Brainstorm: Things to do on Planets

[aRottenKomquat]

So after that Suggestions thread about Planets: Discs or Balls got sidetracked to talking about Minecraft, that got me wondering about what features planets need to be unique and have more of a purpose in the game. Right now they're just salvager food, and anything you can do on a planet you can generally do better with a space station.

I put this in General instead of Suggestions to foster more hypothetical discussion and not contribute to suggestion-spam, if anything comes of this a summarized Suggestion thread could be posted later.

Anyway, I'd like to explore what things can be added to make planets more interesting and more useful. While I hate to compare StarMade to other games, there's a wonder about exploring new terrain and biomes in Minecraft that simply doesn't exist in StarMade. I would love it if StarMade had a ground game so to speak, that planets had enough that players could conceivably spend much of their time on the ground without needing to deal with the space aspects of the game for a time.

The only guiding rule I personally have for ideas here is that they should be somewhat logical and not arbitrary limitations like "Advanced factories only work on planets but not on space stations". Rather it should be something that makes sense only in the context of a planet but not in space or aboard starships, such as geothermal energy or ocean-going vessels.

To kick off, here are some topics. Some of these have definitely been discussed before but oh well. These are hypothetical and may require other features that might never happen, or might steer StarMade in a direction the developers don't like and won't pursue. Please feel free to add new ideas, improve on these, or kick them to the curb if they're terrible.

To examine real life for some inspiration, at the moment it is hugely expensive to operate space stations or space vessels but relatively cheap to have stuff on the ground. The Earth is the source of all supplies, cash, and energy needed to run humanity's space operations. If StarMade somehow worked that way then planets would become true strategic assets instead of mere curiosities with little value.

Energy
If an energy economy is ever developed (in contrast to our current free-energy power reactors) planets could be a huge source of energy in the forms of wind, geothermal, or mining for fossil fuels. The energy could be stored in batteries/capacitors or converted to other forms such as petroleum fuel, fuel cell fuel, used to refine some kind of reactor fuel, etc. While solar panels in space would be efficient, nothing can beat the raw power output of shuttling up thousands of gallons of petroleum from distant planets to keep your home station's turbine generators alive. Imagine your planets covered in geothermal pipelines and oil rigs, extracting a steady stream of energy from the planet's core, and NPC fleets keeping your fleets and stations fueled.

Food/oxygen/water
I'm not convinced either way if a hunger mechanic would be good for StarMade, but if it exists planets become obvious sources of mass quantities of oxygen (Tangential question: should all atmospheres be the same? Or should they have varying compositions each with pros and cons?) and water, as well as plant and animal food.

The most brute-force method of keeping your ships and stations stocked with breathable air is to build a Mega Maid and suck all the air off some uninhabited (or enemy ) planets! Plus you get the obvious benefit of not having to manage or mine oxygen for any facilities built on an oxygen-rich planet.

Add in flora/fauna at low rates (for example, 75% of planets are dead and have no life), unique to various planet types, and some kind of farming/ranching mechanic that ideally suits itself to planets while not working well in space, and now you have some real reasons to keep and defend long-term planetary bases.

Exploration/relics/strange things
This is intended to give players a reason to go out to planets, land, and look around. These could be ancient, abandoned, underground alien cities full of riches, extremely rare systems blocks that cannot be manufactured/bought but can occasionally be found, or sources of luxury goods to keep NPC crew morale up. More importantly, this stuff should be destroyed if someone simply mass-salvages the planet. Otherwise, why explore when you could just swallow the planet whole?

More/Cheaper Building Materials
Hull is insanely cheap right now but I'm not sure it should be. Planet-based blocks such as rock (concrete), wood, and so on would make cheap and effective building materials for planetary stations but in real life it would not make much sense to use them in bulk aboard space stations or starships. This idea is less than half-formed and I'm not even sure where I'm going with it to continue.

So, thoughts/suggestions/criticisms?

 

[KiloZulu]

I recall that Schine has suggested that planets will eventually be inhabited by NPC's and alien fauna. Some of the NPC's will offer quests - perhaps some of them could involve exploring ruins on distant planets in search of the relics you mentioned.

I would also like to see more biome diversity on the planets. I wonder how hard it would be to have each plate on a planet randomly generate a biome, rather than having the whole planet be a single biome?

