What the universe update needs most

[Zephyrim]

Hello. It's been a while since I've posted. I don't play starmade any more, and until today I haven't been following the game's development very closely at all, and honestly looking at the steam charts I can't really hold much hope that it'll ever come back and actually make it as the game I know we all want it to be. However, seeing Schine's most recent blog, talking about his desires to change the direction of the game, I think I might as well drop by one last time and give my input so that hopefully the game can become the hit it always should have been.

Below I want to outline a few of my ideas that will help the game both appeal to a larger and more mainstream audience in order to gain in popularity - which this game sorely needs - and lay the groundwork for updates that will give current and former players everything they've ever wanted from the game.​

Food and air.​

Yes. It's really that simple. Perhaps not that simple per se, but it is pretty damn simple.

Why does nobody play Starmade outside of in creative mode to build a big ship? Simple, Starmade's "survival" or normal mode is simply an inferior creative mode. There's no increased immersion in Starmade's regular mode over its creative mode. Creative mode is cold and dead, and so is 'survival' mode. There's no life, nothing eats, nothing dies, it's rocks here, metal there, space there.

Even Starmade's space is a poor excuse for space. No need to even worry about oxygen, much less any of the multitude of other forces at play in space. Not even a passable attempt at gravity. Heat, cold, debris, light, dark? Nowhere to be found in Starmade's space. Somehow Starmade has managed to make space out to be even more boring and dead than it is in real life.

Look, I know food and Oxygen have been suggested hundreds of times, but I really can't overstate their importance. When you play Starmade currently, nothing you do has any meaning outside of pictures you post on the forums - that probably less than a hundred people will see - and the numbers you see in build mode. Give us something to do, something we need to do, and I guarantee you people will run with it. Take the plants we have currently in game, make them edible, and give us some rudimentary farming system. Add alien cows if you have to. If at the end of the day you simply started ripping content directly from Minecraft and the game became a Minecraft mod there are still mods for Minecraft that are infinitely more popular than Starmade is right now.

I know the team, and especially Schema, have grand visions for what this game could be one day - pirates robbing people in shady sectors and running from law enforcement squadrons sent by far off, massive, civilized empires that are constantly expanding - but in a real situation, or at least a situation that feels real, all those people got to where they are because they ate and breathed and lived.

Imagine - just for a moment - that you start off on a planet with very little food - when you build your first ship and start traveling you have a very real reason to act as a pirate, to pull people over and rob them for anything they have, or to hail them and beg for food. A real reason to conquer or ally with others. A real reason to trade. To explore. To do so much more than just build a ship and look for NPCs or other players to blow up for "fun".

I really hope the team can reevaluate their stance on food and oxygen, and in general on adding in more survival elements to the game. You can always elect to give people ways out in end-game content (such as implants that reduce or eliminate the need for food or oxygen) so they can focus on other things, but you're missing out on an opportunity to make a huge part of the game much more engaging.

Also, as an extension, I think more natural resources like trees and grass and other foliage would also go a long way. Obviously most worlds should be atmosphere-less with no life on them, but simply spawn players on the worlds that can sustain life, even if it's a world where the player can barely breathe and the trees are closer to saplings, I think that sort of random element and disparity between worlds would make for incredibly engaging gameplay eventually. This wouldn't change the way people build ships really, except for taking oxygen into account and growing or storing enough food to feed the crew for the duration of the trip. But it would make getting your first ship much more engaging, and give players something to do, and hopefully more impetus to player interaction or trading in general.​

 

[OfficialCoding]

Hello. It's been a while since I've posted. I don't play starmade any more, and until today I haven't been following the game's development very closely at all, and honestly looking at the steam charts I can't really hold much hope that it'll ever come back and actually make it as the game I know we all want it to be. However, seeing Schine's most recent blog, talking about his desires to change the direction of the game, I think I might as well drop by one last time and give my input so that hopefully the game can become the hit it always should have been.

Below I want to outline a few of my ideas that will help the game both appeal to a larger and more mainstream audience in order to gain in popularity - which this game sorely needs - and lay the groundwork for updates that will give current and former players everything they've ever wanted from the game.​

Food and air.​

Yes. It's really that simple. Perhaps not that simple per se, but it is pretty damn simple.

Why does nobody play Starmade outside of in creative mode to build a big ship? Simple, Starmade's "survival" or normal mode is simply an inferior creative mode. There's no increased immersion in Starmade's regular mode over its creative mode. Creative mode is cold and dead, and so is 'survival' mode. There's no life, nothing eats, nothing dies, it's rocks here, metal there, space there.

Even Starmade's space is a poor excuse for space. No need to even worry about oxygen, much less any of the multitude of other forces at play in space. Not even a passable attempt at gravity. Heat, cold, debris, light, dark? Nowhere to be found in Starmade's space. Somehow Starmade has managed to make space out to be even more boring and dead than it is in real life.

