Starbound: Terraria in SPAAaaace

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus »

PhoneLobster wrote: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!
It's pretty open about its "ARCHAIC... IN SPAAACE" style. You've got two species of space primitives, one of space knights, and one of space samurai. I laughed about the pickaxes when I first saw them too, and would really rather you just upgrade the matter manipulator or something, but it's definitely not a thematic clash by any means.
PhoneLobster wrote: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.
There are only 6 pickaxes total. Once you have the robotic crafting table, there are 5 drills (which seem like they would satisfy some of your complaints about theme). They even each look slightly different! Not just in color! Yay, everybody be excited!
PhoneLobster wrote:3) Pixel build cost bullshit rapidly becomes evident with them.
I can't decide how I feel about pixel costs overall, because they keep changing them and I can't actually be assed to replay fairly each time and get a feel for them. But the drills are ridiculously too expensive, agreed, and the whole idea is stupid to boot and pixels should probably just be saved for the printer.
PhoneLobster wrote: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.
I don't think that's true at all. I've never noticed dirt or stone getting harder by tier, though "dire stone" (which shows up anywhere as far as I'm aware) or whatever is harder than regular stone and the deeper you go the harder it gets whatever tier you're at. There are some planet types later on that are basically all difficult to mine materials, but all of the old biome types still show up and you can just run around on tier whatever forest planets instamining dirt.
PhoneLobster wrote: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.
Not only that, they're the only thing that fucking degrades in the entire game. It's like they realized repair mechanics were ass but had to have one. Anyway, I'm pretty sure they only mine slower when the bar is empty, and repairing them is super trivial at this point (you can use any ore on any pickaxe/drill, so you just grab some of that copper you see everywhere and throw it at it every now and then). They seriously might as well just take out their one and only pointless durability mechanic.

I think that's all I've got to add.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

DSMatticus wrote:I can't decide how I feel about pixel costs overall, because they keep changing them
Yeah... but the way they changed those... also kinda ass.

So they put them in in the first place. And they are a pixel grinding tax on any item they are attached to. A "what you got lucky and found ingredients, fuck you go back and grind for generic pixels!" sort of thing.

Basically a purely grindy time cost inflation mechanic, a somewhat offensive one.

People said "WTF this is bullshit remove pixel costs in recipes from game!".

And so they reduced pixel costs on early items only.

And people said "WTF this is bullshit remove pixel costs in recipes from game!"

And so they removed pixel costs... on some early/variously sub par items only.

And people said "WTF this is bullshit remove pixel costs in recipes from game!"

And they put the refinery in... which gives you lots of pixels... eventually... IF you now spend forever mining all the old ores you don't need anymore thus just transforming pixel grinding tax into... more mining grinding tax because... fuck you mine copper for fucking forever, no you aren't allowed to ignore ANY ore deposits!
PhoneLobster wrote: I don't think that's true at all. I've never noticed dirt or stone getting harder by tier,
It's bandied about a bit as a definite mechanic on the forums. But... well... since the forums can't entirely agree on if the the whole "more ores the deeper you go" thing is real well...

BUT. I would have to say I have noticed this. Especially on depth in planets and to some degree by planet tier (though I think it's been varying with patches especially along with other tier system changes).

If you keep up with your pick axe/drill up grade grind AND you stay on planet surfaces you should break even maybe even speed up a bit (when mining blocks without ores, higher quality ores take longer to mine too).

But if you go deeper/higher tier even the same damn cobblestone blocks will take longer to mine for no reason and you need you pick axe upgrades JUST to mine at the same speed you mined the same stuff at in earlier tiers/depths.

They might be toning this down and tweaking it, but having it EVER have been a mechanic for the same cobblestone to take longer to mine as a time/tier tax was fucking ass and any developer who even tried that for an early patch is not to be trusted.
It's like they realized repair mechanics were ass but had to have one.
Yeah its a token fuck you but they insist on keeping it... as a token fuck you... because fuck you that's why.

