Will starbound be a game defined by god awful grinding?

Every game in the world has grinding, there is no way to avoid it. I see you made complaints but didnt offer any suggestions on how you would 'fix' the grind. I don't mean like fix it by adding more exploring, i mean detailed ways you would go about fixing the grind.

 

When the Devs are gonna read forums properly, I am gonna post something constructive. So far, Devs are on their unicorn train to which only loud kids with game ruining, simplifying and Terraria mutating opinions are allowed to.

 

LOL, Well, if I were into the "Guy, Guy" thing, maybe. I may seriously consider that offer if you were a dude that could bear children. We'd be rich fella. Filthy rich.

Any how. Thanks for the thumbs up!

 

No prob, bro. Glad to see people with some clarity, who haven't catch the "die-hard fan flu".

 

how do you make this game into a survival game? how does a 2d survival game even work?

survival sounds like it would be extremely easy to me.

but they built the game around mining and exploring just feels.. alot better in 3d anyway so it cant be a full exploration game either and... well... it is what it is a god damn mystery until they add more.

EDIT: tbh, seems everyones getting buyers remorse and its actually kinda boring now, terraria is alot better than this game in its current state.

EDIT 2: no iceciro thougt you had a point but you're just talking nonsense, joe chip... i salute thee.

 

The reason it's annoying is because underground is BORING compared to the surface. I'm sure most of us have spent far too much time mining in Minecraft or Terraria and are just fed up of this grinding mechanic. If the underground was more ineresting, say almost as interesting as dungeons, I wouldn't care.

Procedural games aren't going procedural enough, there should always be things to find, not just deposits of the same 5 ores... blah blah blah.

 

This absolutism concerning whether or not the game is "about" mining or is a Terraria clone is largely a waste of time. Regardless of what that About page says, a cursory glance at the game's fundamentals suggests what you're in for. "Mining" in the sense that you acquire materials, reshape the world, build your bases, and generally personalize every single world you meet is at the heart of the game's experience as much as exploration. That the very structure of the worlds you explore is founded upon the humble Block should place this beyond doubt as an intended experience. Note here that I'm intentionally not mentioning the discussion of the crafting system, because it's very much a different discussion than the current one on what this game is "about".

Now, that all being said, I think most peoples' beef with the game's current use of the mechanic is that it's the only piece of the puzzle we have. It's the most-realized facet of the game, and my bet is that huge swathes of content have yet to make their way in. An off-the-cuff example: there is nothing exciting to find within the interior of most, or indeed any worlds. People don't consider digging to be another form of exploration because they know there's nothing to find. So it feels like drudgery to pick up that pickaxe, because you know you're only doing it to get shiny rocks to make it through the next beef gate and repeat. Hence, the 'grind'.

Currently the game's progression is a staircase. A linear, methodical ascent from plateau to plateau, with little interesting to see in between. Just more ore of a different color. Oh, and coal. Always gotta have coal. Numerical balancing (and discussions of fuel) aside, the reliance on mining and crafting is currently emphasized at this point in development by the numbers (it's hard to find a weapon that beats what you can craft, and once that becomes a viable plan, people are going to raid planets and abandon them as they slide into what gets them to the -end- more easily, purely by virtue of incentives and game psychology), as well as there being little better to do right now.

As the list of unique things we can experience and enjoy on each world grows, I suspect the game will begin to feel more balanced, and more interesting.

 

Check out a game called, "Planet Explorers" on steam.

 

It doesn't need a really detailed fix though. The only grind I have issue with is how hard fuel is to come by on your starter world (forcing you to spend the first 3-4 hours in mindless digging before you can get to anything close to the meat of the game) which is a pretty easy thing to deal with.

Either:
-make it cost less wood to generate coal (and guarantee the starter planet has trees in some way)
-make coal a bit more abundant in alpha sector
-start the player off with enough fuel to make one (maybe two) system jumps

There should be a little more emphasis on system travelling in tier 1 than there currently is, but at the same time you can't let the player jump around too much and only mine surface ores (more underground biomes might help stress the important of digging later in the beta anyways.)

EDIT: I see someone already covered it. The issue isn't really the mining as that underground exploration just isn't rewarding or interesting currently. There need to be more interesting underground discoveries, even if it's just isolated buried rooms with some useful loot. It's something later versions of Terraria got right, so I'm sure starbound will get there in time.

 

Starbound has an easy grind on my opinion. To be good in every game you need to grind a little and rise your equip and skills to feel the "goal complete".
I can easily get more than 3k wood, 300+ coal and LOADS i mean, HEAVY LOADS of ores on a single planet. Grasslands, jungle and forest I mean. Other planets that got less trees takes a little more time in the underground. But I tell you that I hardly spend a hour in a single planet in the most case.

Early game could be a little slower, due the maretials, but you can find all cooper, silver, gold, platinum and diamond on the starter planet.

 

every survival game i evert played, survival elements was just a small nuisance and easy.

 

Not always due to the RNG. You can get screwed pretty badly and not know you're in trouble for a few hours.

It's not a hard fix though. Starter planets just need a few constraints set so there's enough fuel to get offworld and enough materials for some tier 1 crafting.

 

How is this troll still going on? You can go from "New Character" to Impervium (Tier 10) Armor in a matter of hours as it stands with the current beta... You can find veins of nearly up to 30-40 coal/iron/etc at a time.. And as for pixels? You can find veins of ~20 diamonds on the surface in the later levels..

This game is not a grind. This thread is a joke. Pyronymer is either a troll or someone who hasn't actually played the game. There is nothing more to this thread.

 

You are obviously still on the older ore generation. A couple patches ago everything became much more rarer. The 30-40 ore veins are now a dozen at most.

Try starting a new character and you'll see.

 

No I am not. If you DIG DOWN as the developers have stated on a hundred occassions that they want you to do, there ARE large veins of ore. You can't expect that high amount of ore on the surface.

 

Really, who gives a damn how fast you can get to the end? The reason it's a grind is the nature of the progression. It's fun like working in a bolt factory is fun, and reaching the end is just as fulfilling as making quota.

 

I do agree with the more underground areas, by doing this there wil still be grinding but the grinding will be more masked because you will be thinking about what you are going to find instead of how much longer its going to take to get these dang ores. I also think plannet explorations should be more important, but I don't think it should be easy to go from plannet to plannet. I think instead plannets themself should be more interseting and make you want to stay on them longer. Maybe something like a dungeon with puzzles that you need to explore the plannet to unlock. Maybe we can have a clue that something rare is found only on that certain planet and we must explore to find what it is. In general plannets need to be more unique, then there would be less need to hop from planet to planet to feel like we are exploreing.
Either way grinding will always be there, but good game design mask's the grinding to make you feel like you are doing something interesting.

 

See that's where you are hypocritical. You are correct that the time to get there is irrelevant, but the fact that you think the only way to get there is through grinding, means the game is nothing else to you, than reaching the end.

Starbound isn't just about making it to the end.

 

POW!

Exactly. Tedium. Tedium isn't fun. Turning a wrench on a nut to drive it to the bottom of a bolt isn't more fun if tomorrow the nut and bolt are different colors.

 

I think the real issue are the people acting as if there will be nothing else added to the game, they act as if we won't have 11 tiers to go through, they act as if a quest system will never be put into place. The game still has so much crap to be added to it, but let's all pretend none of that will ever happen and jump to conclusions without ever having a drop of real data.