Just change your drill setting to rocks and you're good to go. You can get the basic resource ores without excessive wandering. Also promethium - but its a different kind of rock that is bit hardened to find.
I found all of 3 rocks on my last Masperon start after exploring about a quarter of the planet. If rocks are to be any more useful than deposits, there need to be quite a few more of them.
There's hard and then there's impossible. Basically, if you don't find a civilian POI on Masperon, you're hosed immediately. Even if you do, chances are it doesn't have grow plots or corn (and even if it has corn, you have no fiber source anyway), so you basically have to resign yourself to starving to death repeatedly. Then the PV shows up and massacres you while you wave your T1 pistol with two bullets at it. Perhaps you're a better player than I am, but I haven't managed to find a viable strategy for Masperon besides trying a different seed.
@geostar1024 Well, im definitely not saying that I'm a better player, no. Im just saying that the Masperon start should be the hardest start the game offers. Matter of fact, I haven't even done Masperon start yet. Just Ningues which is very scarce on resources. I guess Masperon is hard food wise then? There might be some help coming regards to that And yeah, probably my choice of wording was pretty bad. Of course there should be a way to survive - just so that there wouldn't be abundance of resources right from the get go.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate understatement . No seaweed or any other harvestable food plants and very very limited fauna in my experience. As you need at least 1 clip per slime, you burn through your initial pistol ammo at an alarming rate just from hunting, to say nothing of the drones that require 2-3 clips at least (assuming you can get nose-shots). It's just pretty clear that, at present, Masperon is not viable on hard unless the RNG is extremely kind. Well now I'm very intrigued!
I've completed Akua on normal difficulty. Here's some feedback on the Alien POIs: Fortress - A classic. Its small, simple, and makes a good starter base. Its a good early objective. Outpost - A decent POI that got an update for 6a. The spawners behind the trapdoors do not work. I can't tell if its because the spawners are mounted on the wall or if there's just not enough room for the bad guys to stand. I suspect it is because the spawners are on the wall. Also, those two spawners need to be placed with care. There are already two spawners in the room with the Core. If the two trapdoor spawners managed to spawn stuff into the room, you'll have too much concentrated fire for a beginner, unless they liberally apply rockets. I think you'd be encouraging folks to drive an HV into the POI. Comm Center - I'm of mixed feeling about this one. I like the layout overall, but I don't like the trapdoor and secret room behind the core. The trapdoor doesn't make any sense to me. Who puts a trap in their kitchen? "Where's Mom? Oh, she's dead in the pit. Make your own dinner." The room behind the core also makes no sense. There's no egress. How are the bad guys supposed to get out? Do the other bad guys just lower down food through the trapdoor? Finally, the backroom and trapdoor are pointless. Once I see the core, 5 explosive charges on the grate and the POI is done. I found the backroom while taking the base apart. Finally, the hidden red loot container seems too much for this POI. Drone Base - I really like the new drone base, specially the factory and the use of upper and lower levels. Sentry guns are well placed, but they are too numerous. Each one is worth about 1/3 to 1/2 my health (Med armor with one armor boost.) Without my CV parked just outside to run back to for healing, I would have built an HV specifically do brute force this base or dug down and blown my way through a low-level wall to get to either fuel, generator, or core. One quibble with the design is the elevator to the lower level. I understand the desire to make for a long path and a series of encounters, but having to go to the top of a skyscraper to go to the basement suggests the alien architect was insane.
Masperon: it's ultra for a reason. As far as I can tell, the only way to survive is to make a beeline for the admin trading station, ideally picking up some magnesium on your way, and avoiding both drones and patrol vessels. Once there, you can teleport to the station in orbit, which has two space orange and akua fruit trees growing in the arboretum as well as oxygen stations. The surface installation has a fridge for storing excess food. So, you can live out your days in relative comfort, subsisting on fruit and breathing free O2. So, I guess this does make Masperon possible, it's just going to be a slow slog picking oranges and berries for XP while wandering around the surface in short stints to find resource nodes. EDIT: time for some numbers. Each harvest gets you 8 of each food, for a total of 740 food points. You lose 2 food points and 2 oxygen per 10 seconds, so the net food points from each harvest is about 380. Your oxygen supply is good for about 70 minutes, so if you take 4 akua berries with you, you can spend half an hour exploring outside before you need to make your way back and fill up on food and oxygen again. EDIT2: Nope, this doesn't work, because the plants in the station's arboretum don't regrow (no grow light). So you're still stuck with a limited food supply. The only way to progress may just be to die and respawn at the admin station repeatedly. Sigh. EDIT3: Seaweed exists! (now if only you could make fiber out of it . . .)