Frankly, once you've seen the biomes in Minecraft, they kind of repeat themselves. What makes them interesting is how they impact things like growing crops. What makes the worlds come alive are the animals and monsters. Without them, even Minecraft would get boring pretty fast. Hopefully the addition of AI inhabitants to planets (and stations) will breath life into the universe.

I think that food could be an interesting and fun mechanic to add to the game, it certainly adds a survival aspect to Minecraft. I'm less certain about fuel - that's a debate that's been hashed over time and again, and I don't know what the general consensus turned out to be, other than that Schine hasn't added it yet.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

I think that food could be an interesting and fun mechanic to add to the game, it certainly adds a survival aspect to Minecraft. I'm less certain about fuel - that's a debate that's been hashed over time and again, and I don't know what the general consensus turned out to be, other than that Schine hasn't added it yet.

I am still uncertain on both food and fuel. I think they could be great features if done right, but at the same time I always found Minecraft's hunger mechanic to be extremely annoying without contributing anything useful to the game, though that might be because I remember the Alpha days before hunger and starvation existed.

 

[Scypio]

Alive planets. That's all we need, populations on them, ability to manage them by protecting them or killing them, hire crew from them, trade with them interesting and rare things and so on.
Also food can be a good mechanic but need to not end on death but something really penalizing i think. I would enjoy both sides anyway.

 

[jayman38]

Missions & McGuffins

As in, we need missions that have us go find things that aren't really applicable to the rest of the game. They just need to basically be fetch quests of various complexities in new, extensive cave systems or cities. Such missions could take you to meet interesting cities, NPCs, and random stories. The missions should be fully customizable, so that players can make an infinite number of their own. They can remake a lot of fun stories.

I don't think planets will be useful for players who enjoy space-fighting. They'll only be interested in mining planets to build more ships when their ships get damaged.

Missions will need lots of possible variables and processes.
1. Logbooks
2. Random items (McGuffins)
3. Delays
4. NPC definitions
5. Room and building definitions (for custom caves and other encounters)
6. Enemy definitions, including fauna, queen/nest/spawn stations
7. Rules (survive enemies for 10 minutes, wait at a waypoint for a minute, grab a mcguffin at one location to spawn a new mission, etc.)

After all, some of our best stories are just a series of fetch quests.
Star Wars: Fetch a mcguffin (lightsaber) from a NPC on a desert planet. Then fetch a mcguffin (princess) from a cave on a machine planet. Then destroy that machine planet.
Indiana Jones: Fetch a mcguffin (medallion) from an NPC on a snow planet. Then fetch a mcguffin (instructions on how to use the medallion) from a desert planet. Then survive an enemy onslaught for 15 minutes. Then go to a desert planet. Then destroy all enemies present.
Wall-E: Fetch a mcguffin (plant) from a city on a desert planet. Then go to a machine planet (spaceship). Then survive an enemy onslaught for 15 minutes. Then evade, going over one sector to the right. Then go back and find another mcguffin (plant analyzer). Then go to desert planet.

The Wall-E story implies terraforming Earth back into... well, Earth. So a planet slowly, but completely changing its biomes would be an interesting mission result. Finding planets terraforming in the middle of a series of missions would be a very visible and impressive change that would suddenly make the universe a very much more dynamic place. Different factions might want a given planet terraformed into different biomes and could give diametrically opposing missions.

 

[AtraUnam]

I was always a fan of the idea of having core mining for planets which passively produce recources at a slow but steady rate, functionally indefinetaly, planets could each have a multiplier to this so that most planets would require a huge mining operation to gather a decent amount of recources but the occasional planet has like 5x as many making it a point of contention.

This along with some sort of abiltiy to make ground vehicles would IMO go a long way to making planets more interesting, people say ground vehicles would be disadvantaged but the mass of the planet would actually give them a huge amount of protection against missile damage.

 

[Blodge]

Reasons to visit planets at present:
Mine a ton of resources from orbit,
Test your new Planet Killer cannon,
Sunsets look pretty.

Reasons to visit planets which could be implemented without introducing new features:
Plate regeneration - Allow plates to regenerate like Asteroids (assuming you strip less than, say 50% of the surface at any one time),
Have Shops spawn on them (new shop design required),
Have Pirate bases spawn on them (new Pirate base design required),
Make new Players spawn on them instead of in space.

