Wolfram

@NQ-Sesch when will I be able to wishlist it on my Steam? It keeps saying I'm region blocked (South America/Brazil). Just let me wishlist it!

Are you insane? The middle column is good only for 120 minutes, which then goes to the completely public list of asteroids. Each asteroid takes like 40 minutes or more just to reach the area and be scanned. Well that's the whole point of risk-reward. If a player is spending 2 hours scanning and going to an asteroid, why should their interceptors be allowed to magically know where they are? The moment they get ganked by some random player who waited until a middle-column asteroid to show up they also lost their 2 hours of work, if not more, because they were mining.

The fact DU makes it so easy for anyone to track someone else is why so many don't go out and risk out in PVP zone. NQ doesn't seem to understand that, they keep trying to make encounters an easy thing to see if players get involved in PVP without realizing this will only end up with the PVP space being a place exclusive to PVP players, with nobody else wanting to get into there with risk of being camped/scanned/whatever. I'm not even bothered if some PVP org decides to claim one asteroid as theirs or camp it waiting for players to come there and gank them, that should be valid gameplay, same as if someone wants to patrol the areas around asteroids or hunt down someone carrying good cargo, but like everything else PVP and piracy should need active work from players and not only consist of someone looking at the DSAT middle column and saying "ok boys, let's go to this asteroid because someone just landed there". Why should I, as a miner, be forced to spend 40 minutes slow boating to some asteroid plus a extra minutes trying to pin-point its location and even more extracting its contents, which takes some time for T3+, while on the other side some random kid can just automatically know I set foot there and come directly at me to take my stuff, without barely any work on his part other than camping the DSAT screen? DU needs more PVP interactions? Definitely. But pushing players into it hoping they will start participating more will just end up with the opposite effect.

Honestly, I didn't really like the honeycomb changes, it took quite a bit of realism out of the building aspect, and I really liked the realism aspect of this game. I understand things need balancing and well, even though some things like the max speed cap and floor aren't very realistic, I understand they are balance etc, now HC mass should not me messed with. If you guys want to balance it, why not do it by only changing resistances and HP? We don't need any more dumbed-down systems on his game. I have to agree with @Deathknight here, I'm honestly tired of those "discussion" threads where you ask us about feedback but it goes nowhere, feels like we're just here talking with the walls or a door. I understand you all want to be more "open" and in-touch with the community, but if you're not going to do anything with feedback just don't ask for it, it's gonna save everyone's time.

Crafting in DU is quite deep and things may be quite complicated, specially on the Nanopack. It's going to be KEY on release, though, as everyone will be using theirs to rebuild civilization. A Quality of Life improvement that could come to aid on that, specially for newbies, is adding a second button near "Add to Queue" called "Queue All" or something like that. Basically it would behave just like when you queue talents, all things that are still "pending" would be added to the crafting queue in the Nanopack in the required amount of batches. I know it's not something so big deal when you can just estimate what's needed, but when crafting lots of complex stuff it starts adding up quickly. Also, another improvement that would help is having an item to craft even though the previous items on the queue are "stuck": It's a minor thing, but it's so annoying having to keep moving things around and organizing crafting when you have other things to focus on, such as mining and rebuilding civ

Having a belt being partially in the safe zone but majoritarily on the pvp zone would make lots of players "dip their toes" into the pvp aspect of the game and I'm sure it would also promote more encounters too (that is, at least if they could find each other in the belt), but I'm sure would add lots of fun to it! It's a very nice risk-reward balance. Yeah my big concern is that when new players realize how the whole asteroid mechanic works, specially the fact they are only refreshed on a single day of week, we'll see the game have quite low activity during week days but a rush of players on weekends, potentially leading to lag, since they all are going to the same places. Sure, if someone wants to spend every day of their weeks mining they would be able too... I'm not sure if NQ still checks their forums for suggestions (unless when tagged) but I really hope they take a second look at a few core mechanics before release. I really enjoy DU and would be quite a shame if players get turned away from it because a few mechanics aren't polished.

