Starbound: You may find yourself waiting for a better game.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Starbound: You may find yourself waiting for a better game.

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

The first boss in the mine place for the FTL is.. actually very easy once you get down his pattern. His second and third attack patterns have some extremely easy ways to avoid taking damage. I highly recommend bringing a shield along however, since until you understand how to avoid them, it can be helpful to block the beams to negate some of the damage.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2015 12:02

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 20:45

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

Tenbux McGee posted:

I beat the mining facility boss by having cheat engine slow the game by 50%. Fixing any one of the following issues would make that boss not be infuriating:
The lasers hit for too much damage
The lasers are a little too fast
Falling from the top three platforms is fatal
Killing the spawning enemies at the bottom uses most/all of your energy (making you unable to dash or pulse jump to save yourself)
Stage 3 lasers are unavoidable unless you're at the bottom (hope you killed all the enemies!) or the top (hope the weird platforming controls don't screw up!)

That said, its not a bad game or anything. They just made one hell of an unforgiving tutorial boss.
edit: Wait, EVERY star I've looked at has one of those "incalculably ancient" gates. What the heck?

I have to second this. Mostly I think the big issue is the lasers do too much damage for a first boss. Doubly so since it has additional enemies at the bottom. I think less damage/slower lasers would probably be a bit more forgiving or perhaps just a simpler boss in general. First time I went in there, I had no idea what the hell the switches were for or that you needed them to do damage to the boss in general since well.. That was the first time that mechanic came up and there wasn't even a hint towards it prior that point. Having something more forgiving for an introduction to well.. Introduce people to the mechanic of the boss fight and the patterns would have been better. Doubly so that the patterns changed a lot, with the last one requiring you to stand in one of two places to dodge, while the other two required you to move a lot was a little unintuitive. Also needed some sort of checkpoint system.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2015 23:11

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

Mine boss is stupidly easy, but here we go:

Hit four switches + thing at the bottom to damage him.

First stage just run around him to avoid the beam.

Second stage, stay on the bottom and go left/right as needed. Clear out the enemies and he won't be able to hurt you.

Third stage, stay directly below where the attacking thing is and it won't be able to hit you at all. Go out to hit the switches in between the attacks.

Using a shield helps negate the damage as well as bringing bandages if you're going to get hit a lot.

Completely unrelated to this boss specifically, but I've found that some Mushroom vendors will sell you weapons and they seem to be completely bugged. Their inventory is randomized each time you select a weapon in their shop and randomized further when you buy one. You can easily get a gun that does near 200 damage by buying a bunch of weapons from it. Just remember each time you select a weapon the stats change, usually going up. Select a weapon till it gets stats near high enough and usually the one you'll buy will be somewhere close to it statwise. If not, just repeat till you get something good.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2015 19:58

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

LAY-ZX posted:

How do you hit the switches up top while staying at the bottom?

The attack doesn't stay up forever. After I think two cycles of it, the boss stops a moment giving you time to hit switches before he starts shooting again. Theres also a safe spot directly above him for the third wave, and pretty much anything that happens for the bottom can be done on top too with jumping back and forth between the platforms. Its just a bigger pain in the butt.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2015 23:21

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

Rocketlex posted:

People are having trouble with the Mine boss?

You just run around it and hit the switches. Don't bother fighting anything. Hit all the switches three times and it's dead. I...didn't even realize you could damage it any other way.

I don't think you can. Or rather I had a stupidly strong gun at the time and it wasn't even denting the boss.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2015 08:50

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

XboxPants posted:

Based on what I've seen in videos, people don't really understand how to use Torches and the Flashlight to shine light through the edges of the cave and see that you have not, in fact, found a dead end, and there's just a single layer of blocks in your way that you can pass in a fraction of a second.

To be fair this is largely Starbound's fault. It doesn't teach you that you can and should have your flashlight in your offhand and your weapon in your main, and then you can have a weapon out and use your flashlight for light at the same time, and that you can then easily switch to this combo at any time with a single key, which also switches back to the last item you were using if you need it again.

If you already know all that poo poo it seems obvious, but the game makes no effort to teach you.

It'd be cool if they did something to encourage flashlight use. I wonder if it's possible to have tiles or objects or NPCs that react to light.