New features/mechanics which would create more reasons to visit:
Planet Core mining/energy extraction (requires new block types for the mining equipment),
Atmosphere harvesting (probably requires more planet types, e.g. gas giants),
NPC quests (requires NPCs!),
Introduce otherwise non-renewable resources (e.g. Atmosphere, food, animal hides, fuel etc.)
Make sunsets more pretty.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

This is a tangent from planets, but to expand upon missions/quests, what if there was a way for players to easily create them? So instead of all your quests being some randomly-generated thing done for an NPC, instead you might be doing quests to help your faction leaders, or to do work for another faction that has a deficit in some area or hates doing specific parts of the game.

Think of it as a combined quest/mission/contract system. The game would need an interface to see what available quests are out there, as well as the goals, rewards, suggested mass/firepower or player count or ship count, etc. And potentially a penalty for not completing the quest or backing out early, to reduce griefing from players accepting all the quests/contracts out there with no intention of doing them.

The goal is to foster interaction between players and factions, in a way that benefits both sides, without being some silly randomly-generated quest of "Collect 200 yholes and give it to NPC Bob over there for 10 credits and a Power Capacitor."

There should be a rating system so once a quest is completed, the players/factions on both ends can rate each other, which will help other players and factions decide whether doing future business with them via quests is likely to be successful. If I see quests originating from a poorly-rated faction, then I would avoid them because they are probably stupid missions with stupid rewards or impossible goals. And if I'm the one creating a quest, I can use ratings to prevent poorly-rated players/factions who have a history of failure or trolling from accepting my quest.

Attack/Destroy
If I'm a turtle and don't want to fight, I could set up a quest/mission with a cash or item reward to attack and destroy a nearby pirate station that has been harassing me, and other players or factions could take that quest. Targets could include stations, planets, fleets, specific ships, or even specific players or NPCs.

Escort
I have a ship or fleet that needs protection to get somewhere. This mission type designates a specific ship or fleet for escort, start and ending sectors, and a timeframe for the mission. If someone accepts the mission, they must rendezvous at the start sector within a specified amount of time and escort the target to the destination within a specified amount of time. It is up to the quest-giver to mark the quest as success or failure depending on the state of his ships, fleets, or cargo when it arrives.

Resource Collection
This is a simple one. Bring me a certain amount of X and I will compensate you with credits or other resources. The resources could be mined, purchased, traded for, or salvaged, it doesn't really matter.

Station/Planet Defense
Simple quest type that requires ships or fleets to remain in a sector or system for a set period of time, used to hire extra defensive ships for a time.

Recon
Provides a target system, sector, or planet, and the questgoer must travel there and scan. Once scanned, the questgiver instantly gets an intelligence update for the area and the quest is completed. To make this more interesting, I suggest a new systems block for communications which is needed to transmit or receive fog-of-war information and scan results.

Colonize/Build
Trying to steer this back towards planets...This quest type requires someone to establish a new base upon a planet. How to define "base" will need major thought, but it could be a very basic base with Undeathinators, some power and storage, and basic factories, or it could be a full-fledged forward attack base with shields, heavy weapons turrets, and shipyards for repair. Or, based on the energy economy discussed earlier, it could simply involve setting up a core mining facility. Once built, the questgoer can signal the quest-giver for an inspection, and if the quest-giver approves, the entire base is transferred to his faction and rewards are issued.

Explore
Requires the questgoer to travel to a planet and explore for any relics/luxuries/hidden treasures.

Recruit NPCs
Assuming NPCs/crew become very important and are needed, and have a variety of roles or specializations, this quest type requires someone to locate and acquire suitable NPCs and bring them to one of your planets or stations. This could be interesting if planet-based neutral NPC cities ever become a thing, so to do this quest you'll end up scouting for inhabited planets of appropriate culture, skillsets, or tech level (if such a thing will exist), and trying to recruit suitable NPCs. This quest type will go hand-in-hand with the Colonize/Build one if a faction is hiring out the work of expanding to new uninhabited worlds and turning them into an asset for their faction.

 

[MacThule]

Things to do on planets;

• Turn on the room fan next to my rig
• Gather flowers
• Chat
• Fall through a plate transition and get stuck in the core
• Dream about building things
• Window out and surf Reddit

 

[nogg]

in the future development, planets are going to need to be more important. some source of passive resource gathering would improve them. MUST FIX OBJECTS FALLING INTO PLANET CORES!!!!

