Could re-use Shift-F as loot-all when an inventory is already open. Or even make it work with boxes to grab everything without opening them. That would be super convenient. One thing I'm really missing from ... another game ... is Ctrl-Click to transfer *every stack of a particular type*, like all stacks of iron ingots for example. That game has a really nice consistent treatment of hotkeys so you can even do stuff with right click to transfer half: Shift-RMB = half a stack fast transferred, Ctrl-RMB = half the stacks are transferred.
Drilling is monotonous, specifically when you don't have a jetpack yet. When you are digging to a resource you have to create a long sloped tunnel to be able to get out. It takes forever and it is extremely hard to make it slope. I often run out of fuel and have to cheat to continue. The way drilling removes material with the long pauses is excruciatingly grindy. Showing total carried fuel would be nice too. In other games I could bypass by building a new temp grid wherever I want. Perhaps allow making a Base without a core , but with a block cap that prevents adding more blocks until you add a core?
Crossing these huge planets. No "auto forward" control makes flying SVs or CVs across planets to be an absolute chore.
This could also be addressed with planetary waypoints being visible from orbit so you could take advantage of the faster travel via space.
That's great, for when you know where you're going, but when you're just traveling around and around to search for the same number of ores on a planey 4x the size... However, planet waypoints being visible from space would be awesome. Land my CV at my home first try. I've got a tiny space station I park it at the moment while I go down in an SV because flying CV in gravity is so expensive.
For me its repairing a CV, since i have to do it by hand now. I always live on my ship with a small repair starbase but thats not possible anymore. - the rapair takes way to long, doing it by hand is much more annoying but sooo much faster - you have to remove all docked ships, thats takes a lot of time aswell if you have more than 2-3 ships docked - you can't even remove HVs in space, since they are immune to gravity generators for some reason - all plants die (also because it takes so long) Repairing was so good before 8.0... Just landing, turn off for some seconds and done. Now its like a 30-60 minutes thing, not counting the actual repair time
Early game a8.1: HV and spiders combined with too short despawn time. When to collect loot, they often turn up and start rocking the HV. Often when then killed them, previous kills despawn. Also they have respawned close by, so have to deal with several rounds.
Mining, hands down. I would honestly not at all be opposed to giving us at least one autominer from the start, and the ability to craft more early on, just to ease this burden. I literally spend at least 75% of my early game time just mining, staring at the wall of a cave, for hours. This is not an exciting way to spend my Sunday evenings.
Mining speed should be a difficulty setting. I've heard some people really enjoy mining as a relaxing grind (say, unwinding after work), but while I can sort of appreciate that, I end up regretting the time lost rather than valuing the experience after the fact. Even better would be an optional quick-mining mechanic/setting/device that simultaneously obtained resources faster but risked triggering an event of some kind, like a critter/patrol/drone appearance.
Damn, they could just make the deposits easier to reach instead of forcing players to dig halfway through the planet... On many aspects, Eleon only made things more difficult. I'm still struggling to find where "fun" is taken into account in all these overly complicated mechanics that require pages of text just to get started. I feel like financing research on a dying simulator where the developers always try to avoid "fun" at all costs...
We could also use a better progression in mining speeds between different tools. The difference between the survival tool and T1 drill for mining rocks is excellent (almost 3x increase), but that kind of progression doesn't occur between the T2 and T1 drills. For comparison, Minecraft has a very nice progression in the mining speed of its picks, with the option for enchanting them to be even faster.
Agree instead of having deposits 50m below the ground how about have them start 5m below the ground. Still have to voxel mine etc, just doesnt require as big of a hole before reaching the thing you are trying to get to
I don't know how complicated this would be to to implement, but maybe deposits up in the mountain, which are constantly being eroded, could be accessible right on the surface, whereas those down in the valleys, like the grasslands and forests, could be located deeper, since they have been buried with sediments for so long. It would just be another setting that the game would have to load when generating the planet, having certain depths associated with certain biomes, but I think it could be done. Another thing that is maybe a little more out there, would be to have different grades of ore, so certain ones are more pure than others, or perhaps there could even be hybrid ore deposits, where it is iron/silicon for example. It would be nice to have to hunt around for the most pure ore deposits, and also to be able to mine more than one mineral at once.