In all honesty, they really need to ditch the flashlight as a holdable object in general I think. While its neat to have, they should have a shoulder mounted light or something equipped to you natively so you can see in the dark. Holding a flashlight tends to basically make two handed weapons a pain in the butt to use when you're in an unexplored cave or out of torches. That and possibly giving the player the lantern on a stick's level of illumination around the player by default I think would help considerably when it comes down to spelunking. And really, in the future people have managed space flight but no one has had the bright idea to duct tape a flashlight to their gun or clothes? Even horror protagonists know better than this.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 20:40

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

This might be a bit late but good lord that farming update seems like rear end. I think the entire point of it is to give different planets different benefits for going/building on them. With this probably being the first of many. That said, automating farming by building a colony on a rainy planet just seems dumb and tedious, especially if they're going for the idea that each planet type can give you different benefits. You'd wind up needing to teleporter/fly around to several different planets just to do/pick up stuff.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 00:13

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

Turtlicious posted:

Look, I'm not defending starbound, but uhh...

Weren't we just saying they don't ever update? Then we remember the nightlies, and woops, it's updated all the time. Then the updates aren't the right updates? Do they not get credit for updating the nightly literally all the time?

Literally anytime people have said the game never updates, they also say that nightlies don't count. Its always been that way for some bizarre reason. If its not the stable branch, it doesn't count. End of story.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 08:47

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

ToxicSlurpee posted:

That's kind of how software works, though. Nightly builds are unstable garbage where you just build whatever happens to be there no matter how badly it functions. They aren't proper versions. A developer releasing nightlies is more "hey if you ever wanted to see how bad games are before they're released take a look!" than actual releases.

It seems entirely too convenient and misleading to say that they aren't updating the game however even if the unstable branch is well.. Unstable. It makes it sound like the team isn't working on it at all if you completely ignore the work they are doing. I'm not even trying to defend the game when I say this either. I'm pretty disappointed in the direction the game has been going as well, however spreading blatant misinformation and hyperbole really doesn't seem to help anybody. Especially when theres games out there that the devs have stopped working on their game entirely.

That said, I kinda understand that way of thinking. Unstable builds aren't very functional for the playerbase, and thus practically don't exist since many don't bother with them at all.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2015 18:31

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 20:45

DeliciousCookie: Mar 4, 2011

Rrussom posted:

I've been thinking about starbound and touch on damage, and after playing it a bit i feel like i have to come to defense of it

Have you read what the devs said about this sort of thing? They understand some people don't like it, but it's a crucial part of the gameplay right now. There's very limited way you can play out combat, especially in a procedurally generated world, that doesn't just result in mobs getting stuck or becoming stale. The devs want the game to be more of a platformer, since that's mainly what the game is, & to better do that, you need "safe zone" & "danger zones". The safe zones are where you're not hurt, & the danger zones are where you are hurt, but mobs that use ranged attack just get kited to a position in where the player puts themselves in either an unreachable spot, yet can still hit the enemy, or simply moves out of the line of fire just enough to avoid being hit, before returning to the same place to damage the enemy again. To repeat, the combat system becomes stale, & more of a task then combat. Enemies that use combat abilities, like how the adult ploptop does, just suffer the same delema, but with the player moving through the enemy to completely avoid the attack altogether, meaning that there has to be a consequence since the only other option to make the adult ploptop a danger to the player is to make it do a huge AOE, or have touch damage(which it now does).

Don't get me wrong, I don't like the touch damage either, but people should really read the mountains upon mountains of text the devs go out of their way to explain the reasoning behind the decision, rather than just having another post hit front page again & again begging for the opposite. Personally, I think the game needs both, but as it stands right now, the game needs far more important things than just a overhaul on touch damage. The game is in beta for crying out loud & there are enemies that currently do more that just touch damage(The poptops). And they're working on monsters in the nightly as we speak too. Touch damage should stay, but it should be a priority for the AI's to use attacks rather than to walk on you.

I think most people's issue is that.. frankly? Touch damage is a lazy way to handle this issue. A lot of the issues you list can be handled simply by giving enemies more mobility options. Being able to sprint or jump high, even being able to pass through blocks or tunnel through them would solve many of these issues. Likewise, with the passing through enemies you could simply make them solid, or make bumping into them cause you to be bounced backwards. Heck, I'm not even listing all of the options you could do besides just have touch damage as the go to solution. That isn't to say you can't have touch damage, but having it on everything doesn't really make sense.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2015 09:33

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