I dislike that general direction of thought in a game designer.

Also the general stubbornness to drop an idea that proves kinda bad and unpopular worries me. It's there on wear and tear, its there on pixel costs, its there on star map sectors, its there on mining grind, its there on expensive single use boss summoner items grinds, etc...
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Post by Woot »

Development feels like it's stalled, but the mod makers have been keeping the ball moving. It's *still* grindy bullshit early on, but things like Pixel Store let you pretend you're playing a 2D version of The Sims, and stuff like Frackin Flora and EggstraClucks make it somewhat more worthwhile to actually spend time farming. Some of the fan made races are kind of neat, though the folks who produce My Little Pony or Some Obscure Dumb Anime/JRPG ripoff stuff can die in a fucking fire.

Still, relying on fan-made content to keep your game interesting while you move your team to the UK is at best, a stopgap measure. Hopefully they'll start churning out meaty updates soon, and if not, hey, Terraria just added fishing! (And spring's here, which means I need to turn off the damn computer and maintain my lawn and garden, anyway.)
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Post by Mord »

Like the rest of the Internet, I got caught up in Minecraft and later Terraria when they first hit the scene. A few months later, I realized that the whole "mine for resources" mechanic is even worse than the kind of grindy fetch-quest bullshit that has prevented me from enjoying practically any MMO.

Is there a way to design a building game that doesn't have bullshit grinding as its core mechanic? It seems like the entire voxel-based building genre (Starbound included, apparently) has taken as given that Minecraft's branch-mine grind for diamonds is the bestest and funnest way to maintain some semblance of difficulty or scale.

In Terraria, I started cheating my ass off with map viewers like TerraFirma within a few hours of starting; I think that including "ore finder" items ingame would be one way to alleviate the problem. Another would be to expand greatly on the "dungeon" or other "underground puzzle/challenge area" mechanics and make advanced materials available primarily through looting these sites.
Last edited by Mord on Sun May 18, 2014 4:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Instead of dropping tiny resource nodes everywhere, you drop huge resource nodes fairly rarely almost exclusively off the sides of cavern systems. Then you give the player planet scanners, ore finders, automated drills, and automines that require setting up a facility (think Terraria houses for NPC's, except instead of placing furniture you're placing equipment).

End result is that Bob wants iron, so he finds an iron rich planet and then runs around the planet looking for a big enough node. Then he drills down (possibly automated) and sets up a small automated mining facility. Building a facility is more fun than digging a hole, so this is an improvement. But also: people should be able to fucking build structures by designating corners and auto-filling the interior. Not manually placing every single goddamn block, and this should take very little time.

Anyway, then you make it more Fun(tm) by having a percent chance that the mine spawns some number of monster waves/minibosses that Bob has to clear to get the mine operational. Because, again, fighting monsters is more fun than digging holes. And then once those are defeated, the mine is operational forever more (until it runs out of iron). It's so operational Bob can totally just leave and the next time he comes back it will have done work based on time elapsed. And then he has a bunch of iron, and probably only has to do this 1-3 times for his personal equipment needs. If Bob wants to start making structures out of iron, he'll need more. But since the whole process can be summarized as "explore some new planets, make a small building, fight some monsters," this is so not a problem.

As Bob climbs the tech tree, eventually petty materials like copper and iron are beneath his time. But he still needs them. So he gets the ability to detect nodes for those resources from his ship, and send NPC's/robots to go harvest them. Based on NPC quality/robot quality/node danger, this has some percent chance of success or failure. If it succeeds, Bob can totally pop his head into that area and check out the NPC built mine. It will probably be a refreshing change from his minimalist mines. If it fails, Bob can still do that, except the mine is abandoned/incomplete/destroyed. Bob might even need to answer a distress call and rescue his NPC, but only rarely/when taking huge risks. But again: that's just defeating a wave of monsters, so it's Fun(tm).

