Even with redstone minecraft got really boring really soon. The only thing that kept it alive for me was the amount of mods available. And then they failed to make significant updates. No thanks, give me starmade any time, but not that cheap knockoff of a game called minecraft. Starmade is way superior (and we will eventually be able to create space squids! Yay!).
exactly my little fluffybunny. as far as im concerned, with the exception of mobs and mods, in terms of gameplay, starmade is already on par with minecraft. there was no over all goal in minecraft other then climbing the tech tree (which i liked how doing so made you explore various biomes and the nether.) and slaying a rather easy dragon. iv been disapointed with that aspect of the game since 1.8 beta which they called "the adventure update" i was like holy sh*t finally something to do! but no, it was just more bells and whistles, (and has been eversince) no adventure stuff at all. so overall minecrafts greatest strength was its block building abilities, and a very basic goal to achive.
now, starmade is basically at the same level as minecraft. but its done things much better. for one, advanced buildmode. after a couple of hours of using it, its almost impossible to go back to the one by one placing as in minecraft.
and secondly both have a very simple "goal" to achieve. in minecraft it was slay the dragon. in starmade its kill a pirate station or two. now granted slaying the dragon was more involved then taking on a pirate station. (all you need is radar jamming and any ship with a weapon can take them on without effort) but the main idea is the same, go kill something.
now apart from killing things starmade needs something else to incentive exploration and various ship designs. one obvious solution that always comes up for this is quests. (you need a ship with of X size and X capabilities and maybe X colors or matireals) but another great incentive for people to go out of their way would be rare loot that is un craftable or purchasable. it would have to be blocks/items with special or rare abilities/properties. or even slightly more powerful forms of current blocks.(unreproducable alien tech?) maybe a shield block that give you twice as many shield as a normal block, or super thursters or power blocks ECT. abuses could be avoided simply by the rarity of these powerful blocks. (all these things have been suggested before, but sometimes it good to go over them again)
and remember balancing should be done form the point of view of creating things in survival. as the vast majority of the ships and titans currently made are OP and unrealistic in how the game would probably play in a finished survival state. many peoples views on what should and shouldn't be OP are skewed because they essentially play in creative mode.
but back on topic with the goals. we have already mentioned "killing things" but honeslty, we need many more things to kill! pirates as is are truly underwhelming. and once you get a radar jammer, they are as harmless as kittens wearing mittens. they should fire blindly with a radar jammer to at least try and hit you randomly (turrets currently do this) and we need more things then just pirates to kill.
i for one would love to see something more of less akin to the borg. a kind of swarm, amorphous, hive kind of species. they should take a que from skylord luke and his copy paste templates idea to make procedurally generated enemy ships! if the procedural generation is done properly and pulls from a sophisticated list of preset parts. (something im sure the master builders would love to help the dev team make) so imagine that appart from dodging pirates (which use the current meathod of blueprint stealing) you sometimes encounter these bizarre aliens with procedural ships (that naturally get bigger and badder the farther from spawn you are) and with faction mechanics then things could get really interesting.
any way, bit of a winded/ranty post, but the main point is that yes, theres a great deal of room for improvment for gameplay elements to the game. but its is all coming! the way i see it, is they have been developing a platform in which to apply gameplay elements into. (something i thought they were doing with minecraft, but they never did) and that they are pretty much forced to add because of the very nature of the things you are required to build in the game. the reason minecraft added a dragon to slay? because you where a guy with basic tech running around with iron Armour and a sword. its was the natural conclusion. in starmade? you make war machines! its only natural they will include various forms of warfare that require much more thinking and planning then simply adding a radar jammer to your ship.
So sit tight guys, the universe revamp is the first step towards the serious gameplay/survival meat of this game that we have all been craving. the schine team is not stupid, and they know what we want. and not only that but they have the pros and cons, successes and failures, of minecraft to help guide them. and im sure schema has a personal goal of wanting to wipe the floor with minecraft eventually. like i said in another thread. we are basically on a rollercoaster ride and we are still inching our way up the first mega drop. or to make a more starmade friendly analogy. think of us as a big rocket sitting on the launch pad, and the countdown has not even started yet. right now everything is being checked and rechecked to make sure it all goes smoothly.