Look, I know food and Oxygen have been suggested hundreds of times, but I really can't overstate their importance. When you play Starmade currently, nothing you do has any meaning outside of pictures you post on the forums - that probably less than a hundred people will see - and the numbers you see in build mode. Give us something to do, something we need to do, and I guarantee you people will run with it. Take the plants we have currently in game, make them edible, and give us some rudimentary farming system. Add alien cows if you have to. If at the end of the day you simply started ripping content directly from Minecraft and the game became a Minecraft mod there are still mods for Minecraft that are infinitely more popular than Starmade is right now.

I know the team, and especially Schema, have grand visions for what this game could be one day - pirates robbing people in shady sectors and running from law enforcement squadrons sent by far off, massive, civilized empires that are constantly expanding - but in a real situation, or at least a situation that feels real, all those people got to where they are because they ate and breathed and lived.

Imagine - just for a moment - that you start off on a planet with very little food - when you build your first ship and start traveling you have a very real reason to act as a pirate, to pull people over and rob them for anything they have, or to hail them and beg for food. A real reason to conquer or ally with others. A real reason to trade. To explore. To do so much more than just build a ship and look for NPCs or other players to blow up for "fun".

I really hope the team can reevaluate their stance on food and oxygen, and in general on adding in more survival elements to the game. You can always elect to give people ways out in end-game content (such as implants that reduce or eliminate the need for food or oxygen) so they can focus on other things, but you're missing out on an opportunity to make a huge part of the game much more engaging.

Also, as an extension, I think more natural resources like trees and grass and other foliage would also go a long way. Obviously most worlds should be atmosphere-less with no life on them, but simply spawn players on the worlds that can sustain life, even if it's a world where the player can barely breathe and the trees are closer to saplings, I think that sort of random element and disparity between worlds would make for incredibly engaging gameplay eventually. This wouldn't change the way people build ships really, except for taking oxygen into account and growing or storing enough food to feed the crew for the duration of the trip. But it would make getting your first ship much more engaging, and give players something to do, and hopefully more impetus to player interaction or trading in general.​

Good post. I posted it on the Discord, but Starmade isn't that type of game . I hope it gets added, though

 

[fokko]

this is a building (flying,destroing) Game not a urban simulation, space is just there to move in it. gravity exists bdw, i dont need a life simulation, real life is bad enough. and about diff between creative and non creative mode, this is purely a server.config thing, server admins do wrong there not the game itself.

 

[Equilibrium21]

Maybe as a mod in the future...

 

[Valiant70]

Air has been a missing feature since the beginning of the game. If it is not added, it will always feel like it's missing.

Maybe food and drinks could be developed into a buff system with multiple tiers. You get tier 1 buffs for eating certain foods. You get tier 2 buffs for eating combinations of different foods, which can be packaged into meal packs. You build up tier 3 buffs over time if you eat a variety of different foods or food types.
[doublepost=1540242054,1540241852][/doublepost]

I really hope the team can reevaluate their stance on food and oxygen, and in general on adding in more survival elements to the game. You can always elect to give people ways out in end-game content (such as implants that reduce or eliminate the need for food or oxygen) so they can focus on other things, but you're missing out on an opportunity to make a huge part of the game much more engaging.

These things shouldn't be a central focus of the game, but I do think they should be included. The popularity of Empyrion: Galacic Survival should speak to the popularity of survival content in general. It's very popular. The trick is finding ways to include survival or at least survival-like content in the game without taking away from the game's primary focus, which is building your empire.

 

[jayman38]

I've been thinking about it, and I do now think that food and drink requirements should be added in game. Previously, I always thought it was acceptable to not have it, due to advancements in technology, but seeing a video about "Cyberpunk 2077" inspired me: you need food and drink to survive at first, and can possibly craft automatic feeders or recyclers for yourself and crew later. Effectively, you would be upgrading your way out of the need for food and drink. I still think hunger and thirst should be eliminated from the end game. I heard reports that people were so bored in Minecraft when they had to go back to their old farms and harvest food, no matter how far into the game they were. Technological advancement would be a way to eliminate the annoying things from the end game.

I've always wanted some kind of "oxygen" mechanic in-game. I never believed in calculating closed rooms for the task though. Those calculations become way too complicated when they are needed most: in combat. I always wanted an "oxygen generator" type mechanic, where oxygen was automatically available around a central point, held in place by forcefields or other technomagic. (or within a helmet)

 

[Edymnion]

I agree with the devs in that having food/oxygen/etc as a requirement FOR THE PLAYER is likely a bad idea.

However, I do support the idea of needing food/oxygen/etc FOR CREW as a kind of "currency" to "pay" for them. Whatever benefit we eventually get from Crew, we're going to need SOMETHING to limit how many of them we have. If they require food and oxygen, and we have to build farms and the like to get that food, then we have our limiting factor.