You can do similar things for your fantasy craft-and-build, but the fluff is obviously very different. Honestly, Starbound's failure to capitalize on automation is a fucking crime. It's fucking sci-fi, and the opportunities are obvious.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Mon May 19, 2014 12:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

DSMatticus wrote:Anyway, then you make it more Fun(tm) by having a percent chance that the mine spawns some number of monster waves/minibosses that Bob has to clear to get the mine operational. Because, again, fighting monsters is more fun than digging holes.
This is absolutely fucking dumb. If you want to play a game about grinding monsters, those exist. If you want to play a game about gathering resources and building stuff, you do that. There is no reason to make the resource gathering part of the building game into more monster grinding.

Minecraft at least provides the option to mine without fighting monsters if I invest the resources, why would you take that away?
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Post by DSMatticus »

Okay, first off: you can complain that you don't want to be expected to kill monsters as part of the resource gathering mechanic, but you cannot complain that being expected to kill any number of monsters as part of the resource gathering mechanic is grindy. Because any number includes one, and that wouldn't be very fucking repetitive, would it? The stated goal was to have the player fight a couple invasions/minibosses and then go up a tier and start getting that material for free by sending NPC's to do it. If the number of events required is high relative to the variety of content available in those events, then yes, it will end up grindy. But that's a nontrivial if.

Secondly: Terraria and Starbound are games about stabbing things as much as they are games about building things. I'm pretty sure the pacifist Terrarian/Starbounder crowd is negligible. Especially considering the games are currently tier-gated in basically exactly the same way I have described, where you have to murder things to get resources to go up a tier. Except after grinding your way through stabbing a bunch of monsters you also then have to go grind your way through digging a bunch of holes for shiny rocks while more monsters try to kill you. Combining those two grinds into one and then tinkering with the numbers until it's no longer as repetitive seems like a hugely fantastic idea.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

DSMatticus wrote:Honestly, Starbound's failure to capitalize on automation is a fucking crime. It's fucking sci-fi, and the opportunities are obvious.
This for me is Starbound's most glaring flaw. It's sci-fi. They have all the excuses they need for automation, advanced technology, scanners, terraforming scale tools and other things that would be really nice to have.

Instead they have fucking pick axe grinds and really shitty swords.

I hear they finally made guns more available, but right now I can't be assed grinding my way in to check it out.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Oh yeah, and...
DSMatticus wrote:Combining those two grinds into one and then tinkering with the numbers until it's no longer as repetitive seems like a hugely fantastic idea.
Starbound claimed at various points they wanted options for how to advance and they wanted you to be able to do it almost purely by mining, exploring or quests respectively.

So there is no reason why the fucking pick axe grind (though hopefully a significantly less retarded version of it) shouldn't be able to still exist as an alternative option along side a "Build and defend" advancement strategy. After all supposedly the aim was already to have that pick axe mining grind exist along side an alternative quest based advancement strategy.
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Post by Mord »

Kaelik wrote:This is absolutely fucking dumb. If you want to play a game about grinding monsters, those exist. If you want to play a game about gathering resources and building stuff, you do that. There is no reason to make the resource gathering part of the building game into more monster grinding.

Minecraft at least provides the option to mine without fighting monsters if I invest the resources, why would you take that away?
Points of fact:

In Minecraft, grinding monsters is required for enchanting gear, which is vital for making the most of your iron/diamond items. There is no better XP source in the game than a precisely-built mob spawner; there are many designs available that are sufficiently automated that you can put a paperweight on the left mouse button, go to lunch, and come back to have dozens of levels. So, at least in this area, Mojang has reluctantly permitted automation as an antidote to the bullshit grind.

