems a little off. As soon as I have beginning mining tools, I am no longer using the matter manipulator. Although, are you still able to remotely place objects after you destroy the matter manipulator? Maybe instead of having separate tools, you craft upgrades for your manipulator that allow it to function in a specific capacity? Like a mining upgrade at first, wood cutting upgrade, farming upgrade. This would help to save space on the hotbar for other things that the player needs to use (bow, other weapons, bandages, syrums, etc) and provide a cool sense of progression in the upgrading of the matter manipulator to higher levels of effectiveness.
I kind of like this, except with how progression works right now, it raises the question of why, narratively, lumping a few kilos of copper on a high-tech disintegrator raygun makes it work faster. I know Starbound isn't exactly a hard sci-fi game but this is a little much to handwave over.
The picks and such work well for early game - does a good job of showing just how few resources your toon has when you're making a stone pickaxe to dig with, in a space-age setting. BUT, once you get your ship fueled up and get a hold of the situation, it would make sense to move on to more high-tech solutions to physical labor. I would go to great lengths to make the Matter Manipulator as effective as the pick - the fact that it doesn't break is in-and-of-itself a very appealing factor, but frankly, the MM is just friggin' cool. Picking things up, moving things, breaking things, etc, all will a little blue laser? Yes please! This is a sci-fi game, after all.
I think that picking up things and moving them is the key element, there. The MM isn't a mining tool, its a means of manipulating and hauling about large bits of matter. I saw it more as a fork lift that could also be used to hammer things out of the ground, but it isn't designed to separate so much as fuse and lift. What I kind of wish the MM could do is be upgraded to work like a short range grappling hook, so if you are quick on the draw, you could save yourself from deadly falls and sink holes while mining.
In its original state, yes. The suggestion is to make it upgradeable to be able to handle the other things, and for a device that can lift and wave around a thousand+ lb object like it's a feather, pulling rocks from the ground isn't far fetched.
I agree with the need to keep a meaningful progression for resource gathering in the game. That initial scarcity and the scraping together what little you can find is key to the initial experience of the game. You are stranded on a foreign planet with no fuel to leave and limited tools at your disposal so I think starting off with the manual tools like picks and axes makes sense and is fine. Haltus pretty much hit my point on the head with the soft science approach to the manipulator. It's a piece of technology that can manipulate 1000+ lb objects with a small blue beam so the idea of crafting upgrades to increase its functional capacity doesn't seem that far fetched. As you get later and later into the game, it seems more far fetched to me that after using your FTL capable ship to travel to a new space system and then teleporting down to a chosen planet, you would then begin gathering resources with a stone/copper/iron pickaxe and not some equally cool technology like a mining laser that could be fitted to manipulator. It just doesn't fit. It also ends up making the resource gathering more tedious (look up the mining thread in suggestions, where that is already being discussed). The other reason I bring it up though is because of the real estate issue on the hot bar. As you get deeper and deeper into the game, you find yourself needing access to a larger array of tools, weapons, and support items. When you are exploring, just gathering tools alone can take up 2-3 of those spaces. For instance, when I am mining and foraging for wood, I keep manipulator, drill, axe, and torches in the first 4 slots. If the matter manipulator can be configured to operate in the both a mining and woodcutting capacity, I just freed up 2 slots on my hotbar. Less time reconfiguring my hotbar, more time actually playing the game. It could be something as simple as a key press to cycle between modes, or it could just assume by context (if I have the woodcutting upgrade and I am targeting a tree, the woodcutting upgrade is applied).