Last time I started Masperon I found it to be as easy as all the other planets, as you can simply die in this game to refill your food bar. I haven't tried it with a 'no death' rule though. However I had the same issues on Omicron at first, but then I build a new minimalistic hover (when they removed the bike) that you can build with the starter resources and suddenly everything was super easy and I didn't die a single time. I assume Masperon will be equally easy with such a hover, as you no longer have to deal with enemies, have O² easily available and the most important: you cut travel time significantly.
If you do the hard start on Masperon, you don't have any starting resources, so no minimalist HV :-(. If you can get to a deep lake where there's seaweed, you're good to go for quite a while, as there's also promethium stones under there. The only remaining issue is how to get into a minimalist HV or SV (an SV with only two thrusters turns out to be very slightly less expensive than a minimalist HV with one thruster and one hover engine; chances are good you can get to level 7 just by collecting seaweed and raw pentaxid); probably the most straightforward way would be to get lucky encountering a regular plasma drone that drops a load of components (which, in combination with the core you start with, should be enough for a minimalist ship). Conceivably, this all could be done without dying, as long as you don't get unlucky with your initial landing location as compared to a body of deep water, and the PV doesn't show up too soon.
Drones are fairly easy to defeat if you run underneath them as they fail to target you there. Having enough ammunition is however a different issue... I would assume that turning stones into minerals would give you enough for the HV/SV, but then I heard there are less stones on Masperon. Maybe I just give it a try.
As of 6.2.0 1109 Oh cool. I gave it a quick try... I wonder if the landing pod could be pointed toward the Engine Compartment. At start, its 90 degrees to the right and a new player doesn't have a lot of time to understand what is happening and find it. The game starts around 9500 according to what I can see with debug on. If it started at 6500 the player would see more daylight. I could see where a scenario designer might want to set the time and the rate at which time passes. Mission Brief - That's a lot of text. Can time stop until they choose either Skip or Continue? Why is Skip a choice? They chose to enter the tutorial. If it needs to be there, no problem. Chat Messages go away too fast for tutorial instructions. Food - You give them a variety of things (cool), but it includes Corn Dogs which can give them food poisoning. Or is food poisoning disabled in some way? Ore deposits - I wonder if they can be moved closer to the starting base and be put right at the surface? If not, no biggie. Mining - Do they have to mine all of the resources? I mention it because there are enough of them that they'll probably do them out of the order listed. Yet there's a message attached to Promethium (Back to Base) that assumes they did them in order. Instead, perhaps they could mine iron and then you give them the rest? Hunting - Talon Guardians count as animals. (They were passing buy; it was convenient.) Maybe Talon Guardians shouldn't be present in the scenario? I mean, shooting one could get the player killed. I could see where a scenario designer might want to specify the critters that spawn. Registry - I don't understand this step. What was it about? What did I accomplish. Overall - I like where this is going. I think things that improve the tutorial will also improve other scenarios. Rock on.
Yeah, it's the ammo that gets you. . . I used ~350 rounds from the T1 pistol to take down a Large drone (one that uses the troop transport model). . . . Good luck finding enough regular stones for that (the spawn rate is very very low). There are a ton of promethium stones underwater, but obviously they only give promethium. Even when you manage to bootstrap yourself to an HV or SV, you're still out of luck in terms of farming because there's no fiber to be found.