Hi @BoostHungry, There will be a free trial server available (separated from the normal world) where your friends can try out the game without spending money, but if you want them to have the real experience, the most guaranteed option here is the DAC. They should be able to activate one and use it for a single month of game time, though I doubt NQ will remove the monthly option any time soon, as they seem to have added that specifically for the release period.

Asteroid belts would make a quite nice addition to the game too, even if they kept being reset over and over or had lots of spacing in between, would be cool to scan and mine there. I'm even fine with locations being well-known or outside the safe bubble, as they would be kind of a high-reward place. The point about not showing the asteroid tier also sounds quite good, maybe replace it with something more "technical" such as estimated mass or something like that, then from that players could try inferring if there's anything useful there or not.

So, a bit of feedback here on how the current DSAT/Asteroid Mining experience works and what could be improved to make it more interesting with the upcoming release. Spawn asteroids across the week instead of just Saturday Basically, instead of spawning all asteroids over a single day of the week, you do it over a week, maybe even have a timer showing on the DSAT window showing how many days until that specific asteroid leaves the Helios system. This would "funnel" more people into the asteroids, which for any asteroids outside the safe zone would mean more chance of encounters, since almost always people would want to be the first on those "tasty" T4/T5 rocks, and also allow for those who don't have much time during the weekend (or just prefer playing during the week) to have a chance at participating on asteroid hunting too! Remove the middle-section (recently discovered) from the DSAT screen Simply make the DSAT show an asteroid as either discovered or not discovered. If you still want to give a timer before publishing then fine, but don't make that timer public. Having participated on asteroid hunts before the only two uses I noticed for it are either letting people know that something was found, so they might go for another asteroid, or for ganking and piracy. We don't need yet another camping-based PvP mechanic in the game. Allow us to retract/close the DSAT antenna when not tracking anything This is more of a cosmetic thing than functional one, but would be nice to be able to retract the antenna when the DSAT is not in use, would fit designs much better. Well, those are my 2 cents on things that could be improved, I'm sure other players might have more ideas, but thought about bringing up that discussion out of Discord into a more official place...

A bit late to the topic but since I'm here, why not give my two cents anyways. My previous and current keyboard both are Surara PRO keyboard from Redragon, they are opto-mechanical and are a pleasure to use (I spend like 12-14h daily mostly typing on my PC), the only real difference between them is the switch colors, the previous one being blue (tactile and loud) and the current one being red (linear, non-tactile, mostly quiet). At first I was a bit concerned on moving to a red switch because the blue ones felt really good to type on, but I got used really quick and it feels really nice to play flight sims on them too. That being said, Redragon is not a very well-known brand when compared to Logitech, Razer, etc, and their non-optical keyboards have a few issues because of the cheap Outemu switches they use, but if you're looking for something with a good price and that's easily found, then it might be a good option. While at the subject, if you find any optical keyboards like the ones Razer has it might be a good option, at least from my experience those switches don't really break easily as the only electronics on them are a small light and receiver mounted directly on the main board instead of the switch, with the switch consisting only of a small bit of plastic or some other material that moves and blocks the light. When I got my keyboards they included a bunch of those plastic bits in case I ever need replacement but I really didn't. Another keyboard I enjoyed quite a bit was from Akko, they do a lot of customization on their keyboards though, like lots of custom keycaps etc, might be a good idea if you're into that. I bought one of their World Tour Tokyo keyboards as a gift a while ago and they have a great feeling, the build is also quite nice and they were pre-lubed too. A bit going off-topic, but make sure you lube your keyboards too, it makes a big difference on the feel of it.

