I have a couple of suggestions... Im pretty sure the fully customizable ship has probably been suggested a few times. If not then I'd suggest adopting it over doing missions for an "expandable" ship. Its MUCH more fun building your own. Much like a base on a planet. Sure you can build whatever you want on another planet but you still spend a lot of time on your ship. So why not have the ability to Fully customize your ship? It is practically your main base. Maybe start the ship out as a rusty beat up bucket of a ship and maybe add missions to find things to "upgrade" parts of your ship. A new Captain's chair.... A new Fuel tank that can hold more than 1000 units. Maybe even when you start raising your tech and using the robotic table you can build new 3d Pixel Printers that are more Efficient and allow you to Install and Buy items for a cheaper price. I dont know how many hours Ive spent in an asteroid belt just mining for diamond and whatever other ores I can use to refine for pixels just to buy things back from the Pixel printer but I dont even mind that. It makes a valid Pixel dump =P. I can go on and on about ship upgrade suggestion... An asteroid belt that has Ship Part sellers for Decoration. Wings, fins, etc... Im a builder/explorer type. Thats what I love about this game already and its not even finished. There are times where Ive filled my own inventory up with stuff that I havent had the room to pick up anything else and it was all cosmetic items lol. For the other suggestion.... I guess I've been delusional from being doped up on too much cough medicine here lately because Ive been sick. I could have sworn while Exploring USMC Bases and USMC Prisons there are a couple of items there that I had mistakenly thought were in the foreground and stay in FRONT of the character. As in letting you go through them with them still in the forefront giving it a semi 2D/3D effect. The items Im speaking of are the Glass Panels and Pipe Fences. I went back to check this out (Ive started a Topic all about it too asking how to get them to move to the forefront lol). So I guess I must have imagined it all. If there was some way to do so, it would be great for us Builder and Creator types to have some items like that. Im not sure how much extra coding it would take make an extra "layer" to be able to place things in front of characters like glass blocks etc... It would even be neat if the random generation system did that to planets for the flora. Pass some trees that alternate back and forth in front and behind the character. And my thanks goes to Aey for the suggestion to suggest the Panels and Fences and Princeofmar5 for keeping the Fully Customizable Ship Mod up to date for us builders =)
Over all, I think having to complete missions and explore to improve your ship would be a really neat idea. However, the ship itself should offer services that your home base can't do. Such has having a pixel printer and so on. But that doesn't mean it can't have a few fancy features. Simply put, have missions to increase the overall size of the ship for the first few tiers. Just to give it an extra floor or two. From the ship, you could gain quests from an intercom sort of object, that will allow you to install new ship-specific goodies for a relatively high amount of pixels. At first, there's only a couple of upgrades. Things like an improved captains chair which requires you to gather leather, iron and wood to look more official and futuristic, A slightly bigger fuel tank for around 1400 pixels and some steel, and perhaps an improved life-support system, that introduces a very slow passive health regeneration. Once you have the second tier work table, you can create a new Terminal item. The terminal item is a small lectern-like computer, which allows the player to enter a new UI with a small tool bar, filled with different cosmetic ship parts. The Terminal lets players edit the overall look of their ship, but doesn't allow them to remove the contents or re-shape the ship. That stuff comes later. Once you have the terminal, you can start new quests with the intercom. The quests would include a racial captain's chair, improved life support to slowly refill the hunger bar, a new fuel tank and some sort of 'Stabilizer' object. The very last would require the player to find some rare components. The rare pieces would be three or less micro-chips, special cores and a smaller life-support system, perhaps found on a derelict or wrecked ship. Once the quest is complete, the player unlocks the ability to create said Stabilizer, which is a terminal with a different-colored screen. Activating the Stabilizer would put the ship in a large forcefield, of which the player can build within. Keep in mind, entering this mode temporarily removes all the decorative portions of the ship. The player can build any shape and remove the ship's core parts, allowing them to fully rebuild their ship within the bubble, so long as the Stabilizer is still there. While activated, the ship can't be moved or used, and the stabilizer cannot be moved or destroyed. The stabilizer will not allow players to deactivate it if the ship is not 100% secure, with all of it's fixings. If the ship is missing a part, like the Captain's chair or the teleporter, the stabilizer can't be deactivated. The ship will be considered insecure if there are any holes in the ship's un-decorated hull. Once the player has a rough build of the ship, the player can deactivate the stabilizer and use the terminal again to redecorate the exterior and interior with the fixings removed upon activating the stabilizer. All of the ship's original parts, excluding the teleporter, the lights, the captain's chair, the intercom and the fuel tank/engine are considered decorative items and will be removed when the stabilizer is activated. God damn. Decorating your ship might be harder than you think, especially when you don't consider weapons systems and such. If any of this means something, it means that ship-building and decoration should be an end-game sort of deal. Requiring lots of hard to find or expensive ingredients to build the proper components. Rare drops could also offer alternatives, allowing the player to jump ahead with the ship's customization. Perhaps the ship doesn't have an intercom originally, and has to be found in a chest or purchased from a Glitch merchant?
I really dont think there should be a mission to increase size limit though. I think you should be able to build as large as you want any time you want. I dont care for a ship background because I like the ability to put ship windows in to see the planets in the background. Hell! The hunting for the materials alone is enough of a mission to just keep building your ship. Trust me, the one Im working on now is needing ridiculous amounts of just block resources alone and thats not counting the ores I need to refine in to pixels for decortations. I do agree on the Upgrades for the other parts though (as I stated in the above post as well) and I also believe the pixel printer and ship storages should remain on the ship only. With the Mod you can turn them in to pixel items and use them anywhere. I strictly use them on the ship and use other storage items on planet bases. Thats also why I suggested Asteroid belts for find new cosmetic Ship parts. Maybe a Ship that was ripped asunder by flying in to the asteroids or some Asteroid Merchant hiding in one of the lil bases in there running around with a Life support Pack on his back lol. An asteroid scavenger =). Asteroids already require some good techs to move around in and at least the ability to make the Life support backpack just to survive there. That alone makes it more of a late to end game past time and pixel dump.
The biggest issue with making the ship bigger, is how do you make a ship that's floating in space bigger? Perhaps you can land it on your home planet and do the modifications there? But that still introduces problems like missing walls or pieces of the ship, which won't actually change anything because of the current way building works. (Although, it would be sa-weet if having holes in your ship created some weird gravity changes and started freezing effects.) And there's also all the original ship parts. Unless you scan all of them, how do you get more? Would you rely on older metals to create your ship? Hopefully once it's in orbit again, you wouldn't be able to mine anything out, just for the sake of in-flight safety.
I'm leaning more towards the 'preset upgrades' side of the debate above. Complete freedom to build would simply open up a slew of ship designs that couldn't feasibly function, and also negate the advantages of building a base on your home planet. Another story or two would be nice, and I'm all for additional ship-exclusive features. Above all else I want the ship to have a backlog of previously visited planets so I don't have to keep typing out names and locations in an open notepad document.
Apparently a bookmarking system is in the works for the navigation machine. But yeah, I really don't think players should be given free reign over their ships, for the sake of building bases. Unless a slew of new machine upgrades are introduced, like another crafting table, a better anvil and a megafancy refinery are introduced, in which case players might want room to drop those down. I think at most, players should have maybe three or so floors. Enough room for a little farming, some storage and a bed. Maybe some other misc stuff like extra storage or more vanity stuff. But generally speaking, they shouldn't be given much space. If we run with the idea of the stabilizer, it limits how much space the player has to build, but still allows them full customization. Improving the stabilizer would introduce more space, untill a maximum cap is reached. (Just enough for a three level tanker of sorts.)
