Ikeprof

Thank you Zenith Corp for a great show. It gave us a bunch of great ideas on what is possible in this game for builders. Some of my favorites were Doom Train, Thor, and the semi trucks as I am in transportation.  Also would like to congratulate our own TeeWRX82 ( <-- Discord & DU name ) for getting a nod as well in Twitter.  Hit him up for blueprints in the future. 
 
The crew from XBC which are noted mostly from the Empyrion build series hosted by Xcalibur are doing their best to learn voxelmancy in DU and create some inspiring builds. Our corp XBC "The Anvil" is looking to give back to the community with a library to help new players.
 
Thanks again to Zenith Corp for the cool venue.

I have to ask… Is this a game or a tech demo? There's a very important distinction to make here: a game has to be challenging. Right now we're in creative mode in Minecraft. For the game to exist long term, we have to switch to survival.
 
We're a PvP-oriented group. We *really* want this game to be successful but we're very concerned about the current state of the game, and hope [or lack thereof] for the future. This game needs a challenge. Without it, you have a community that will login, build their favorite childhood spaceship(s), and then go play something else. I'd be very curious what the daily active user count looks like since Beta launch. My guess is that it's not going up.  Longevity requires Challenging content, and in this game you have to have PvP in some form. PvP is unlimited/timeless content. Mining and ship building with no purpose will burn everyone out eventually. Most people that we know who are PvP-focused are not giving this game a chance right now, there is no content for them.
 
For this game to be great, players need to be confronted with interesting decisions, constantly. Currently, there are no interesting choices to make in this game.  Not in ship building, not in industry, not in gameplay. Ship building? Just add more. More engines, more brakes, more of everything. Industry? Just add more machines. Gameplay? Everything is perfectly safe. Pilots never need to make a decision of "do I risk this ship in order to achieve this goal?". The answer is always just warp there and be perfectly safe. This game might have made for some great YouTube videos so far, but that is not enough.
 
So here's my thoughts. But let me preface by saying that when PvP works in this game, it is some of the most rewarding and satisfying experiences of any game I've played. Taking constructs you have built into a fight adds an extra level of intensity during, as well as pride and accomplishment afterwards. Even when we don't win, we still acknowledge our ships performed admirably.
 