Looking forward for the new databanks (possibly new elements too?), I know those are quite important infrastructure pieces for players so will be nice to see them getting revamped into more efficient things! Bonus if we get a way to easily import/export data, even if text-based, I'm sure it will be much more straightforward than manually inputting and copying data from the Lua channel. This is something that would make a big difference too, @NQ-Ligo, having a C++ native way of encoding and decoding JSON. The existing library is quite okay, but not as efficient and sometimes will just cause a CPU overload when trying to work on larger data sets. I'm sure having a native method, similar to the ones under `library` would make a big difference here.

That's pretty much the idea, actually! It would be a much more simplified databank, that instead of having a fixed table with keys and values only stores a single large string of whatever you want (which could be JSON, CSV, Lua, logs, etc, anything that fits a string). The data could be accessed either via UI (which would be just a window with a large textarea with the contents) or could be directly copied from/pasted into similar to how we can do with Programming Boards JSON configs.

This would be an element very similar to a Data Bank, with the exception it stores a large raw string (similar to the HTML of an Screen) that both can be read and written via Lua. A few reasons this element would be useful: - Simple and clean way to export and import data with Lua - No need to dump large strings into Screen elements with the only purpose of copying that data, possibly less intensive than updating Screen elements - Can be used as an table-less alternative to a Data Bank, for those who prefer to store JSON or Lua-encoded stuff directly - Data is kept private similar to a Data Bank, only those with edit permissions could access it, maybe allow for DRM-ing of it too? - Limits can be either similar to a Data Bank or maybe closer to what we get from Screen HTML like ~50KB

I'm glad NQ is going to reward beta players with some perks at release and is pretty much killing all those beta key alts people have exploited for so long! You guys finally done a good decision!

Well I'm not an expert in this part of the game, nor with PvP, but I'd suggest still having some sort of relation with the original (pure) mass. At least in real life, a honeycomb material isn't made 100% "filled" with that material, but in a certain structure so that not a lot of material is used but yet it has some structural integrity. Considering how realistic this game has been, I think it's something we could follow too. Here's my two cents.

I want to publicly congratulate NovaQuark on keeping up with the traditions, not only of going silent, but also of ignoring player feedback and specially on the tradition of screwing things up with schematics. You're doing a great job there, shoving up this update where EVERYONE TOLD YOU it was a bad idea and yet you did it, maybe because of the greed of getting some people to buy extra alts so they can keep their mega factories around, because that's how NQ does things: as far as you pay, you can completely go around limitations. You could've done WAY BETTER by getting the long awaited power system up, that way no matter whether you had one or a hundred accounts, you would still be limited to how much power you could generate or extract from the tile and there you go, problem of mega factories completely solved. Now instead what we'll see is whale players still owning 100s of accounts just to keep their factories and some artificial numbers that I'm sure you will use to promote this dead empty game around. Very good job. Great way to kill whatever remained of this game right before release.

Every single new "limit" they add can be conveniently ignored if you pay for another account. Meanwhile good ideas that could also address their industry issues, such as adding a power usage system, simply get postponed or completely ignored. Like, really, if NQ truly didn't want mega factories they could add some pool of energy per tile, similar to how it works with mining, and have each machine use a certain amount of power. There you go, nobody would be able to easily produce every single element without having to spread production across multiple tiles and constantly move inventory and obviously everyone would be in a level field, since having an alt or not wouldn't matter much.

This is one of the most stupid broken mechanics I've seen NQ not only suggest, but apparently they also have implemented it, and knowing how arrogant they are they ABSOLUTELY won't accept that it's a stupid idea, even with tons of feedback here in the forums, but will push it into production. NQ managed to make Schematics even worse than they already were, and are in the way of making this game a completely "not-a-sandbox" game, by trying to shape their "player-driven" game and economy their own way. Please, if there's one thing I *hope* NQ employees listen is how stupid this change is going to be, specially by making consumables something you need to go and get individual Schematics for. I'm sure this will be yet another exodus of players, and this time not only I'll leave with them, but I'll make sure to spread the word on how broken this game has became and how NQ clearly doesn't care about the player base, but just about making alt-exploitable (P2W) mechanics. So much for this game...

