XboxPants posted:

Mining ore blocks isn't an inherently fun enough mechanic for it to be the focus of your gameplay, regardless of how many ores you have spawning. It would need to, like, have a puzzle mechanic or something, like a Super Motherload-type game, for it to be that fun. Like bonus combo chains when you mine the same type of ore or something.

But mining is probably never going to be the core of this game - so instead it needs to be something you do occasionally while you explore and look around for interesting content. That's probably the strongest part of Starbound's gameplay, and what the whole game should center around.

But the MM needs to be really fast for that sort of "drive-by mining". Which is why it feels so sluggish and frustrating right now - because every time you have to mine, you're essentially being asked to stop doing the fun stuff to do something repetitive & boring, in order to gain access to more fun stuff.

XboxPants posted:

I'm drawing a distinction here between "Spelunking" in general - caving, in other words, and all that entails - and "Mining", specifically just breaking blocks with your MM or a pick, and nothing else. I guess I could have said "breaking blocks".

I don't think "Mining" was all that fun in Minecraft, either. It really wasn't all that fun or satisfying just to break blocks, though it was a little better than in Starbound.

Very small things contribute to this, like sound design, how the mined materials fall on the ground, what the notification looks like for picking up blocks, how different the "exciting" blocks look from the surrounding tiles, how the lighting changes when you break a block, poo poo like that. Things like that can make the pure act of breaking a block and collecting a piece of ore fun, even without doing any exploration or combat or anything else. There are entire games that center around it, and succesfully so. Starbound's lacking in that department.

Vib Rib posted:

I know this is mostly a joke and this is a pretty y thing to segue into from it, but I hate that "parkour" is the go-to name for even the most simple things like grabbing a ledge and pulling yourself up in a video game. That's not parkour, that's just pulling yourself up onto a ledge.
Like, I once made a Minecraft map with a jumping puzzle, and literally every LPer I saw who stumbled upon it went "Oh hey, a parkour challenge!" It's just a jumping puzzle, goddammit!
All right, sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

Awesome! posted:

has anyone considered the fact that the stars have not consented to being bound and this whole game is incredibly troubling?
?

grimcreaper posted:

HEY! i know that reference! Homeworld 1!

Crono S. Magnum posted:

Games > Starbound: a warm and welcoming community of Lamars!

Cicadas! posted:

P. sure that was supposed to be a feature but it was too hard or something.

Party Plane Jones posted:

Rhopunzel posted:

Thank you! Seriously. That means so much to me.

Jorge Bell posted:

In addition to adding more pre-genned monsters (actually not a horrible move but we're 3 years into EA) they've also added devices that will detect pockets of ore (color coded) and tunnels with sonar-like pings emanating from a hand-held device, assumingly to remove a couple layers of tedium from the process of digging through eight million tiles of bullshit.