Starbound: Terraria in SPAAaaace

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Avoraciopoctules
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Starbound: Terraria in SPAAaaace

Post by Avoraciopoctules »

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http://playstarbound.com/

Pretty sweet-looking sidescrolling sandbox game. I really liked Terraria, and this one looks like it will be a substantial improvement over that game. The procedural generation of new worlds, creatures, and weapons should make for impressive replay value.

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Post by Blasted »

So looking forward to this. $1M in preorders is nothing to sneeze at.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Choose your own warp color!

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Post by Kaelik »

Also, Starmade, Minecraft in Space.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

http://playstarbound.com/7th-july-progress/

In-game ABC music is looking pretty fantastic.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Looks like you'll be able to script NPC behavior to an impressive degree. I'm looking forward to modding in some palace guards for my Doom Fortress.

Also: Starbound OST - Novakid Theme: "I was the Sun (Before it was Cool)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tONfEAQdDiQ
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

I glanced at Tiy's twitter and saw something neat. Apparently you can remove the back wall from your spaceship to expose the working components. No hilarious deaths to vacuum will happen when you try adding wood paneling to the ship lounge.

http://imgur.com/R2vfZlG

http://imgur.com/7xIkrAg
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Post by DSMatticus »

Given that the beta was announced days ago and is supposably coming out on Steam in a few hours, this thread is somewhat overdue for a bump. So... bump.
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Post by Kaelik »

Is it just me, or is the woodcutting sound effect basically just fapping.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by DSMatticus »

I don't hear that at all. It's like a dry thunky sound.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

A.C. wrote:A guide to easy and quick progression
  • Always cut down trees. Trees are the best fuel source for your ship. 1000 unrefined wood = a full fuel tank, which is enough for multiple jumps
  • Don't stay on a planet! Don't dig below the surface! These are wastes of time!
  • Go to a new planet with a Threat Level you think you can handle. Pick a direction and run across the surface.
  • Keep chopping down trees! Mine any big ore deposits you see. Higher threat level planets will have large deposits of ore visible from the surface.
  • Explore every dungeon/location you run across. Loot every chest/crate in villages (they have lots of ingots, pixels, and materials). Slaughter the villagers for more pixels if you want. Dungeons will give you thousands of pixels in no time - an Avian Temple on a Threat Level 6 planet earned me about 12k pixels from clearing it out. You'll have enough to buy anything in shops!
  • If you find a larger-than-average enemy (every planet seems to have one), it will drop a magical weapon of some kind. Kill these, exploit the fact that attacks go through terrain by trapping them in blocks if you're not opposed.
  • The only base you should keep is in your ship. Build a fortress on a planet later, for now, all of your crafting/storage can be handled on the ship.
  • you can take anything you want from villages with no repercussions. Use this to get your anvil instead of wasting iron on it
That's it! Enjoy skipping all the tedium of mining and exploring caves (which currently seem to have no special loot to be found). It's really fun to just explore planets like this and you get more than enough resources to continue progression - it feels a lot faster than pretending you're playing Terraria.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Flying pirate ships are apparently great places to buy guns. Just don't jump into a propeller, or set one down on your spawn point.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Upcoming patch is going to tone down pixel costs on basic crafting and change the warmth meter to something more obvious.

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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

All right, here's a post of random tips & tricks, since people keep asking very similar questions. Not really formatted well but might teach people something they were asking about.