In Terraria, getting to the "Demonite" item level is a blatant monster grind. On the map, Demonite ore is found in pockets of 3-4 ore blocks scattered widely and deeply; you need 82 Demonite Bars (which are made of 328 Demonite Ore) and 51 Shadow Scales to make the Demonite items. You can't realistically skip this tier and hope to survive in the "Hell" layer. The only way to get Shadow Scales, and the best way to get Demonite, is to farm a boss called the "Eater of Worlds." The way to get enough of the loots needed to craft the item needed to summon him for farming is to farm enemies called "Eaters of Souls."

So, both Minecraft and Terraria include monster grinding as part of their basic gear upgrade mechanics. DSM's suggestion doesn't add any kind of grinding to the game that isn't already there.

In any case, automation sounds like a real blast. Managing your team of mining robots or sapient miners would require another layer of interface, but it would give the world something it badly lacks - evolution. It's so boring the first time you realize that these are dead worlds you're passing through. When no one but you the player is harvesting or placing blocks, it sort of impresses on you just how thin the reactivity of the game really is.
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Post by Kaelik »

Mord wrote:In Minecraft, grinding monsters is required for enchanting gear, which is vital for making the most of your iron/diamond items.
Point of fact, both of those statements are wrong. You can get by just fine never enchanting anything, and you can enchant things with the XP you get from mining.
Last edited by Kaelik on Mon May 19, 2014 4:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Mord »

Kaelik wrote:Point of fact, both of those statements are wrong. You can get by just fine never enchanting anything, and you can enchant things with the XP you get from mining.
That's like saying that you can beat Starcraft without buying any unit upgrades, or Castlevania without using anything but the whip. It might be true, and could be fun for a challenge run, but you'd be refusing to use all the tools the game puts in your hands (and expects you to use) for no good reason.

Additionally, mining/farming/trading/literally all other sources of XP are piddly shit compared to the monster grind. I don't think I've ever even seen a mass-scale grinder that uses anything but mobs as raw materials. Not enchanting is grossly suboptimal play and doesn't really constitute proof that there is no expectation of mob grinding built into the game.

But this is all beside the point, which is that voxel build games don't have to have the grind be their core mechanic, even though all the existent ones do.
Last edited by Mord on Mon May 19, 2014 1:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

Mord wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Point of fact, both of those statements are wrong. You can get by just fine never enchanting anything, and you can enchant things with the XP you get from mining.
That's like saying that you can beat Starcraft without buying any unit upgrades, or Castlevania without using anything but the whip. It might be true, and could be fun for a challenge run, but you'd be refusing to use all the tools the game puts in your hands (and expects you to use) for no good reason.

Additionally, mining/farming/trading/literally all other sources of XP are piddly shit compared to the monster grind. I don't think I've ever even seen a mass-scale grinder that uses anything but mobs as raw materials. Not enchanting is grossly suboptimal play and doesn't really constitute proof that there is no expectation of mob grinding built into the game.
You are a fucking idiot. Enchanting is not essential to anything. A Diamond pickaxe lasts literally forever if you only use it to mine the things you need diamond for. Diamond Armor is insane. All enchants do is make it last slightly longer or slightly more protective. You don't need that shit to do literally anything. Enchanting is super fucking niche high end shit that you absolutely do not need to do anything.

And you can't grind XP without mobs, because other stuff is not grindable, but you still collect XP when you do it, so when you go about doing stuff, even if that stuff never ends up involving monsters, you still end up level 30 eventually, and you might as well enchant your back up diamond pickaxe.
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Post by Mord »

Kaelik wrote:You are a fucking idiot. Enchanting is not essential to anything. A Diamond pickaxe lasts literally forever if you only use it to mine the things you need diamond for. Diamond Armor is insane. All enchants do is make it last slightly longer or slightly more protective. You don't need that shit to do literally anything. Enchanting is super fucking niche high end shit that you absolutely do not need to do anything.
It's OK to admit you're wrong about something. This is not super secret leet h4xx0rz I'm talking about here; this is gameplay only slightly more advanced than farming.

