Has single player been fixed yet?

[Drambit]

I usually check up on this game once every 6 months or so to see how things are coming along, and each time something has completely ruined the game, and it's different every time.

Initially, I quit about a year and a half ago because the game was big time plagued with performance and programming issues that led the game to run at obscenely low framerates and caused ships to randomly disappear, sometimes with entire sectors of stuff disappearing. Came back 6 months after that, and it was better but still performance issues too major to play the game for me. 6 months after that, I came back, and for some reason single player got completely ruined. All shops had the same items at the same price to prevent making money from shops, stations were locked so you couldn't mine them for resources, ice crystals and cactuses both had their value reduced 100 times making them totally unprofitable. The suggested way to make money at the time was manufacturing, but all shop values made it so that all manufactured blocks were either worth exactly the sum of the costs to make them, or very very slightly more so that a very small amount of profit could be made over an extremely long period of time. I ended up just cheating blocks into the game because it was so bad.

Is single player playable yet or is still as shit as it was 6 months ago?

 

[Matt_Bradock]

The crafting system has been completely revamped. Everything has a fixed recipe accessible in the basic, standard and advanced factories. Claim a system for your faction through a faction block placed on a planet or station, and you can mine crystal shards and ores, with a 12x bonus from asteroids and planets as long as you're in your own faction's system. Which means, you get 12 items from mining a single ore block.
Since you no longer have to chase recipes, and you can manufacture everything from the start (provided you have the resources) crafting is actually a legitimate alternative to trying to make money and buying stuff from shops.

In addition, money isn't needed for ship blueprints any more. All blueprints are "buy with blocks" now, in a way that you buy only a metaitem from a shop, which you need to fill up with all the blocks that are in the blueprint in order to be able to spawn the ship. Which also makes crafting even more important.

Unfortunately, there's no easy money, infinite loops and other workarounds any more that'd get you to your first capital ship on your first day of playing. Free stuff can still be obtained from farming pirates, which is easier as pirate stations, although themselves no longer salvageable until the faction block is destroyed (in which case they become decayed and will yield scrap you can use in micro assembler factory, but not the full blocks) will spawn a wave of pirates (and state they are calling in backup in a blue message) upon taking block damage. Of course, that requires a ship that can take on pirates.

Core drilling is also a thing of the past, ships and stations now have HP, separately armor and system HP. As long as you have armor HP, your systems only take reduced damage, and you need to lose 50% of your system HP to start overheating. This means you'll last longer with your shield off - but so will the enemies.

Those are the most important changes in a nutshell.

 

[Bonusinches]

Crafting is the same as it was 6 months ago, and trading is either super easy but not really entertaining or not worth doing compared to mining depending on your config settings. Pirates spawn in then sit at long range shooting at you while drifting slowly sideways and are only a challenge if you deliberately go after too many of them with an unsuitable ship due to the AI not being very clever or you make your own pirates, and even then the ai is so bad that they're still only a challenge if your ship is hugely outmatched.

It's good if you just want to build things unmolested to upload for multiplayer though as now you no longer have to use admin commands to make your stations shop unlimited since they added creative mode.

 

[Comr4de]

Is mining seriously that hard

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Is mining seriously that hard

For those who were used to the old free stations and cubatoms, it may look so.

 

[StormWing0]

Is mining seriously that hard

Once you go Logic Miner you can't go back. It seems though some people can't figure this out.

 

[Winterhome]

Destroy planet.
Get logic autominer.
Mine plates one by one while wayching TV.
Make weapon anf effect modules.


Find asteroid.
Mine asteroid.
Make paint for hulls.


Find pirates.
Kill pirates.
Salvage for nearly free shield caps/rechargers, guns, thrusters, and power.

 

[Bonusinches]

Logic miners and such hardly make for engrossing gameplay though especially when you just run them while watching tv. A few people have missed the OP's point I suspect.

 

[Groovrider]

Yeah, his point is: Is starmade feature complete? No.

 

[Keptick]

Don't bother with credits, ships are spawned directly from blocks now. So you're better off crafting all the things you need and just buy things in little quantities like decorations.

 

[Bonusinches]

Yeah, his point is: Is starmade feature complete? No.

Exactly. Can dress up grinding for materials instead of just building in creative mode as being somewhat more rewarding somehow all you like, fact is there isn't much gameplay outside of multiplayer. SP is space minecraft without the pve challenge.