Like you build a farm of X size that acts kind of like shield capacitors in that they grant you a maximum value of Y that can support Z crew. The number of crew you have will be limited by that maximum value. Like say each crewman eats 3 "food" a day, and you have a farm that produces 10 food a day, then you can have up to 3 active crew with a slow buildup of 1 food a day excess you can stockpile.

If food was an item, then we could have players who run mega-farms and then sell that food on the open market to players who don't want to build that way.

Personally I love the idea of setting up dirt and putting berry bushes or something on it that you can then harvest manually. And once you start getting bigger, you could assign some crew to harvest the food automatically.

 

[DoomCarrot]

I agree for the most part. I hate to make this comparison, but MiNEcRaFT was basically built upon the back of a hunger and agriculture system. You HAD to do certain things in a certain amount of gametime, or you would die. I agree that starmade should be the same way. Give us a reason to HAVE to leave the safety of our OP homebases every once and a while. Make the unknown of space truly dangerous, but mandatory to risk delving into.

Either that, or alter the broken FP system to give us other reasons to explore and claim land and wage war. Right now, there really isn't any good reason to do any of that besides the laughs.

 

[WildRage64]

Hello. It's been a while since I've posted. I don't play starmade any more, and until today I haven't been following the game's development very closely at all, and honestly looking at the steam charts I can't really hold much hope that it'll ever come back and actually make it as the game I know we all want it to be. However, seeing Schine's most recent blog, talking about his desires to change the direction of the game, I think I might as well drop by one last time and give my input so that hopefully the game can become the hit it always should have been.

Below I want to outline a few of my ideas that will help the game both appeal to a larger and more mainstream audience in order to gain in popularity - which this game sorely needs - and lay the groundwork for updates that will give current and former players everything they've ever wanted from the game.​

Food and air.​

Yes. It's really that simple. Perhaps not that simple per se, but it is pretty damn simple.

Why does nobody play Starmade outside of in creative mode to build a big ship? Simple, Starmade's "survival" or normal mode is simply an inferior creative mode. There's no increased immersion in Starmade's regular mode over its creative mode. Creative mode is cold and dead, and so is 'survival' mode. There's no life, nothing eats, nothing dies, it's rocks here, metal there, space there.

Even Starmade's space is a poor excuse for space. No need to even worry about oxygen, much less any of the multitude of other forces at play in space. Not even a passable attempt at gravity. Heat, cold, debris, light, dark? Nowhere to be found in Starmade's space. Somehow Starmade has managed to make space out to be even more boring and dead than it is in real life.

Look, I know food and Oxygen have been suggested hundreds of times, but I really can't overstate their importance. When you play Starmade currently, nothing you do has any meaning outside of pictures you post on the forums - that probably less than a hundred people will see - and the numbers you see in build mode. Give us something to do, something we need to do, and I guarantee you people will run with it. Take the plants we have currently in game, make them edible, and give us some rudimentary farming system. Add alien cows if you have to. If at the end of the day you simply started ripping content directly from Minecraft and the game became a Minecraft mod there are still mods for Minecraft that are infinitely more popular than Starmade is right now.

I know the team, and especially Schema, have grand visions for what this game could be one day - pirates robbing people in shady sectors and running from law enforcement squadrons sent by far off, massive, civilized empires that are constantly expanding - but in a real situation, or at least a situation that feels real, all those people got to where they are because they ate and breathed and lived.

Imagine - just for a moment - that you start off on a planet with very little food - when you build your first ship and start traveling you have a very real reason to act as a pirate, to pull people over and rob them for anything they have, or to hail them and beg for food. A real reason to conquer or ally with others. A real reason to trade. To explore. To do so much more than just build a ship and look for NPCs or other players to blow up for "fun".

I really hope the team can reevaluate their stance on food and oxygen, and in general on adding in more survival elements to the game. You can always elect to give people ways out in end-game content (such as implants that reduce or eliminate the need for food or oxygen) so they can focus on other things, but you're missing out on an opportunity to make a huge part of the game much more engaging.

Also, as an extension, I think more natural resources like trees and grass and other foliage would also go a long way. Obviously most worlds should be atmosphere-less with no life on them, but simply spawn players on the worlds that can sustain life, even if it's a world where the player can barely breathe and the trees are closer to saplings, I think that sort of random element and disparity between worlds would make for incredibly engaging gameplay eventually. This wouldn't change the way people build ships really, except for taking oxygen into account and growing or storing enough food to feed the crew for the duration of the trip. But it would make getting your first ship much more engaging, and give players something to do, and hopefully more impetus to player interaction or trading in general.​

I like the idea, a lot. However, oxygen would be a bit tricky. B ecuase if that does get in the game, we need to add oxygen tanks to pit ships. We need to make airlock and stuff. Lots of new players don't know how to make a logic airlock, I would forget to close the door, too. But yes, you do have an excellent point. Then the space helmet would have a purpose!