- Holding shift while using the matter manipulator or placing blocks results in a 1x1 block instead of a 2x2 block.
- Right click when placing or destroying blocks to place or destroy the back wall.
- The L/R buttons on your hotbar can be used as a hotkey as well! Anything placed there will be switched to when you use 'x,' and you can use 'x' again to switch back to what you were holding beforehand. Try putting something you use often there, like your weapon.
- Hunting is done with the bow. Killing things with a bow makes it drop meat or leather, killing it with a sword or similar weapon makes it drop pixels. Meat does not always drop, so try killing multiple monsters with your bow until it does! [Soon there will be a hunting knife that allows for meat kills as well.] Alternatively, to grow things, make a stone hoe and till the soil at the top of the planet to make it viable for growing seeds in.
- To collect plants, tap e while near them.
- Things like campfires and crafting tables need to be 'used' (default button is e) to see what you can do with them. For things like crafting, be mindful of the buttons below which sort what recipes you know. If you need to find a recipe fast, search for it in the search bar.
- That "light" indicator bar at the bottom of your screen is actually your warmth meter. Get yourself near a campfire to heat up. You will die if your screen starts becoming foggy and you start losing health. [This will soon be a more obvious temperature indicator.]
- To regenerate health, you can sleep in something like a bed or a wagon. To do it faster, make bandages! First, build a spinning wheel from your crafting table, then collect plant fibres (by chopping down vines growing in caves) to create fabric, then make bandages (back at the crafting table).
- You can fly to a different planet, even if you haven't built the beacon! Go to your ship and use the terminal near the pilot's seat. Coal and unrefined wood can be used to add fuel to your engine. To zoom out of your system, right click.
- As an addendum, sometimes starting planets just seem barren of resources or fun things to explore. Don't be afraid to leave! However, mind cold & moon planets since they have harsher temperatures and may not be as easy to explore in.
- The distress beacon is a one-time use item and summons a really hard boss. Don't put it down until you're ready and be aware that you might need to save up and make one again.
- To repair your pickaxes, pick up ore from your inventory and right click on the pickaxe. I've actually had luck using copper to repair a gold pickaxe, but some people say you need to use same-or-higher quality ore to repair. Repairing brings it back to full durability which lets it go at its best speed.
- I suggest putting things like your anvil and crafting table on your ship. You'll always need them and you won't need to replace or take them with you when you fly to new planets.
Last edited by Avoraciopoctules on Fri Dec 06, 2013 4:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kHi ... 1&sle=true

This Google doc is a list of planets with cool stuff, if you run into anything notable feel free to add to it.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

I want to take this opportunity to say, in it's current state starbound sucks.

People say "Beta!"...

...but every indication is the developers are leaning toward some mindless unrewardingly grindy mechanics. Case in point everything about the robot boss, and coal.

Oh yeah and like fifty gajjillion levels of grindy fucking pick axe upgrades in a sci-fi game.

The fan boys on the forums are yelling down multiple groups of players dissatisfied with the current direction.

The game is now a hardcore mining game and if you don't like that. The game isn't for critics like you.

So currently in the "fuck you its not for you!" crowd. People who don't like pick axe poor terraria knock off grinds, people who want an exploration game, people who like sci fi anything, people who want guns that don't suck, people who want combat that doesnt suck, and people who want to build stuff.

This game isn't going in a good direction and it's community is pretty shit.
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Post by DSMatticus »

I really don't know where all the time they dumped into this game went. For how long it's been in development, it is impressively incomplete even for a beta.

Dungeons/NPC features/quests/the storyline are still not done yet, and there's not enough variety or reward in looking for interesting locations. You would be well-advised to skip most of the dungeons you see because it will take more time to clear them than it would to find more and better things running around the surface. Cities are nothing but a couple of stores you don't care about. And there's no way to identify where the cool things will be before you lap the entire goddamn planet. They need to finish the content, and then they need to give you a "scan planet" ability that gives you basic info like biomes/dungeons/cities/so on.

The ore system is a mostly uninteresting timesink, and almost as if aware of this, they've put all the ores all the way up to the surface of the planet so you can at least dig them out of the ground without wasting too much time. I don't know why you'd complain about how grindy the pickaxes are, it's the armor sets that eat most of your ores. What they probably should have done is put huge veins underground and then implemented sci-fi prospector tools that find those deposits, making collecting ores a minor and rewarding detour from exploration.

They haven't added any useful autoconstruction tools, something the genre is desperately in need of and would have been perfectly justifiable given sci-fi. How fucking hard would it be for someone to have the bright idea of letting the players draw shapes and then click autoperimeter or autofill?

Combat/tech use/damage/energy all that stuff are practically placeholders they're so shit. Shields make no sense, guns have half the DPS and compete with your techs for energy, bubbleboost allows infinite flight (which is awesome) while the actual tech for flying barely gets you off the ground, and since the major rebalance where they stripped tiers the game is pretty fucking easy to boot and nothing in your tier is ever really dangerous once you have that tier's equipment.

