Whats the deal with asteroids not respawning?

[KiloZulu]

The Shattered Skies server reset at the same time as an update over a month ago. Since that time, I've yet to see an asteroid respawn. The server admins do not believe it is a server setting, but I haven't seen anything in the forums about a bug, either.

Initially my faction and I moved some blue asteroids near our base so that we would have easier access to the rare materials. They vanished after being mined once. I read a forum thread the other day that suggested that asteroids would no longer respawn if they were moved, so I found some new blue asteroids and mined them without moving them. They didn't respawn. These were all within faction space, by the way.

A server admin did some testing, and in his experiment only 1 in 3 asteroids respawned. Our faction hasn't seen any respawn among the ones we tracked. Our base was built in an asteroid belt, and was at one time surrounded by rocks. Now the region is barren as far as radar can detect.

 

[Aynslei]

Asteroid spawn has been dead for some time now.

I think the biggest issue with this is people who clearly haven't gone out mining recently keep talking about them respawning.

 

[SmilingDemon]

Asteroids do no longer respawn!

Thats a fix for a bug and an exploit.

 

[Edymnion]

Yup, asteroids were never supposed to respawn, it was a bug, that they finally fixed.

 

[Jananton]

Well, it's certainly an incentive to start exploring more.
And lets be honest, those strange half mined asteroids everywhere weren't a pretty sight either. :D

Greets,

Jan

 

[KiloZulu]

That's odd, I thought asteroid respawn was intended and added at the same time faction control was introduced. Asteroids in faction controlled space were supposed to respawn faster than those outside of it.

 

[Aynslei]

It was a massively exploitable system, the only really biting part about it being fixed is that they have not re-balanced the current spawns and the levels of ore in them.

There was a post a few weeks ago about how much useless crap fills some of the rock types.

 

[Control]

w8 w8 w8... Is this on all servers?!
Asteroid respawn is gone!?

HELLO UNEQUAL RESOURCE DISTRIBUTION!!!

 

[K10wN]

In my opinion the regeneration of asteroids was only causing an issue when people built custom asteroids with 1000's of extra blocks on them (mostly shield and adv armour), these would then respawn after the player jumped between two locations, a custom asteroid built in each location.

The lack of regenerating resources is now causing other problems. Systems are bare, very bare. Since the 'bug fix', planets and asteroids have been completely mined out of all the systems closer to spawn. This makes things hard for new players who now have to travel a few 100 km to find anything to mine to get started playing. Many don't make it after either flying into a sun, or running into pirates and loosing their ship and their startup resources. They land back at spawn, with nothing. No ship, no resources, little money, and an empty shop because established players rarely visit these 'dead' systems and sectors and sell to the shop there anymore.

The established and active factions have mined out their homebase system, and the systems around it. This leaves them with two options, either spend faction points at a higher rate to mine the systems further away from homebase, or tear down their homebase station and move every few weeks to keep faction point costs under control for the owned system you're currently mining in.

Players have even taken to mining stations again in an effort to gain resources. They mine some of it for scrap until they can afford to buy the rest, then salvage the rest for blocks.

In the systems where this has happened there is nothing, absolutely nothing. Just a shop or two and a sun.

As a server manager I try to discourage the mining of planets. This is nigh on impossible now with the lack of available resources. Players need to eat everything they possibly can to get enough resources to build their project ships or to get the resources needed to spawn in the big fancy ship they downloaded from StarMade Dock.

There needs to be some kind of middle ground with renewable resources. It was indeed broken with your ability to exploit asteroids before the bug fix, however the fix has caused a whole new series of issues.

I would like to see asteroids be a renewable resource, but instead of them spawn back as the last saved entity, it creates a newly generated asteroid entity each time it regenerates them. This would eliminated the respawn of edited asteroids with expensive blocks added to them, yet leave some resources available to mine.

 

[Comr4de]

Wasn't there supposed to be a feature where you could respawn asteroids with faction points?

 

[StormWing0]

They could just make asteroids totally respawn when the sector stays unloaded for a long enough time. However only asteroid orbital sectors would allow this and they'd only respawn if totally mined. Also the respawn being total the asteroids mined out completely would respawn as newly generated ones so asteroid sectors would generate new ones rather than bringing back old ones from the dead. That'd solve most of the main issues with the old bugged respawning too.


Also yes I agree that asteroids should be a bit more random. Have the game pick a Mineral, an Ore, a Crystal, and 1 to 10 other blocks; than randomly generate a shape and size. Asteroids having useful blocks like shields or maybe a crashed ship embedded in them would make for some fun things as well. Now as for those going to whine about the generation of new forms while the server is active how about the game be setup to only generate new forms when activity is low or when the server starts up? This way it'd have a nice saved list of current and new forms, than cycle them out over time.