 

[Edymnion]

I dunno, I can generally have a station on a new server the first day simply by eating some green asteroids and making warp gate modules to pawn off.

I'm sure it must seem difficult to have to actually EARN your stuff instead of just having it all handed to you for free 30 seconds after logging into a server though.

 

[Drambit]

I'm sure it must seem difficult to have to actually EARN your stuff instead of just having it all handed to you for free 30 seconds after logging into a server though.

I play to build and I play single player, the concept of deliberately delaying what I'm doing by 10+ hours for the sake of "earning it" in the loosest quotes I can muster, is shit game design. In multiplayer that kind of thing matters, maybe some other obscure goal that matters, with what I do it does not and it doesn't just make the game less fun, it completely ruins it all the way through.

Here is what I used to do and it was awesome: Load a new game, build small weak ship, depending on how things spawned I would either go raid a planet for cacti, ice crystals, or some other valuable resource, or build a massive salvage ship and raid a station. If I didn't feel like doing any salvaging, I would instead just cross reference shop values between sectors, and truck resources back and forth due to price disparity. I would build my ship up with those resources, repeat the process until my shit was extremely tanky, then just fight pirates, make stations, play with massive battery / power tank mazes, and have fun.

Now, because schema killed every single one of those methods, the game is more like: Make a new server, build small ship, spend hours scouring planets crossing my fingers I can find some good l4s or l5s, if I do I then sell them for minimal profit, build a shitty ship because you can't make money quickly any more, and just continuously grind salvaging minerals, and manufacturing blocks until at an absolute minimum 10 hours later I have a ship that can barely hold up to multiple pirates, and just hope for the best. Usually what happens is either I get destroyed by the pirates, uninstall the game, and hope 6 months later the game is better, or if I really have nothing to do I might grind out a better ship and try again. All in all the game has turned into a grindy, slow, boring mess that straight up is not worth playing solo. The multiplayer is far too broken to enjoy as well, because most servers run at about 5 tick with massive lag, and even if you do manage to play normally there will always be a couple people who just ported in ridiculous ships from blueprints.

Yeah, his point is: Is starmade feature complete? No.

It isn't a feature or a beta thing, it is a design thing. The game a long time ago was much, much, much much much better than it is now in single player (although obviously most of the changes were directed at multiplayer which is presumably much better now,) but the game was unplayably broken back then with massive game-breaking performance issues and glitches. Now the performance issues and glitches are mostly out of the way but the single player mode of the game has been left in shambles do to many terrible design decisions.

 

[Groovrider]

I play to build and I play single player, the concept of deliberately delaying what I'm doing by 10+ hours for the sake of "earning it" in the loosest quotes I can muster, is shit game design. In multiplayer that kind of thing matters, maybe some other obscure goal that matters, with what I do it does not and it doesn't just make the game less fun, it completely ruins it all the way through.

Here is what I used to do and it was awesome: Load a new game, build small weak ship, depending on how things spawned I would either go raid a planet for cacti, ice crystals, or some other valuable resource, or build a massive salvage ship and raid a station. If I didn't feel like doing any salvaging, I would instead just cross reference shop values between sectors, and truck resources back and forth due to price disparity. I would build my ship up with those resources, repeat the process until my shit was extremely tanky, then just fight pirates, make stations, play with massive battery / power tank mazes, and have fun.

Now, because schema killed every single one of those methods, the game is more like: Make a new server, build small ship, spend hours scouring planets crossing my fingers I can find some good l4s or l5s, if I do I then sell them for minimal profit, build a shitty ship because you can't make money quickly any more, and just continuously grind salvaging minerals, and manufacturing blocks until at an absolute minimum 10 hours later I have a ship that can barely hold up to multiple pirates, and just hope for the best. Usually what happens is either I get destroyed by the pirates, uninstall the game, and hope 6 months later the game is better, or if I really have nothing to do I might grind out a better ship and try again. All in all the game has turned into a grindy, slow, boring mess that straight up is not worth playing solo. The multiplayer is far too broken to enjoy as well, because most servers run at about 5 tick with massive lag, and even if you do manage to play normally there will always be a couple people who just ported in ridiculous ships from blueprints.