Honestly, I think this new proposed system is even worse than the current implementation of schematics. First, because it adds yet another two chores for the players, which are: - Babysitting your character's schematic copying queue - Going through each and every machine putting down new schematics Let's get this out and clear, the whole point of industry and factories in a game is to automate things you don't want to do manually. If players were into having to babysit their stuff like this the nanopack would have way more usage than it currently does. This new feature isn't gonna add more "fun" or "engagement" to the game, but just add yet another artificial limitation. You keep promoting the game as a player-driven sandbox but also try to mold it in your own ways, meanwhile things that should be given a bit more of attention, such as the gameplay department of "things to do inside the game" is lacking, specially after you're past the grinding part and into the "let's have fun" part, and adding a chore to the game won't fix that. Like, why would someone pay a subscription of something where the only thing they have to do is to once in a while copy some schematics or calibrate miners, but have nothing actually fun to do? Also, this new approach to schematics gives alt-account players yet another benefit. By this point I honestly think it's something intentional or by design, like an attempt at bringing P2W into DU but not in a very explicit way. I know NQ is desperate about money and keeping afloat, but maybe you should look into other ways of making an income, maybe letting players buy merch or even talent points and quanta, at least you would be honest about it. Finally, if you guys want to make DU something cool and attractive, then why not look into stuff such as NPC fights or in-game events? Or lore and community quests? I mean, it's way better than adding yet another babysitting/chore "feature" that sounds worse than the already bad schematics we currently have...

I did, in the PTS event, after watching many videos of PVP. It was boring.

I'm sure this will be the #1 thing happening, specially for players who are long gone such as the ones who left in 0.23... Oh yeah, definitely. That 1.75kt thing pretty much took most of the fun I had in the past. Physically it makes no sense, but even if they wanted to do a balance pass, having such a low threshold and a speed floor is ridiculous... And Idk exactly what you meant regarding the building, but even decorative is building isn't that great when elements don't mix well with the art style of voxels. Most of functional building revolves into making ugly ships that "just work" most of the time... Many players of the current player base came from something such as EVE, so I guess they are just used to it. For a game with simulator vibes such as DU it makes absolutely no sense. I don't think targeting is complex, it's just too shallow. You click a button and hope for the game's math to favor you, there isn't any other real skill involved like there is in PVP on competing games, such as Star Citizen or even Space Engineers... They want the game to be player-driven BUT as far it follows their model/way, which is absolutely annoying. I really had lots of hopes for DU when I joined, wanted to build big things and make cool stuff, but pretty much everything is getting more and more restricted, it isn't fun anymore. I pretty much migrated to other games for now and hoping to see what they come up with release.