If you want to ignore all levels of play beyond the most absolutely basic, be my guest, but don't pretend that your refusal to engage with a game mechanic means that that mechanic should not be considered when evaluating the game. Also, you do need enchants - Silk Touch - to harvest certain block types. (inb4 "but i don't need those blocks!")

Would you say 3e Fighters aren't broken because you never play in campaigns above level 4? That's the same kind of loony bullshit you're spouting right now. "It's not a problem because I don't play that way" just isn't a valid argument.
And you can't grind XP without mobs, because other stuff is not grindable, but you still collect XP when you do it, so when you go about doing stuff, even if that stuff never ends up involving monsters, you still end up level 30 eventually, and you might as well enchant your back up diamond pickaxe.
You can grind XP without mobs by smelting mass quantities of farm goods; it's just retardedly slow. Which was my point: it takes 825 XP to hit Level 30, which means a potato farm can get you there in "only" 37 stacks of baked potatoes.
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Post by Kaelik »

Mord wrote:If you want to ignore all levels of play beyond the most absolutely basic, be my guest, but don't pretend that your refusal to engage with a game mechanic means that that mechanic should not be considered when evaluating the game. Also, you do need enchants - Silk Touch - to harvest certain block types. (inb4 "but i don't need those blocks!")

Would you say 3e Fighters aren't broken because you never play in campaigns above level 4? That's the same kind of loony bullshit you're spouting right now. "It's not a problem because I don't play that way" just isn't a valid argument.
Dude, it is fucking minecraft, not a fighting game. What the ever loving fuck are you doing that requires enchants to do it? You can't kill a Balor with your fighter. You build literally all the things without enchanting, and do it faster than grinding a mob farm and enchanting your pickaxe.
Mord wrote:You can grind XP without mobs by smelting mass quantities of farm goods; it's just retardedly slow. Which was my point: it takes 825 XP to hit Level 30, which means a potato farm can get you there in "only" 37 stacks of baked potatoes.
You can just build 37 or 74 furnaces, so with a proper auto farm that can actually be really fucking easy, but I don't do that because again, enchanting is trivially minor that I just occasionally enchant a 30 diamond pickaxe when I end up having those levels anyway. But if you had an autofarm with dispensers to fire seeds it sounds like that would actually be faster. Although I'm pretty sure you need a mod to set up an auto tree farm, so I guess coal would always be the limiting resource.
Last edited by Kaelik on Mon May 19, 2014 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

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Post by Mord »

Kaelik wrote:Dude, it is fucking minecraft, not a fighting game.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
What the ever loving fuck are you doing that requires enchants to do it? You can't kill a Balor with your fighter. You build literally all the things without enchanting, and do it faster than grinding a mob farm and enchanting your pickaxe.
"A castle made of ice and cobwebs" springs to mind as something that can't be built without Silk Touch.

In single-player enchanting is totally optional because literally everything in single-player is optional. On a MP server, the value of enchants becomes clear, especially if you play Walls or any other competitive map type.
Kaelik wrote:You can just build 37 or 74 furnaces, so with a proper auto farm that can actually be really fucking easy, but I don't do that because again, enchanting is trivially minor that I just occasionally enchant a 30 diamond pickaxe when I end up having those levels anyway. But if you had an autofarm with dispensers to fire seeds it sounds like that would actually be faster. Although I'm pretty sure you need a mod to set up an auto tree farm, so I guess coal would always be the limiting resource.
Dispensers don't do planting in vanilla, sadly, though they really should. I feel that that just goes to DSM's point: automation should be embraced as a way of wasting less of the player's time in the later stages of play.

Grinding for XP or cobblestone or bonemeal or whatever is a boring waste of time, whether you're grinding mobs or digging or whatever. Building an ingenious Redstone machine to grind XP or cobblestone or bonemeal for you is a fun way to interact with the game using the skills the game teaches you as you play. It's a totally organic way for the game to reward the player for learning and mastering its rules, and I don't at all think it's "unbalanced" or "gamebreaking" as long as there are more skills to be developed once you peel away the layers of bullshit, and maybe also valuable resources that can't be infinitely spawned in such a way.