Sooo I did the 'no death' challenge on Masperon yesterday and succeeded on the first try. ^^ I played with all settings on hard except XP which was set to fast. Masperon is definitely the hardest difficulty to start, however mostly because resources are rare, not because the content is actually challenging. I scavenged the structure you seem to start in now but got barely anything to work with, so my usual strategy of building a minimalistic hover didn't work as I lacked the resources. Luckily the oceans of Masperon are full of seaweed, which you need to harvest for XP anyways, so I had enough food basically from the start. O² was another issue however, as I could not build a vehicle with O² support, and my initial plan to just put one on the starter structure was thwarted by the patrol ship. Which really works well at making the player feel in danger btw. So I had to get closer to the administration station where you can get free O² and heals. At this point I realized how stupid it is to have NPCs that sell stuff, if you cannot make any money by selling things to them. And when you actually have gold you no longer need anything from them. Anyways: from there my new plan was to build a SV to build the base in space, out of reach of Mr Patrol Ship, and to reach the moon for further resources. Technically you wouldn't need a SV for that, because you can just teleport to space and even reach the moon in the suit if you wanted to, but I tried to play it somewhat realistic. Drones turned out to be close to no threat, as they take so long to target you, that you can simply rush in and out with the bike without ever getting hit. A slightly faster reaction time for them would be good as currently they don't feel dangerous at all. I managed to grab some loot at a nearby POI that was undefended (except for the drone), but all ore spots were guarded by a heavy drone, which you cannot realistically take down with hand guns at the beginning. So I scavenged what I could get, put it into the blueprint, spend half an hour swimming at the bottom of the ocean for XP and finally built the SV. Searching the orbit for asteroids is very painful, as they are sparse and could be anywhere, but then it is ultra hard difficulty, so it's ok. I found one iron asteroid before I gave up and continued to the moon. Down there I immediately found two unguarded POIs which I looted so I could finally start producing the base. Since I had enough neodym from scrapping I immediately built a minimalistic CV instead of a base, which I parked in front of Masperon in orbit. I upgraded my SV with miniguns and some ammo, then went back down to Masperon to kill some drones. From that point on things got a lot easier as I had food and O² and could take out the drones for further resources. I found a crashed capital ship, which turned out to have a warp drive and warp tank, so I plugged in a core and looted it. The ship also had many large thrusters, which gave me a over 100 CPUs in total, so my neodym problems were solved as well. As much as I like the buried CV as a structure, the amount of thrusters really killed the "low on resources" issue and were a huge shortcut. Probably that POI should have less thrusters. At this point I plugged the warp drive into my CV and jumped to Akua, so I essentially won the challenge, as I could now progress in easy mode. Overall the experience was good, surviving was challenging yet not too tedious, especially the lack of predators was very welcome as those are simply an annoyance at the start. The biggest issue was the stupidity of the AI for me, as it is so easy to outsmart them. I.E. you can at any time just jump into a pond and dig down 1 block and there you are invincible (also a problem in PvP btw) and drones immediately loose aggro. Also taking out the core of a base will immediately deaggro the patrol ship, despite the entire base still standing. That ship really should continue firing on the rest of the base. The orbit of Masperon is as well too easy, a few more structures and/or drones/ships would be appropriate here. As above there should also be no POIs with so many resources to scrap as the buried capital. The POI is in general a great idea, but if one POI gives you all the resources you ever need, things become too easy. The big issue with Masperon as a starting planet (especially for multiplayer) is that there is no reward for starting in ultra hard mode. You are a bit closer to the top tier ores, but that's it. And that is effectively no real advantage, as a player who starts on Akua simply needs to harvest some pentaxid to get there.
Yeah, finding the crashed CV was rather vital to my bid to leave the system as well (since I couldn't seem to find any sathium asteroids in orbit). Basically, it seems that hiding under water and getting ridiculous amounts of XP is the way to progress; I had as many deaths as I did in large part because I wasn't aware of the presence of seaweed at first, and was trying to make sallies out from the Admin building to nearby resource nodes (most of them happened while I was climbing steep slopes with enemies right behind me; bad idea now, as it turns out (enemies used to be slower at going up slopes)). Anyway, like every other start, once you have an SV, you're basically home-free, as you can return to an ocean any time to stock up on seaweed and xp (and oxygen). Seems like we need a lot more in the way of progression (besides the "tech tree").
I absolutely agree. Currently the only progression in this game (beside the annoying XP restrictions) is base ores -> Sathium/Neodym -> Zasc/Erest. Once you have those the game is basically "won" and you essentially enter creative mode. At this point the (non-creative) endgame consists of farming POIs - which is not that much fun as the AI is annoyingly stupid - or PvP (in MP) - which is not fun because it is severely imbalanced/broken.