PRIORITY 0
Mining and industry: everything is done in complete safety. You can build anything and (almost) everything from inside the safe zone. There's no incentive to risk anything? The safe zone around Alioth, Madis and Thades needs to go ASAP. I know JC said it's not permanent, but the damage is already done. End game stuff should be risky. You can build basics from the safe zone, that's fine. But if you want high end / end game items, there needs to be risk in order for there to be value. Look at warp drives, they are already dirt cheap. Industry recipes needs to be redesigned and include higher tiered ores and things outside the safe zone. T4/T5 Ore is completely useless? We made a bonsai… now what? They aren’t better honeycombs either. Sure, they have more EHP/weight, but in terms of raw EHP, the obvious choice is Steel. It's objectively better, and it's made from readily-available T1 ore. Warp Drives: Everybody has a warp drive. There's no "safe zone" around planets anymore because (almost) nobody flies through the PvP zone. It shouldn't be possible to warp to a planet, load up on Ore, and warp back. But everyone is doing it. Can we make warp core usage exponential, as opposed to linear? Over-safety exploits that need to stop: Alt-F4 that has been sanctioned by NQ as being fine to do is ridiculous. It's not "emergency braking" as is described… it's just braking, for haulers, all the time. GM teleporting: this needs to stop. There's traders that just rely on GM's teleporting them and their ships full of cargo from market to market. The GMs are not overloaded anymore, in sharp contrast to beta launch. There's NO reason for this to continue. GM repairs: you crashed your ship and don't feel like repairing? Just get a GM to do it! What?!? Item destruction: Right now anything built in game never goes away (unless under very specific conditions). There needs to be a sink here. There needs to be some full destruction with RNG. This will greatly help the economy as PvP'ers getting blown up will keep demand high for Industrialists. Where is my loot fairy GDI?  
PRIORITY 1
The Meta issue: The meta in this game sucks: XS core cube with everything L/XL There has to be limitation on what you can put on a core. Whether that's a power grid system, or a hard limit on up-scaling (for example only being able to go up one Size, like an XS core can use XS or S, but nothing bigger). Having a ship with everything L/XL on XS core should not work. The lock range system has got to go. I want to take giant battleships into battle, but I can't because a couple XS cores will just wreck us. NQ needs to make us have to make interesting and/or difficult choices in the game. Right now the choice is "how many L Brakes can I fit on this thing?". It’s just about moar… moar… MOAR!! I've hit 17G braking in one of my ships (and I know folks have done moar). But 17G on a human body is dumb. Give us a pass out and/or die mechanic here. Or stress on components? You can't tell me an Aluminum ship can withstand that much pressure. There needs to be sacrifices or compromises when designing a ship. Do I go full speed? Full tank? Full guns? Bit of everything? Right now the answer is yes, to everything. Speed Tanking or Sig Tanking: We need to introduce a mechanic where L weapons don't do full damage to XS cores. It's crazy that I can put L weapons on an XS cores and do full damage to other XS. The desync often makes PvP impossible: If you get close to someone, they just teleport around all over the place. Half the time we can't shoot back because we don't know which way to point the ship. I've had my gunner have to tell me which direction to point my ship before because they were in sync… like Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 looking out the window. It's extremely frustrating to lose a ship, or even get damage because you can't fight back.  
PRIORITY 2
Immersive PvP experience: Lot of room for improvements here… getting hit should go BOOM Right now I can barely tell if I'm getting hit (I feel like I have to actively look for voxel damage) Voxel Options: for ship building, we need better Voxel options. Right now we basically do:    If PvP then steel
   Else aluminum
Cockpits: They are objectively worse than hovercraft seats. Please give us a reason to make cockpit ships. Windows: I'd love to make beautiful spaceships with lots of windows, but they are death traps. The economy is not picking up, it's just tanking due to cash injection. There's no item destruction in the game. Nothing of value ever disappears since you can repair everything (yes voxels do blow up, but that is very minor). That means overtime, demand does not keep up with supply, and the value of items plummet. We need to either stop the cash injection, or make things disappear from the game a lot more  
Ultimately, NQ is going to upset *some* people with the decisions they will be making in this game. I just hope they don't upset the people that will make this game successful in the long term. The loudest voices are rarely the voices of reason.
 
Vheox
Scotch & Tea™ - Purveyors of the finest goods this side of Alioth.

It was only so 'important' because of dev incompetence. Nothing more.
 
In a sanely designed game, destroying a market would've had no effect on the market orders, and replacing it and getting it functional again would take maybe 5 to 10 minutes at most.
 
Instead, the devs decided to tie the market orders to the existence of certain elements in the market, and we have this snafu.

As simple as that and anyone who has tried to dig out a basement while keeping the earth flush to their walls knows why we need it. 

When we open the market / crafting window, the search field should be automatically selected so that one can start writing immediately.

Hello,
 
So I have ran into the problem that my current static core isn't big enough anymore, and found out that you can't upgrade the core without destroying the whole building.
 
Why not make it possible to upgrade the static core in some way, so you can have the bigger building radius that comes with it?

The ways to get this to work (feel free to add them):
 
-A option in the right click to upgrade the core, this would replace the core with the bigger core
-Making so you can link more then 1 core into 1 building area, this wold work so you can expand the build space with more cores, while still needing the cores themselfs
-A option to parent/child the cores giving the main core a bigger building area.
-Letting us destroy a core and some sort of timer starts where you can place down another static core before the building is destroyed/availible for salvage
 
Let me know what you think.
 
Grey

When I first read about lua I thought there would be a way to setup a production setup that would be controlled by the end machine if you coded it properly IE want a Space Engine M que it then the lua would go thru the other machines in the line and change their recipes to the needed product and hit start. Was very sad when this was not a thing

Just like the mining tool is able to deposit soil by using the alternative mode (alt+lmb), the flatten tool should have a similar functionality.
 