As DSM suggested, having monsters come to wreck your complex machinery is one way to keep the game interesting even at the point where your machines bring you functionally infinite supplies of bread and rotten flesh or whatever.
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Post by TarkisFlux »

Fix your quote tags Mord - 2 posts back now.
The wiki you should be linking to when you need a wiki link - http://www.dnd-wiki.org

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Post by Kaelik »

Mord wrote:If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
And right usually does not involve building a mob grinder, because it is faster and better to do literally everything without doing that, and just occasionally enchanting pickaxes if you really need silk touch.
Mord wrote:"A castle made of ice and cobwebs" springs to mind as something that can't be built without Silk Touch.
I like how you named literally the only two things in the game that you think require a silk touch pickaxe to make and it makes no sense. Firstly, there is no reason to want to make a castle of cobwebs and Ice, because those don't fucking make sense together. Secondly, you can totally make an Ice castle without silk touch, so good job there. Now you would need silk touch for specifically cobweb, so I guess in the process of mining and farming, you might want to make a Silk Touch Diamond Pick at some point.
Mord wrote:In single-player enchanting is totally optional because literally everything in single-player is optional. On a MP server, the value of enchants becomes clear, especially if you play Walls or any other competitive map type.
On a MP server everything is totally optional because it is fucking minecraft and everything is always optional. If you choose to specifically engage in weird PvP minigames, then yes, enchanting is useful. So what, if you choose to engage in specific PvP minigames you literally cannot build a mob grinder so who cares.
Mord wrote:
I feel that that just goes to DSM's point: automation should be embraced as a way of wasting less of the player's time in the later stages of play.

Grinding for XP or cobblestone or bonemeal or whatever is a boring waste of time, whether you're grinding mobs or digging or whatever. Building an ingenious Redstone machine to grind XP or cobblestone or bonemeal for you is a fun way to interact with the game using the skills the game teaches you as you play. It's a totally organic way for the game to reward the player for learning and mastering its rules, and I don't at all think it's "unbalanced" or "gamebreaking" as long as there are more skills to be developed once you peel away the layers of bullshit, and maybe also valuable resources that can't be infinitely spawned in such a way.

As DSM suggested, having monsters come to wreck your complex machinery is one way to keep the game interesting even at the point where your machines bring you functionally infinite supplies of bread and rotten flesh or whatever.
If you aren't going to talk about anything I ever talked about you should probably just quote DSM to talk to him.
Last edited by Kaelik on Wed May 21, 2014 12:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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.

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Post by Mord »

TarkisFlux wrote:Fix your quote tags Mord - 2 posts back now.
Thanks; I had no idea what was screwing up the page templates so badly.

Kaelik wrote:And right usually does not involve building a mob grinder, because it is faster and better to do literally everything without doing that, and just occasionally enchanting pickaxes if you really need silk touch.
I'm not even sure what you're arguing here. Maybe I should clarify: You can speak on the characteristics and nature of a game only if you're playing the game as it exists in reality. A deeper discussion of the game requires a deeper command of the mechanics of that game. Arbitrarily deciding that certain mechanics don't interest you and therefore do not count as being "part of the game" is retarded and certainly not conducive to analysis or discussion.

So, the long-lost point here, from which we have strayed far: I maintain that introducing monster waves as threats to automated resource production sites, as DSM suggested, does not add any new kind of grind to the game.