It is in obvious need of a lot of work, but the biggest problem is that it just doesn't have anything cool or rewarding to actually do. It's interstellar marathon the game - you lap planets in perpetuity, dodging monsters and collecting shiny rocks so you can go to new places and dodge the same monsters and collect slightly different shiny rocks.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

DSMatticus wrote: I don't know why you'd complain about how grindy the pickaxes are
I feel the pick axes are somewhat emblematic of the problem and the apparent game design methodology of the creators.

Armour is a worse grind. The robot is a worse grind. The early game coal as fuel bullshit is a more offensive grind that undermines more of the game's supposed potential directions.

Of course you have do DO all your mining grind for all that... with pick axes...

But. Mostly the pick axes are like a microcosm of almost everything wrong with starbound.

1) They are fucking pick axes in space. Boo! You are stuck with them for way too fucking long, also Booo! You STARTED with a fucking matter manipulator and have to switch to pick axes or suck DOUBLE BOOO!

2) There are like... what? 6 tiers of them available in sector 1 of the game. SIX TIERS of incremental recolored fucking identical fucking pick aces.

3) Pixel build cost bullshit rapidly becomes evident with them.

4) They really are just microscopically more effective reskins of the same fucking thing that works in the same fucking way. They don't even dig bigger patches of blocks they just dig faster, very slightly faster... only dirt and stone gets harder to dig the higher level the planet/deeper you go or some crap, so all you are doing is upgrading to keep up the same digging rates in the same damn ways.

5) Oh yeah and wear and tear... because fuck you that's why. They degrade unless you keep throwing resources at them. And AS they degrade they mine slower so yeah, double fuck you grind more and harder with your pick axe.

6) They inexplicably punish some activities in ways that don't fucking make any sense but MUST have been obvious on design. For instance. Your character is 4 blocks tall and 2 blocks wide. Pick axes can mine 3x3 blocks at a time. So tunneling down is easy. But tunneling side ways is a pile of fuck you because for some reason a 4x4 pick axe in a sci fi game that has goals for "massive surface modification" would be TOO GOOD FOR THE LIKES OF YOU!

7) I don't think I recall these pick axes being pushed hard up front with the games advertising. Pretty sure they didn't have a thing going saying "6 incremental tiers of fuck you terraria knock off pick axes you will be needing to use for fucking hours before you even get as remotely close to sci-fi as a fucking drill!"

So yeah. I feel the pick axes are sort of the poster child of Starbound looking dangerously like some sort of clumsy bait and switch.

Of course... with luck the further changes and additions will fix all that... but... the problem is this stuff looks like an intended foundation and template for the rest. The road map pretty much describes the current status that way. Many fan boys are defending this crud as awesome and intended. And really the promised "new directions" and such are... not promising.

I mean really look at two of the "upcoming features" promised to address some concerns.

Robot bullshit is bullshit? Well it's going to be a QUEST later! Don't like building a crap ass brain extractor and grinding with it for superior brains (and everything else grindy about building the robot). Well don't worry SOON that will be bookended with QUEST TEXT and that will MAKE IT ALL BETTER AM I RITE!?

Or even worse, as there is some minor hope that the quest bullshit MIGHT trash existing time investments in items like the robot components (yeah right, i'll believe that when they do or at least say it).

There is the whole separate sectors thing.

Now I myself don't MIND the sectors being separate. I don't like it. But I don't mind. And IF the separate sectors were FUN and DIFFERENT I wouldn't even mind that there is no reason to stay in them forever or go back and forth between them or whatever. I would mind EVEN LESS if there wasn't a bullshit high fuel cost to hop between them.

BUT. Some people do mind. And a bunch of people have put forward some fairly valid criticism of the multiple separate sectors thing being kinda bullshit to them.

So the developers took that on board. And their response is "OK so Separate sectors on separate maps you can't go to without killing grindy linear gateway equipment check bosses in order sucks!" Well now we will put all the sectors on one map... but you still have to kill grindy linear gateway equipment check bosses before you are allowed to go to them, in order!"

And that might be the worst indication of future direction at all. They decided to "address" an apparent community concern... with a cosmetic change that does shit all to actually address the concern in any meaningful way.
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