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tarwich

6
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3
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A member registered Jun 03, 2019

Recent community posts

Congratulations! Another release. This is wonderful. Is there still no ability to trash things? Gets frustrating not being able to clean. Would love to see that in the future!

Good luck, buddy! I'm hoping the best for you.

Autosave?!

I spent an hour decorating my base and playing with different ideas, but I had to step away and when I came back, I had died in a raid and my base reset back to when I last came back from exploring.

Later I went on a base-decorating kick over a few days and forgot to leave town again. A raid came in and I got killed because I was stupid and my base reset to several days ago. 


Can you please  do something to mitigate this? I realize I could probably go exploring to mitigate this, but I keep forgetting. Could we have the base save at dawn or something?

I have sooo many opinions about this! Firstly let me say thank you for your work and for continuing this great game!


Survival

I typically don't want to play a survival game, but rather an adventure game. I tolerate survival if the adventure is good. So mix the two. If I'm sitting at home, I should be safe, and be able to build with stone, wood, and perhaps stucco. However, if I want gold, marble, or other exotic materials I'm going to have to brave the outdoors, which get more dangerous the further I adventure. When I get 5 tiles away from the base and have the exhilaration of adventure, I'm equally gripped with the fear of losing everything.

Inventory

I've never heard anyone say they love spending time sorting and managing their inventory. However there is still a dynamic it can have in a game. Instead of making inventory management compulsory, make it a risk. Everything I have on my person is left on my corpse when I die, and I'll have to adventure back out there to get it back. Therefore if I have lots of loot on my back, I'm going to be motivated to drop off at base and adventure out again.

Farming

Superfluous Sand hits farming versus automation really well. I don't want a Factorio. However, when I play Minecraft, I tend to try to automate everything. Why? Because after beating down 500 trees, it gets a little tiring. Also since I never liked the food mechanic, automating a farm has high value. However, I play for adventure (which Minecraft does poorly) and base building, which Minecraft knocks out of the park. I don't play Minecraft because I enjoy sorting inventory, eating food, or living in fear of creepers in a well-lit town full of life.

Adventure

This part IMO is the hardest. Adventure isn't about exploring N+1 procedurally-generated caves. It's about CONTENT. It's about going one tile further into the danger, hoping to see some new enemy, material, or story that I've never seen before. Recoloring a sprite doesn't make it new, either. It should have its own AI, and its own backstory. And above all, when I finally kill them I really hope to see new loot. As you see, adventure is all about content. 

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is the only reason that some games were ever successful, because the content was very limited. It seems like multiplayer can boost your game's publicity, but also drastically raises the difficulty curve of maintenance. I would recommend the Farmville approach. Make one of the tiles public. Anyone can visit my home tile, and interact with it. Their interactions are private (they can't see me and I can't see them). Their interactions cannot negatively affect my town (they can't take my things). However, they can drop off letters or goods if they want to help me out. Now my aspiration is to have a base that other people will see and drool over. 

Base Defense

Base defense is like industrialization. It's not fun in its own right, but when it overcomes a massive nuisance, it can be very satisfying. If my base gets attacked and destroyed by mobs every night, and I finally make an automated-turret perimeter that ends the annoyance once and for all, it's like finally getting rid of an itch or pain after hours of trying. The itch or pain wasn't the positive interaction. My recommendation would be to keep the home tile safe, but allow the player to own an additional home tile outside of the base. Perhaps to extend adventures a little further by not running out of gas. However, the forward-deployed base runs major risk of attack, and setting up a perimeter, while not compulsory, can have a major advantage. 

[shift] now constrains the Y movement and [control] now constrains the X movement while building

Woohoo! I've been using MouseKeys in Windows to help me align things in this game. Hopefully this helps me make a grove of trees without crying.

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This is an awesome game so far. It's very fun to play and reminds me of Autonauts without feeling like the sole purpose is automation. I love a game where you can do it all yourself if you prefer, but automation helps a ton. Another nice thing is that the further you go from the base, the more risky life gets for you.

I love the idea of having humans do work in the base. Currently I build a huge group of humans and then mow down the wasteland, but in the base they just stand around or get in the way, so having them work is a great idea.

I would have robots be faster and have a boost to efficiency. For example, if 1 harvest is 1-2 corn for a human, it would be 1-4 for a robot, incentivising you to move up the tech tree to robotomation, which would free up those humans to do another task.

I get more irritated than I should at how hard it is to come up with metals, so building a mine and sending humans in could be cool, and possibly have side-effects such as more thirst, or even having beasts come from the mine and attack the base. I don't think robots should mine (perhaps they should), however, having a refinery where the ores are processed into metals could be automated with an efficiency boost by bots.

Since you're legitimately interested in listening to people, I thought I'd share my two cents. Love your work, man! 


PS: When I play games, I don't like to waste time. Sometimes my time is very precious. You have addressed that with the faster version of the game, but have you thought about teleportation? One of the first mods I look for is a teleportation mod so I can play faster and do cool things. I don't mean teleportation between cities. I am referring to a maneuverability mod where you can blink across the screen (for example, if you just want to exit the map). I'd love it if that were to appear in the game :-p.