- Joined
- Nov 14, 2014
- Messages
- 25
- Reaction score
- 30
One issue with crafting and item production is that it's just not very intuitive, for a couple of reasons. One is that none of the resources or factory types closely correspond to any real-world material or production process; the other is that all of the resources can be found in more or less equal abundance everywhere, and as such, all of them are used equally in crafting. Imagine if, in Minecraft, there were 8 kinds of stone, 8 metal ores and 8 diamond variants, which were the ONLY items in the game used to craft other items, and the crafting system consisted of 3 different types of crafting tables that all had the exact same UI but were used to make different types of items, with each type of crafting table being used to make items of a different complexity level rather than form or function, and you had to smelt ore twice in 2 different kinds of furnaces before you could do anything with it. You now have a very neat picture of what Starmade's resource mechanics are like.
Minecraft, of course, does not do this. It makes you go out and look for different types of resources, some rarer than others and almost all only found in specific places or only obtainable from certain mobs. And each item has a function that closely approximates its real world function, or, in the case of fictional items, what you'd logically expect to be able to do with it. And the crafting is intuitive and makes sense. Even though what you build in Minecraft has little function beyond safety, storage and farming, it remains consistently popular because obtaining and crafting the items you need to build something isn't a tedious and nonsensical grind, and the fact that different resources are obtained in different ways and from different places makes the gameplay interesting.
Minecraft, of course, does not do this. It makes you go out and look for different types of resources, some rarer than others and almost all only found in specific places or only obtainable from certain mobs. And each item has a function that closely approximates its real world function, or, in the case of fictional items, what you'd logically expect to be able to do with it. And the crafting is intuitive and makes sense. Even though what you build in Minecraft has little function beyond safety, storage and farming, it remains consistently popular because obtaining and crafting the items you need to build something isn't a tedious and nonsensical grind, and the fact that different resources are obtained in different ways and from different places makes the gameplay interesting.