 

[KiloZulu]

It's pretty absurd that they removed respawn. I somehow missed it in any patch notes. The thing is, they've converted the economy to be 99% reliant on mining, which was a good move, but they've now removed the supply source for this new economy. I'm in a faction with multiple players, and there simply aren't enough resources to go around. After we've built a couple of small ships, finding the asteroids for shields, jump drives, and other necessary systems for anything further has meant striking out into non-faction space where we don't even get the faction mining bonus. Finding these rare asteroids involves a great deal of time in searching, and the risk of losing our small ships to a wave of pirates or PVP increases the longer we search.

This is rapidly losing it's potential as a game for the casual player, and I'd be curious to meet the kind of player who enjoys hours of searching for a rock to mine.

 

[Visitor]

To be honest, I am quite fine with how things are. Granted, I don't play in any really big factions or regularly on any particular servers so my impression may be much skewed. I do like the fact that people have to venture outside of boundaries of their own turf in search of resources - that's how conflicts and possibly diplomacy gets their place to bloom.

I also tend to notice that lot of the issue is caused by how resources are managed. Too many people immediately put their credits into warships and after that they're left on ice because they didn't create decent logistics back-end to support it through proper fleets of smaller but versatile support and mining vessels.

Lot of it is luck-related, though. Some asteroid fields are far more abundant and rich than the others. Some areas get mined out faster than the others. Again, on one hand it may help shape faction politics, on the other lead to irritation and sense of injustice.

Hopefully later in the development we'll get other ways of acquiring credits as well as need to use resources to maintain certain infrastructure (Maybe farming and hunting planetside while also needing to eat and perform maintenance on some structures?), thus ensuring that the bigger one gets the harder it will be to get beyond that, while allowing both multitude of different approaches to early-game faction development and ability to get stronger for those wanting to establish some galactic hegemony.

 

[lilheartless]

i don't remember where i read this exactly but it was on stardock.

Eventually one possibility to make money will be that the random pirates you fight no longer drop random amounts of random blocks but instead just give you credits (kinda like bounty hunting) and if/when the trading guild resupply ships start working it will give a consistant supply of blocks to purchase with earned credits from pirate hunting.

Renewable resources have been in discussion for a while now and i believe are a planned feature but not in the broken way that they were implemented before and probably alot slower yield than what we see now.

 

[Dire Venom]

Somethings defiantly broken....
Short term its ok, but as K10 said its terrible for the new players and isnt sustainable long term.......

 

[Edymnion]

It was a massively exploitable system, the only really biting part about it being fixed is that they have not re-balanced the current spawns and the levels of ore in them.

They were imbalanced before to provide an embarrassment of riches. You don't fix a bug thats giving unlimited resources and then turn around and undo the bug fix by simply giving people unlimited resources in some other way right off the bat. Might as well not have fixed the bug if that was the case.

That said, they are working on ways to make us pay for renewing resources. Its just not in the game yet. Gotta get the foundation solid before you start building on it.

 

[KiloZulu]

At least we had to work for the resources, unlimited or not. We couldn't simply throw a build block down and delete a starbase for wealth. Really, if they thought it was such an issue, why not just increase the respawn timer? How about reducing the amount of ore you obtained in faction space? I swear, the number of times that Schine has implemented game changes without any thought to the consequences for the game community astounds me some days. Sorry if that sounds harsh Schema, but we're testing your game for you and even paying you to do it. You make it work rather than fun when you do stuff like this.

 

[Edymnion]

Sorry if that sounds harsh Schema, but we're testing your game for you and even paying you to do it. You make it work rather than fun when you do stuff like this.

Its an alpha.

If you aren't willing to deal with bugs, massive design changes, and constant wipes, you shouldn't be playing.

Heck, if you aren't willing to deal with that, you shouldn't be playing a beta either.

Stick to 100% polished and released games.

 

[aceface]

Let's just see what Schema and Co do, I'm sure they know what they are doing. They disabled this bug for a reason.

 

[Aynslei]

At least we had to work for the resources, unlimited or not. We couldn't simply throw a build block down and delete a starbase for wealth. Really, if they thought it was such an issue, why not just increase the respawn timer? How about reducing the amount of ore you obtained in faction space? I swear, the number of times that Schine has implemented game changes without any thought to the consequences for the game community astounds me some days. Sorry if that sounds harsh Schema, but we're testing your game for you and even paying you to do it. You make it work rather than fun when you do stuff like this.

I had a setup on my SP world, where all I would have to do is wait until a server save and press one button. Boom shit ton of mats already in my refinery. The old system where you could relocate and mine an asteroid many times was broken with how little "work" it would take.

These changes were made to remove multiple forms of "unlimited" resources. Like Aceface said, give them time to show you what they have planned.

All that said if you rely on mining asteroids for your income, you are missing out on quite a few other opportunities out there in the void.