Starbound: An Action Adventure Exploration Sandbox Game

I'm not too worried about that Tuef. Chances are good the playerbase's whining will end up causing them to switch it back to the old status in another patch if they release the changes to the general public. Besides, I'm having a hard time imagining the placement of copper deeper underground was intentional, cause that just sounds plain dumb and more likely to be due to a glitch or something.

As for the devs themselves... I get the feeling that Chucklefish either lost some important staff members on the transition to England or they're REALLY starting to slack off. It's taking way too long between iterations and the Steam version hasn't received an update for the longest time. Got a feeling this sucker isn't even going to be out of beta by mid 2015 either.

I've also heard stories that the Chucklefish forums or any threads directly related to Starbound are being tightly controlled and any "complaint" threads deleted. Take it with a grain of salt though, because most of this hearsay is coming from the Steam forums and that's not exactly the most intelligent or fair and balanced of communities. Not like I'm gonna bother to check and confirm either, I just don't have the time or inclination to do that.

they did lose an important member in the transition to england. they and the person leaving (because he didnt want to move to england) kept quiet about it for a while and the fanbase exploded and made a bigger deal about it than was strictly necessary.

that being said, he was probably replaced fairly quickly, and it probably didnt slow them down any more than the simple move to another country did.

they arent slacking off. it has been a while since the last steam update, but they've been releasing fairly frequent updates about what they're working on at any given time for the past few months or so now.

about the forums...its both exaggerated but not wrong. tiy himself angrily shut down a series of (intrusive and rude) questions about the above mentioned debacle, stating it was a post written by someone who was banned but posted by someone who wasnt, the questions were going too far, and the questions should be reworded.

and then a mod did just that, and he closed that thread anyway. i have seen plenty of "complaint" threads that, at least while i was in the mood to follow the official forums, werent being locked.

incidentally, the steam forums is awful, even by steam community standards.

regarding the beta 2015 thing: http://playstarbound.com/some-thoughts-on-early-access-release-dates-the-big-1-0/ (in other news, tiy doesnt seem to know how much his game costs, claiming it to be 3 pounds cheaper than it actually is. :V)

edited 5th Aug '14 9:31:32 AM by Tarsen

They haven't had a stable update in quite a while just a lot of the clunky nightly builds. They may say they are working on a lot but the player base has yet to actually really see more then a couple of these big changes even in the nightly builds.

edited 5th Aug '14 11:07:57 AM by TuefelHundenIV

cant really comment since i dont do nightly builds, though the mere fact that nightly is, supposedly, updated nightly means that whether you see the results as easily or not, they are clearly doing work, and to suggest they're slacking off is kinda rude, i think.

i'd go into a monologue suggesting gamedevelopment isnt easy and even if the changes are minor, updates still require a lot of work behind the scenes...but i dont know a thing about designing a game or coding, so im keeping my mouth shut and sticking to the "i would do this thing im doing right now, but id rather pretend im not currently doing it" strategy.

edited 5th Aug '14 11:16:26 AM by Tarsen

Thing is we haven't had a big update in quite a long time. No it isn't rude to suggest they are not really doing as much work as they claim and every person who bought the game on their promises has a right to suggest otherwise when we haven't seen any of the supposed big important changes after a fairly long period of time. A fair bit of progress has been both promised and advertised but at best has been very slow in coming.

Nightly builds have almost all been small "balancing tweaks" which more often then not just break more things and make the game unpleasant to play via punishing the player or making some rather stupid changes to the game that they should know really won't go over well and honestly are not the best "balancing" ideas ever put out.

Rail roading players under ground when they don't want to be and shoe horning hard core features into the game at best speaks of some questionable judgement. What it looks like is typical developer corner cutting. If they want people to go underground give them a reason other then just mining for resources. Players already lose a fairly big chunk of one key resource on death adding a second is just needlessly punishing the players.

If they can't get their shit together well enough to put together semi-regular updates it really does make one wonder what exactly they are doing.

edited 5th Aug '14 12:01:00 PM by TuefelHundenIV

They should make it such that if your pickaxe isn't strong enough to mine the mineral then it shouldn't even damage the block it's in.