Agreed. Once I conquer my starting planet, I start to lose momentum. Sometimes I never even warp to other planets. When you get enough gear, looting more gear doesn't provide motivation. Eventually, there's no point in looting a POI as its more fun to just obliterate it with big weapons. Can scenarios break this pattern? I can see two kinds of scenarios. One where the scenario defines its environment. You play it to a conclusion, then start a new game. The other possibility being that a scenario is really just a mission that you acquire some place, like the bar at a Trading Station. You would do many missions during the course of a game, perhaps perpetually. Exploration might provide some interesting options too. I have spent thousands of hours exploring the same Minecraft world with my friends. Part of the appeal of Space Engineers (sorry, I invoked SE) is endless space. Of course, SE's space is empty, so I don't play it much. Anyways, Empyrion folks occasionally mention procedurally generating a universe.
I'm still of the opinion that some kind of leveling/skill tree system would be useful. I don't think that acquired resources should be the ultimate measure of a player's level. As long as there's more to do than in NMS . . .
I think ultimately it should be a combination of both, but the difficult part will be to implement systems that are neither boring nor feel too tedious. Of course there is always some grind, but in a perfect game even the grind is fun. Currently the XP system does not advance me, it prevents me from advancing initially till I am through with it, and that feels stupid. I have the blueprints, I have the resources, I just can't build it until I fire 782 more bullets into irrelevant enemies. If instead I get all the tech from the start (just not the resources) and then the XP make me or my tech better, that would actually feel like an advancement without the feeling of being gated by an invisible wall. Resource gating wouldn't work with just 3 tiers of resources that are so easy to get. I like the way Avorion handle this (although they do have several other flaws): 8 tiers of resources, you can build all essential things with the first tier and get 1 new feature with every tier. Also the higher the tier the more powerful the items I build from those resources become. Just copying that would totally not work in this game, but the general idea behind it is what I like: I am not annoyed by the game, because I can build my ship mostly as I want right from the start. But then still with every resource tier I feel rewarded, because my ship gets noticeably stronger and it doesn't feel repetitive, because I also get something new with every tier that makes me want to redesign/optimize my ship. I imagine it like this: with T2 ores (Sathium) I can build my first warp drive that works as we all know it. T3 allows me to upgrade the warp-drive to have a slightly higher jump range (30 AU, which could also unlock planets I wasn't able to visit before). T4 allows me to either build a warp drive with even higher range (like 50 AU) but the drive consumes more fuel, or one that consumes only 50% fuel but does not increase range any further. This would for once make me feel happy about the new ores, and still doesn't become boring, because higher tiers are not just plain upgrades, but a choice for the player.
Nice improvements from 5.x to 6.x, just wanted to say nice job. Love the fixed and random POI's in YAML's and have now made some interesting play fields due to that fact. Love the regeneration, will make managing a server much easier now and a lot more fun for all playing. Very nice start options for player gear, start location and I now have a Space Station as a starting playfield, very difficult but fun to start there. - Suggestion, is it possible to make T2 drills level 5, it really sucks grinding to level 7 with a T1 in space (I just give the player a T2 to start now so they don't have to go through that, but they have to make there own drill charges). - O2 was a problem in space but used a couple of support stations with a low respawn time to compensate. The Deco that gives O2 can't be accessed from the control panel and can't be set public. (Can't scavenge O2 on Admin structures) Thank you for fixing custom freighters, was nice to see Shadow Vessels and them firing again, Klingons are also pretty kewl guarding incoming spawn points in Kronos. http://imgur.com/cqVFg5W I do have a question about the starting graphic ... Meaning when you first log onto a server, you are given a selection of starting planets with picture and description. - when I use 'preview_empty.png' in the playfield folder on my test server with solo play it loads that graphic just fine in the selection menu. But when it's put on a live server, it seems to default to the Terrrain value in the YAML, meaning, temperate will always show that Akua graphic. Is this hard coded for the server??? http://imgur.com/z80VDSp This is a temperate planet and it looks nothing like Akua, how can I load this for the server selection menu? Anyways nice improvements.