First things first, I don't hate DU, nor hate the devs and the GM/CMs, those always were quite friendly and open to talking with players. What I hate is how the management at NQ is going to end up killing DU in their pseudo-race to see how quickly they can release it. I don't care if the game takes ten years to release and they keep charging for it as a beta, I do care about getting a good game with nice mechanics, something actually enjoyable, in return. Like really, NQ is going to end up doing a paper release of DU with mechanics that are either half-finished or aren't even enjoyable and they are going to spend the only "hype" moment of release they can with it. This isn't the same as No Mans Sky that did a full 180 and became a cool game, it is an exception not a rule. If the game doesn't take off on release it might never make it. Anyways, here's what I feel about what NQ called the game "pillars" in their state today: - Building and scription, well I must reckon, the voxel and Lua tech on this game is amazing and you can clearly see the devs did a work of love there, building and scripting is very nice and can be a rabbit hole if you want! Kudos to the devs working on that! - Piloting is also quite good, I like the simulator feeling of DU and how we can fly in and out of space, even with autopilots it never gets old. As some people have mentioned before, it would be nice to have multi-role (rotating) engines though and maybe some passive wheels that behaved like landing gears. - Mining is now reduced to just machines spitting out infinite ore after you find your unicorn 600L flower and asteroids on the Saturdays. Yeah, because the lack of rolling release of asteroids makes them mostly useless during weeks, even the ones at PVP zone. The whole "discovered but not public" thing is also a really poor attempt at forcing players to cross each other's path instead of relying on "emergent gameplay". - Combat/PVP is a joke as it is right now. Clicking buttons to "target" and "fire at" someone and praying to the almighty RNG/talents instead of relying on actual skills might have worked for some early MMO in the 2000s, but definitely not for such a "big and innovative" game such as DU and in 2022. The issue gets even worse when atmospheric/planetary combat gets mentioned. - Trading is okay-ish, the markets definitely need an UI overhaul, but it works. Player markets are nowhere to be seen (other in Scoopy's lost inventory, that is) and I'm quite sure they won't show up for a long time. - Social, oh social. DU wants to be a metaverse and tries its best to push players to socialize, but does so by punishing those who want to play solo. There's orgs, sure, but what's the benefit of those other than maybe sharing some constructs or elements? You would assume that by having your tiles close to your org mates you would have benefits and all, but instead you actually lose the mining bonuses? Now this is inside an org. Try to scale this to something such as a nation, that was one of the things DU wanted to create (with politics, etc), why would people do that to themselves by living nearby just to create a pseudo-nation? That's not to say the really -really- bad communication system. Sometimes the only chat tabs I'll see is Lua and maybe General, and that's it. For the rest of time I won't even remember other chat channels exist. VoIP is also non-existant, which honestly makes no sense for a game who wants to be a metaverse or at least to have emphasis on social aspects. - Industry, well it's fun. It's really nice but schematics are quite meh and I've said a few times before it would work much better to have an unlockable tree system instead. But yeah, let's copy EVE on that. The whole linking concept is a bit meh, I really would like to see factories with conveyors (even if they were opaque like in SE), but I understand that limitation. Anyways, this is what I can say about the game in like the year and half I've been around. Please don't get me wrong, I really like DU and wouldn't have spent so many hours playing it if I didnt, but I also know there's a lot of room for improvement here and that releasing right now is a bit of a bad idea for everyone, except for management, but well, let's hope for the best... Also a quick extra note here regarding DACs. I think it's a really bad idea to release them without a proper way of trading them in-game. Not only scams will happen a lot, which will lead to lots of people complaining on NQ's support tickets, but also will probably be an open door to RWT to happen, more than the game already has. Please NQ, invest your time and get this stuff properly tradeable in-game before releasing it. Thanks.

Absolutely. The worse part is knowing that we can't have any more expectations other than the whole wipe/no wipe thing for release. There won't be anything new, no new features, loops or systems coming, nor changes to what we currently have, like giving a better Lua API. It's a big disappointment.

I'd rather have NQ postponing the release and focusing on actually fixing their game, making big changes to stuff such as better Lua APIs and stuff like that, instead of releasing DU in the current state. Even if they made everyone 100% sure that there would be a wipe on release or after a certain patch, but that's their last chance of actually doing anything like that before release. After releasing there's no going back and wiping or doing major changes, as it will make people much more angry than they already are.

This whole wipe discussion and lack of decision/action is just killing the little that remains of the game in its actual state. Last time I logged into DU the game felt ridiculously dead, nobody around and even the market was dead, only buy orders for T1 in District 6 were bot orders. WTF? I had plans and wanted to do some more work but I simply gave up for the time being and went to play Star Citizen instead. If NQ goes for a wipe then there's no point in doing more grind and stuff, if they don't go for a wipe it will be fine and I can just come back later anyways. I'm sure other players are in the same boat too, and being really honest, the more the world feels dead, the more chances for a wipe to happen, since after all, why would NQ keep all stuff around costing them servers if nobody's playing? I don't care anymore whether you wipe or not, just ffs make a decision and go with it, if this keeps going for another month+ I'll just unsub and put my money somewhere else. The game tech is cool and all, but the lack of management decisions make NQ look so unprofessional...