Since "holes" and "terrain deformation" inflate the savegame files and hamper performance, and knowing the developers will be asked to find solutions for performance issues, this raises some questions. Other solutions have been proposed to the mining system, and we saw how the developers went back and forth from one system to another, completely ignoring points brought forward by players. There could be solutions to garantee resources for new players at anytime, to limit terrain deformation, and to make resources available everywhere without resorting to a zillion deco items like trees and rocks.
The planetary waypoints from space is a feature I wish for. Exploring these bigger planets was a real chore before the FOW came in to at least tell you where you'd been before, nvm having the radar to help find stuff. It's only the first real iteration of "big planets" so I hope there will be some tweaks to deal with the effect on general gameplay. Even the speed limit (done for performance reasons, I believe) becomes a real PITA on these larger planets. Larger planets made exploration and discovery a whole load more fun, with more to do and find, but directed actions, like going from A -> B or hunting for something specific became a lot more tedious.
Personally, I'd like to see substantially deeper resource veins, but unless planetary playfields are expanded vertically more (so that there's more like a kilometer or two of depth underground), I feel like this probably won't happen. Which is a shame because terrain deformation is one of the main things that first drew me to Empyrion ("Minecraft in space" was my first thought, and the reason I first fell in love with the game). One way that's been suggested in the past to solve the late-game resource issue is to have autominers (both the current terrain-placeables and future BA versions) target virtual resources, in a similar fashion to the way KSP does drilling for ore (scan the planet with a sensor array to see ore distributions, and drill where concentrations are high enough). Potentially, the player could even build their first very basic autominer using the portable constructor, but it would have a very low output rate, and/or could only utilize concentrations above a certain threshold. Or, the survival tool could have a "subsurface mining" mode that would operate on the aforementioned virtual resource concentrations, and would periodically give (in random order) individual pieces of the the three basic ores; alternatively, it could simply give crushed stone, and then the player would use the survival constructor to filter ore out of it. By adding this functionality to the survival tool, you could assure that players could almost always get the resources to build a portable constructor and T1 drill without having to break surface rocks.
I haven't been testing A8 yet. But reading all this i should. So i hope all those examples for mining and repair to blueprints are just exaggerations. I mean, i like to build a bit bigger and more fancy (compared to the standard PvP brick), so both mining and repairs play a big role when playing survival with my creations. So i hope some things do actually change IF they are that bad: - finding good ore spacees should be the interesting part in mining not the "click LMB for hours on end" part. Maybe make discovering more aof an adventure and taking time than the actual mining itself. actual veins of ore (i know, planned) reaching from the surface way deep into a planets core. A few Ores and a few more you can get with realtive ease by digging down a few meters. But to actually get the whole vein there could be difficulties to overcome: deeper rock is harder so it takes longer and more fuel/energy the deeper you get and you also need heat protection the deeper you go. You know.... make it more dynamic. Easy to start hard to finish. And not hard to find, hard to take out from start to finish. -repairing should work when away from base (which ist seems to be planned). Repairing and replacing blocks on a ship you have build for hours before block by block by hand is as exciting as watching a automatic block do it block by block while you just sit there and wait. Maybe have a way to speed up the process, adding extra cost in double tripple materials needed or excessive Power consumption. Every benefit needs to come with a cost in the end. I mean, it almost sounds as the game punishes players that build bigger and with much more details. I think it is not intended but a side effect of a linear way of progressing in things in this game. A more dynamic way of handling stuff would be cool. Possibilities to speed things up with overheating machinery and tools, more loss of durability and intense in resources. Example for repairs: repair a CV class 10 in 10 min.... just costs you five times the mats and activates a cool down of an hour for the repair bay. Side effect: making more repair bays actually makes sense without being overpowered. Repairbays could have exponential power use too if you have more than one. For ex: one repairblock (RB) = normal power use, 2 RB = 2,5 times the power use, 3 RB = 4,5 times the power use and so forth. Example mining: find a ore vein and take the first few meters quick and easy with minimum effort. Dig down a few dozen meters, drilling gets slower and takes more fuel/energy, dig down hundreds of meters you need heat protection and your fuel usage is doubled (tripled), getting closer to the bed rock => not possible without a vessel and mining lasers (rock to hard for mechanical). That way you could even put a few rare and valuable resources on basic planets => deeper down and only reachable for people putting the effort and work into it.