Besides the enchanting component, now that I think of it, zombie sieges on villages are a thing. Those events are pretty much identical in implementation to DSM's idea of "mobs spawn to threaten the player's supply of renewable resources," and they're already in the game to boot.
Kaelik wrote:I like how you named literally the only two things in the game that you think require a silk touch pickaxe to make and it makes no sense
You are losing your fucking mind. Of course I'm going to name items you can only collect with Silk Touch when I'm naming items you can only collect with Silk Touch.
Kaelik wrote:Firstly, there is no reason to want to make a castle of cobwebs and Ice, because those don't fucking make sense together.
Fuck you; ice cobweb castles are the way of my people.
Kaelik wrote:Secondly, you can totally make an Ice castle without silk touch, so good job there.
Partial credit. You can build with ice in a cold biome using buckets of water and letting them freeze. However, you can't build with ice in a hot biome in this way. So, when I make my traditional ice cobweb castle in the desert (which is the ancestral home of my people), I will still need Silk Touch.
Kaelik wrote:If you aren't going to talk about anything I ever talked about you should probably just quote DSM to talk to him.
Did you miss the part where I pointed out how your dispenser farm idea was completely fucking wrong? I'm pretty sure you saw it, since you went to the trouble of selectively editing it out of the quote.

I engaged with your contribution, such as it was, exactly as much as it deserved. Maybe try saying something that isn't wrong if you want a more substantial and nuanced response.
Last edited by Mord on Wed May 21, 2014 5:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Mord wrote:I'm not even sure what you're arguing here. Maybe I should clarify: You can speak on the characteristics and nature of a game only if you're playing the game as it exists in reality. A deeper discussion of the game requires a deeper command of the mechanics of that game. Arbitrarily deciding that certain mechanics don't interest you and therefore do not count as being "part of the game" is retarded and certainly not conducive to analysis or discussion.
Yes, and even though I have personally enchanted, and even though I have personally been in a jungle biome, I would not tell people they aren't really playing minecraft wrong if they don't build their house in a jungle biome, because it is trivially a part of the game that has no bearing on anything else and is not necessary to do anything.
Mord wrote:So, the long-lost point here, from which we have strayed far: I maintain that introducing monster waves as threats to automated resource production sites, as DSM suggested, does not add any new kind of grind to the game.
Yes it totally does. Adding monster waves that you have to kill to get your iron adds grinding monster waves to get your iron that isn't in the game, because unlike enchanting, iron is super fucking needed to do basically anything.
Mord wrote:zombie sieges on villages are a thing. Those events are pretty much identical in implementation to DSM's idea of "mobs spawn to threaten the player's supply of renewable resources," and they're already in the game to boot.
If by identical you mean nothing like, then yes. Since the way you beat a zombie siege is by not fucking engaging it in any way and leaving.
Mord wrote:You are losing your fucking mind. Of course I'm going to name items you can only collect with Silk Touch when I'm naming items you can only collect with Silk Touch.
Let me be more clear. You deceptively implied that those two are somehow two out of many, when in fact they are one out of one of the things you actually need a silk touch pickaxe for.
Mord wrote:I engaged with your contribution, such as it was, exactly as much as it deserved. Maybe try saying something that isn't wrong if you want a more substantial and nuanced response.
I don't want a more substantial response. I want you to fucking quote someone else if you are talking to someone else or about something someone else said.

Because Mord, and this is really important. Mord, pay attention. Please Mord, this is important.
[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Paragraph of gibberish text deleted.
[/TGFBS]
Last edited by Kaelik on Thu May 22, 2014 12:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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.
Mord
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Post by Mord »

Your block of gibberish characters proved to me just how wrong I am about everything.

Congratulations Kaelik, you win the thread and the Internet. Your prize is an extra inch on your penis. Keep up the good work, champ!

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Woot
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Post by Woot »

Wow. That was a very special exchange, you two. And by special I mean "like two mentally retarded divas at a dance recital prancing angrily at each other to the melodic strains of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'"

So, anyone else, Starbound?
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

It's pretty cool. Damage scaling was kind of messed up at first, but I had fun sharing world coordinates on SA and finding neat dungeons and towns to loot.

Haven't played it in a while, but the game is certainly evolving and I'll certainly get back in when quests are more of a thing.

There's already some impressive modding happening.
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