 

[philthy mcnasty]

One concern that i have with the upcoming npc factions: how will they stop expanding? will there be a size limit? will they contain each other via fighting?

I think a good long term solution to limiting size, would be planet habitability. Make npc's live on planets, and need certain types of food resource.

This makes the concept of an automated farm far more important in this game than in minecraft. the ability to sell food cargo to npcs for money and stuff would be great.

But it would also solve the growth problem. Once they run out of worlds, they have to get aggressive. We could also add a village mechanic like in minecraft, only they need x amount of living space on a planet, and build cities themselves.

The crazy bit, is this would also open the door for fleet based races: they live in floating biospheres, and do not set up planetary cities.

The big question: how much time and effort will be needed to code this in? Though once npc factions are added, and working, i think this will have to be the next logical choice.

 

[MacThule]

One concern that i have with the upcoming npc factions: how will they stop expanding? will there be a size limit? will they contain each other via fighting?

I think a good long term solution to limiting size, would be planet habitability. Make npc's live on planets, and need certain types of food resource.

This makes the concept of an automated farm far more important in this game than in minecraft. the ability to sell food cargo to npcs for money and stuff would be great.

But it would also solve the growth problem. Once they run out of worlds, they have to get aggressive. We could also add a village mechanic like in minecraft, only they need x amount of living space on a planet, and build cities themselves.

The crazy bit, is this would also open the door for fleet based races: they live in floating biospheres, and do not set up planetary cities.

The big question: how much time and effort will be needed to code this in? Though once npc factions are added, and working, i think this will have to be the next logical choice.

Less time if the food, oxygen, water, etc are abstracted into something we already have. Many have suggested using Faction Points to represent all those resources as an abstract so relatively little new coding is needed. Then have planets generate FP that factions need to support NPCs, stations, ships, etc. Planets of different types and with different levels of development (read: system HP) could even generate more or less FP as would be expected in a 4x.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

What if you only had to worry about food, water, etc. for NPCs but not for your own player character? That would solve the early annoyance like in Minecraft of trying to rush to get a farm up so you don't starve, all while battling enemies and gathering resources and building a base. I always hated trying to plant a farm in the middle of the night, having no food, getting bombarded by creepers, with no beds and no sheep for miles to make one. StarMade's early game would be fantastically annoying if your tiny little homebase is constantly getting assaulted by pirates and you can't get away to find food on other planets.

Or, better yet, what if food/water requirements do not exist until your faction has a certain number of players or NPCs? Then it's not an issue at all in the early game but will be a concern once you start growing and expanding.

I don't know if food will be some abstract single resource, or if there will be many different kinds with different effects, prices, or perishibility. Different kinds of food open the doors to having different groups of NPCs with their own individual dietary requirements due to culture or religion, as well as using food as a control for NPC morale. For example, if your fleet is staffed by NPCs coming from a culture that worships Purple Planets, providing them with only Yhole Salad could result in mutinies.

 

[philthy mcnasty]

What if you only had to worry about food, water, etc. for NPCs but not for your own player character? That would solve the early annoyance like in Minecraft of trying to rush to get a farm up so you don't starve, all while battling enemies and gathering resources and building a base. I always hated trying to plant a farm in the middle of the night, having no food, getting bombarded by creepers, with no beds and no sheep for miles to make one. StarMade's early game would be fantastically annoying if your tiny little homebase is constantly getting assaulted by pirates and you can't get away to find food on other planets.

Or, better yet, what if food/water requirements do not exist until your faction has a certain number of players or NPCs? Then it's not an issue at all in the early game but will be a concern once you start growing and expanding.

I don't know if food will be some abstract single resource, or if there will be many different kinds with different effects, prices, or perishibility. Different kinds of food open the doors to having different groups of NPCs with their own individual dietary requirements due to culture or religion, as well as using food as a control for NPC morale. For example, if your fleet is staffed by NPCs coming from a culture that worships Purple Planets, providing them with only Yhole Salad could result in mutinies.

why not have the basic factory have a recipe for "nutrient cubes" or field rations? Give the player 100 at start, so they have a few days worth of food. After all, we give you a ship's worth of resources at start, so might as well give you everything else too. also a meat recipe for when you kill aliens/players. Call it soylent green or something.


Quests and jobs might alleviate this as well. if you hit rock bottom, you get to do errands for the trade guild, or join the pirates.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

One concern that i have with the upcoming npc factions: how will they stop expanding? will there be a size limit? will they contain each other via fighting?