It isn't a feature or a beta thing, it is a design thing. The game a long time ago was much, much, much much much better than it is now in single player (although obviously most of the changes were directed at multiplayer which is presumably much better now,) but the game was unplayably broken back then with massive game-breaking performance issues and glitches. Now the performance issues and glitches are mostly out of the way but the single player mode of the game has been left in shambles do to many terrible design decisions.

OK. I bow to your longer experience. In what way was the past single player better?

 

[StormWing0]

What about having to earn things is poor game design? How about you try to make a game for that and players won't play it after a long enough time because they are bored due to having everything from the get go. Also try programming in general before you start ripping into people making something to play or use. XD

In any event you can still make millions in a matter of hours if you know what you are doing. So what if less is handed to you off the start all that means is you have to think more to get what you want.

 

[Drambit]

What about having to earn things is poor game design?

It is not earning things that is the poor game design, it is the extremely contrived way it was implemented. This is a pitfall a lot of video game designers fall into, where they will continually balance a game around what they want players to be doing, instead of what players actually want to be doing. In this case, what happened was Schema developed a huge crafting system a long time ago, and realized that because of the mechanics of the game, it not only made more sense, but was also more fun, faster, and more profitable to farm credits and buy items than it was to craft, unless you needed extremely large quantities of the same block.

He didn't like that nobody was using his intricate system, so he took out a big nerfbat and nerfed the shit out of everything he didn't like, meanwhile making the experience 5 to 10 times worse for people who play the game like I do. To be fair to him, there was a couple good reasons to make the change, multiplayer was extremely broken for a long time because of how the economy worked, and his system was going to waste, but single player is now terrible for people who liked the old system. Now the only way to make significant progress in single player is hours upon hours of extremely boring, extremely slow factory grinding, and as a direct result the game isn't fun anymore so I quit. That's how it's bad game design.

Developers, if you want people to play the game the way you envisioned them playing it, either build the game from the ground up so that your way is actually desirable, or buff your mechanic so that it is more desirable. Taking 4 of the top 5 ways to make progress and completely destroying them while barely making any improvements to the only systems remaining just makes for a bad game.

 

[Groovrider]

That's a shame. When I started playing around last Xmas I hardly used the factories at all. I sold minerals to the shops, claimed a system, sold more minerals and bought more stuff and went knock knock on a few stations. That's when I discovered I could eat pirate ships and sell/use the loot they dropped. So Then I was sitting on 40 million in cred in legit survival putting fuzzy dice on my battle miner after about 3 weeks of playing and mostly just dicking around at that. It was then, and only then, that I began to explore crafting properly and make a station that was more than a shell with docks.

Where was the extremely boring extremely slow factory grinding?

 

[kiraen]

Obviously nothing that we say can convince you that the game is improving. So, in terms you can understand...

Nope, the game isn't complete and doesn't fit your personal vision yet. Go away, try again in another six months. Or not.

 

[StormWing0]

Also keep in mind if they balanced around what you want them to there'll always be someone else that wants it balanced around what it currently is. This kind of debate well never end and in the end if you try to please both sides you'll end up losing both of them in the end because they'll always want it one or the other and hate you for even trying both.

 

[Drambit]

Where was the extremely boring extremely slow factory grinding?

That is all there is left. I played 12 hours of the newest patch and all there is to do in single player for the most part is grind for minerals for hours, make factories, spend a bunch more time grinding minerals into blocks, use blocks to build ships. It sounds fine in theory but it can easily take over 10 times longer than it used to take, and it is at least 5 times more boring than it used to be. It just feels like a massive waste of time rather than a rewarding game.

Also keep in mind if they balanced around what you want them to there'll always be someone else that wants it balanced around what it currently is. This kind of debate well never end and in the end if you try to please both sides you'll end up losing both of them in the end because they'll always want it one or the other and hate you for even trying both.

I have never seen anyone who wants this in single player, and it's not this way because it's good for single player. It is the way it is presumably for 2 primary reasons, 1: multiplayer was super broken with people getting super rich too quickly, and 2: Schema didn't like seeing his work go to waste on crafting systems that no one ever had a good reason to use until very late game when you needed thousands of specific blocks. The problem has an easy solution, just balance single player seperately from multiplayer, because there is no point in balancing a mode with no opponents. Make it so you can make money by trucking between shops, make it so that certain blocks are worth large amounts of money without having to find L5s, there's so many things you can do.

It is completely ridiculous to suggest that there is no end to a debate like this, look at literally any other popular multiplayer game, it is always possible to find a good solution.