Anyone who has leveled an entire tile with a significant height difference knows just how time consuming it can be. Right now you need to mine out or flatten all of the high spots, then you need to fill in low spots then go back over them with the flatten tool. All of that is much easier said than done and it has you going over the same area numerous times. 
 
Let the flatten tool deposit soil by holding the alt key while setting the height then if you hover over a tile where there isn't enough voxels to lift up to surface height, it can fill in using soil voxels up to a maximum distance below the selected height. 

My suspicion is simply that there is NOTHING else out there that brings the other elements to the table like this game does.  The market is pretty bereft of offerings and I found myself mostly playing Space Engineers had this not come along and even that was starting to get stale no matter how many mods I threw on the pile.
 
if all the other facets of the game were terrible, such as ship building, industries, talent tree design, voxel deformation based terraforming etc..if all of those were subpar aspects of gameplay but PVP combat was exceptional, then I think the only people even chatting in this forum would be hard core pvp folks.
 
The game offers enough elements that as a package cant' be found anywhere else that it is going to draw a diverse crowd.
 
I'm personally on the fence and reserving judgement until there are more specifics on actual mechanics, inter-safe zone travel etc.  I've done my share of 3d newtonian based physics pvp in a very old game called Jumpgate, but I'm just getting too old for it anymore.  With that said, I understand the appeal.

My suspicion is simply that there is NOTHING else out there that brings the other elements to the table like this game does.  The market is pretty bereft of offerings and I found myself mostly playing Space Engineers had this not come along and even that was starting to get stale no matter how many mods I threw on the pile.
 
if all the other facets of the game were terrible, such as ship building, industries, talent tree design, voxel deformation based terraforming etc..if all of those were subpar aspects of gameplay but PVP combat was exceptional, then I think the only people even chatting in this forum would be hard core pvp folks.
 
The game offers enough elements that as a package cant' be found anywhere else that it is going to draw a diverse crowd.
 
I'm personally on the fence and reserving judgement until there are more specifics on actual mechanics, inter-safe zone travel etc.  I've done my share of 3d newtonian based physics pvp in a very old game called Jumpgate, but I'm just getting too old for it anymore.  With that said, I understand the appeal.

one day there will be a thread about pvp where the OP wont judge pvpers negatively.
 
- still waiting after all these years

would be really nice to see how close to full our inventory is without having to open it. Maybe it can be attached to the Flashlight/mining lamp so it appears on the screen with the azimuth and altimeter gauges that already appear, to avoid clutter. Just a little yellow bar on the bottom of the screen

As has been mentioned many times, ore on planets is currently finite, and quite frankly we are depleting it rapidly on the more populated worlds. Without some method of regenerating the ores on planets we will soon run out. That leaves us with the yet to be implemented space mining as our only hope of acquiring the resources we need.
 
But what if we could have Ore Regeneration on the planets without actually wiping them? Here are a couple ideas that could accomplish this.
 
IDEA 1: Regenerate Unclaimed Hexes
 
Any Unclaimed Hex will regenerate over time. Any dynamic constructs on the hex at the time it regenerates is moved to the new surface which may be different than the old surface but should be meshed with all adjacent hexes as best as the system can. (And static constructs can't be built on unclaimed hexes, so we don't have to worry about those.)
 
On Guarded planets there may need to be additional rules made for how close different players/orgs can claim hexes to each other, but on "normal" worlds where PVP is allowed the players make the rules, by force if necessary. Planetary Wars will be fought over control of hexes to keep them unclaimed so they can regenerate their ores.
 
IDEA 2: Vertical Regeneration
 
Over time holes underground will fill in up to the lowest point on an existing static construct on the hex. In un-mined/filled in portions of the hex there is a chance for ore generation over time. The chances should be based on how far above the "layer" the ore is spawning in has been re-filled and how rare the ore is, and how much ore is nearby. (Optional: players manually back-filling holes speed up the vertical regeneration.)