Also, making us lose ores on death was a dick move. Especially when the difficulty level doesn't tell you anything about that.

Hopefully the devs can listen to us and remove the scrappy mechanics.

edited 5th Aug '14 7:51:27 PM by ironcommando

Even if you can pick the ore back up if you die deep underground you might as well write it off. The crazy thing is that is normal difficulty. The thing with the picks is just stupid beyond belief. The picks and mining mechanics weren't broken before so I have no clue why they are mucking about with them now.

I think they should revert the picks back to normal. IIRC you can't smelt gold (or even make gold equipment) until you get the molten forge or something. That alone prevents you from getting equipment ahead of time.

Sounds like they want players to go underground and not suicide to get back to the surface.

Which is just silly because you can still exit the game and go back in in your ship without even losing pixels.

Sure would be nice if they made an easier means to dig deep underground, because right now saving & exiting the game is the only practical option available (death costs you WAY too many pixels to be an efficient method - you'd lose everything you earned by the 4th death!)

Let me just stop in and say the math on that subject is wrong, you lose 25% of your CURRENT pixels. so you actually lose less with each death

This has been your math moment

You lose 30% not 25%.

QUEIT YOUS, ME MAFFS IS PREFECT, I R NOT DUM!!!

Is the build bugged? I get a variant exception everytime I click on my character to play, then a runtime error.

Edit: Found the problem. I had to delete the universe folder.

They introduced dungeons, I started out in one. It can be pretty hard without any armor for protection. Once you get a weapon from a Mini-Boss, it gets a lot easier and manageable.

edited 7th Aug '14 8:00:33 AM by ironcommando

The actual math is something like 31% rounds up against the player.

Yeah I had to zap the old folders and reinstall the game to get it to behave on my last start up of the game.

"This has already been tackled in the current nightly build. '''Triggering a chain reaction of cascading sand destroys the ores, so you now need to carefully mine your way around to them from above or the sides'''. This is likely to be a controversial change, since a lot of players were strip-mining desert worlds exploiting the ease you could get ores from these types of cascading blocks"

fuckin really? god damn. that sounds awful. cascade mining was the least tedious and most fun method and they just got rid of it.

Because they are too stupid to adjust the amount of ore that could spawn in that material and made a change that doesn't make any sense what so ever. Also too stupid to give players something better to go underground for rather then wasting our time mining.

edited 14th Aug '14 5:24:21 PM by TuefelHundenIV

and here i was thinking back when i first discovered cascade mining: "fucking wow, i wish more mining games did this, its such an awesome result and it seems like it makes more sense than static ore in a sea of unstable sand"

but apparantly it did not.

...

not sure how the ores being destroyed by the cascade makes any more though...

It doesn't. Just more sloppy design and mechanics.

speaking of...odd mechanics, do hylotl and glitch still drown?

I can think of two reason for both drowning. The Hylotl might be land adapted at this point or more amphibian then all fish otherwise how would a Hylotl breath air? Most amphibians have a limit on how long they can be under water.

I would have the Hylotl take a lot longer to drown in my own opinion.

Glitch are made to simulate living things accurately which is why they need warmth and food as well as drown. They may not be able to disable that programming immediately but say have the ability to modify it to improve their survivability.

Any idea how the game has been going? Been out of it for the better part of the year, official development seemed to slow to a crawl.

Its been out for about a year. There has not been a stable build in a long while. The nightly builds are almost always buggy and unstable. I haven't played it since the last stable update.

Supposedly they are closing in on a stable build but they have been saying that for a while now.

edited 13th Dec '14 12:36:22 PM by TuefelHundenIV

A news update popped up on their Facebook page recently, but it still hasn't given anything solid about the Steam version getting updated. Really, the only thing that's keeping me from un-installing the game is that I don't want to lose the custom ship and characters I built using mods, since they may not jive with the later updates and become corrupted. Otherwise it would've been outta my library since the end of summer.

I will believe in the reported changes and improvements when they put them out in a stable build.