I’m keeping an eye on the game, but it’s unlikely I’ll pick it up until after the beta.
I played it for some 15 hours, but the frequency of character/world wipes turned me off further investment. I am going to wait until a later beta, at last until they stop wiping, before I come back. I want to love the game when it’s readier and don’t want to burn out on repeating the early game ad infinitum.
There is a mod which lets players skip to building the distress beacon.
Guess I will turn it off then.
Regarding the next patch, expected some time next week:
Hmm. Getting closer!
I may pick this up the next time it goes on sale.
There seem to be plans for an extensive quest system. There are mods which add quests.
The patch is now live and there shouldn’t be any more ship or character wipes, but there still MIGHT be world wipes.
Alpha Lambda Aur IIIc (-83144690, -5029306) makes for a nice base of operations. Working left from the spawn point: an abandoned hut, a Floran village with a food vendor, and a bandit tent. Might me more that I haven’t encountered yet.
So the worlds aren’t randomly generated? Or are they randomly generated and then added to a cloud database and assigned coordinates?
AFAIK, it starts with a set of coordinates, part of which determines whether or not a planet is supposed to be there. If one is supposed to be there, the rest of the coordinates specify the planet type, biomes, flora, fauna, structures, etc., it has. Which are then generated.
Coordinates are to Starbound are as seeds are to Minecraft.
Some interesting mods I’ve found:
[ul]
[li]Kawa’s xbawks-mode character creator, expands the number of playable races. Necessary for using fan-made races.[/li][li]Novakid race (includes the above)[/li][li]Half-Warp race (similar to Novakids)[/li][li]classic Grey Alien race[/li][li]Mantis race[/li][li]generic Insectoid race[/li][li]Avali race[/li][li]Aragonian race[/li][li]Kangaru race[/li][li]Crystalath race[/li][li]Ferengi race[/li][li]Felinoid race[/li][li]Snow Pirate race[/li][li]Ethereal race[/li][li]Cephalopod race (outdated)[/li][li]Time Lord race (haven’t installed myself)[/li][li]Faster Start (skip to building the distress beacon)[/li][li]Bandit Hideouts[/li][li]Portable Atmosphere Generator[/li][li]Dungeoneer Dungeons (more dungeons & micro-dungeons)[/li][*]Base in a Box (craft placeable buildings, unlocks with Gamma Sector).[/ul]
Turns out this also needs to be updated.
By the way, fan-made races do show up as NPCs. I encountered a Grey base with a medical vendor.
I got the mission to build a distress beacon. A UFO/boss came down, and I defeated it. (He dropped 5 power cores, I think, and some book that provides a little background lore.) But no new mission was assigned, and I don’t know what to do next.
I went to my ship, stuck 120 coal in the fuel tank. When I warped to a nearby asteroid belt (in the same star system), it used up about half of that fuel. Without a spacesuit or some other kind of life support, I couldn’t stick around long on the “surface” there. I went back to the starting planet.
I built a metal forge thingy (the recipe requires a power core), but it didn’t offer anything new to craft.
What now? Do I mine coal until I can fill the ships fuel tank? (That will take about a thousand coal!)
To unlock most of the Metal Forge’s potential, I think you need to build the new Starmap item. It’s craftable at the forge, I think. Use it on yourself and you unlock the Beta sector for travel, as well as part of the tech tree.
And yes, it makes no sense from a ‘realist’ perspective, and only barely from a ‘gamist’ perspective. It’s one of my little annoyances with the game.
The other annoyance I am having right now is that my new game started me on a world with constant goddamn meteor showers.
I’ll look through the crafting list again, I didn’t notice that starmap. Thanks.
What to do next is entirely up to you. You can even build your own little village if you want and build spawners to populate said village.
I don’t know if more quests are available anywhere in vanilla; if they are, I think they’re only offered via NPC. As I said upthread, there are mods which add them.
At present the only real “quests” after that presently in-game that I know of are gathering the materials needed to summon the boss for each new sector. For example, when you upgrade your star map you’ll find plans for various parts of an “Inactive Robot”.
They are planning to add a lot more stuff though.