I think a good long term solution to limiting size, would be planet habitability. Make npc's live on planets, and need certain types of food resource.

This makes the concept of an automated farm far more important in this game than in minecraft. the ability to sell food cargo to npcs for money and stuff would be great.

But it would also solve the growth problem. Once they run out of worlds, they have to get aggressive. We could also add a village mechanic like in minecraft, only they need x amount of living space on a planet, and build cities themselves.

The crazy bit, is this would also open the door for fleet based races: they live in floating biospheres, and do not set up planetary cities.

The big question: how much time and effort will be needed to code this in? Though once npc factions are added, and working, i think this will have to be the next logical choice.

I like the thought of planets being important for NPCs. Perhaps NPC morale, reproduction rate, and task efficiency can be much, much higher for NPCs living on planets versus NPCs living in space? Except of course for any rare NPCs with a quality/culture that makes them prefer space. That makes planets extremely important assets, and will make conflict inevitable as factions begin to bump borders.

 

[philthy mcnasty]

At the moment, planets are not a good place to set up a base. I have to build a massive space elevator and docking ring to dock my ships there, because they are too big to dock on the surface.

I can't leave them in orbit, because rubber banding is damn annoying.

At the same time, space stations are a far better starting base. They have power, some have turrets, and you just have to put the factory blocks down. they really do need monsters or something to keep them dangerous.

This does not make any sense to me. at the moment planets are a terrible place to set up a base. the only advantage is you can walk around and get some resources.

So planets do need a use. I also think atmosphere needs to be a thing, but i have no idea what that will do for server lag.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Yeah, it goes without saying that the planet lag and physics glitch issues must be solved first. Once that's done, I hope planets can be much larger than the current ones. I also hope to see greater variance in sizes, with small planets being common and huge planets being rare. Which would make huge planets even more strategic since they would be better at core mining and have greater space for hosting NPC populations.

 

[Blodge]

At the moment, planets are not a good place to set up a base. I have to build a massive space elevator and docking ring to dock my ships there, because they are too big to dock on the surface.

I can't leave them in orbit, because rubber banding is damn annoying.

At the same time, space stations are a far better starting base. They have power, some have turrets, and you just have to put the factory blocks down. they really do need monsters or something to keep them dangerous.

This does not make any sense to me. at the moment planets are a terrible place to set up a base. the only advantage is you can walk around and get some resources.

So planets do need a use. I also think atmosphere needs to be a thing, but i have no idea what that will do for server lag.

Some of these issues can be addressed by simply making planets bigger (roll-on planet optimisation!). However, if Planets are changed to be the Player spawn point, then Players will not have massive ships to begin with. You can start with a landing pad and a mining ship small enough to park on it, and work on Space Elevators/Stations when you've collected enough resources to build ships big enough to require them.
[doublepost=1480684173,1480683320][/doublepost]Schema has previously said food will not be a mechanic in Starmade. However, I'm starting to like the idea of being able to craft something similar to a Basic Factory Block called a "Food Cube" Processor Block into which you can put the flora/fauna of any "habitable" planet and it produces consumable food items. That way if you end up marooned on anything other than a dead planet/out in space you will be able to survive from scratch. The food processing feature could even be built into your suit if crafting the Processor Block proves too difficult for new Players.

If the Devs then add in a reproduction cycle for flora/fauna, food can become a renewable resource provided it is farmed carefully. You could even transplant flora/fauna to spaceships in hydroponics bays to have a portable resource, although I imagine Planet-based farms would always be easier to manage due to having all the resources naturally available to build them.

 

[Madman198237]

Here's my thought: Make atmosphere drastically slow things that enter them. Spaceships, missiles (REALLY slow), cannon blasts, (Beams weakened, maybe? Scattering due to particle interactions, after all), damage pulse, well, nerf damage as well. Same reason as beams. Then, make ground-and-atmosphere specific vehicles, made of somewhat smaller blocks (lighter weight because they do not need to protect you against radiation, and do not need to hold as much circuitry/storage/redundancy.

 

[Blodge]

Reducing the power of weapons/engines inside an atmosphere is an interesting one. Atmosphere specific vehicles could then require a "Jet Engine" or "Hover" block to manoeuvre properly.
Schema has said on multiple occasions that smaller blocks will never happen.