This sounds like awesome fun to me! Also I love the clever use of the logistics connection! This sounds reasonable to me. It is inevitable that a player's tactics would change as their experience grows. Unless there is an entirely different set of POI for each planet, investigating the same known thing becomes a boring grind. Crack them like an egg and take the delicious yolk! I prefer to be more haphazard in my approach to POIs so I gather/craft extra items and transport vessels knowing that there are going to be setbacks on death, but a setback that I have control over what I lose. I find the preparation fun. It is not correct that death carries inherent penalties. If the character revived immediately right where it died with all its gear, there'd be very little difficulty. The penalties for death and the gameplay difficulty are directly related. We can see this if we remove death completely: If the character didn't die at all then there'd be little to no difficulty. In fact, if death awarded a 30 second invulnerability starting right where you died then the game would be even easier! The question for a game developer is what exactly does death mean in terms of gameplay. The gameplay loop of a survival-crafting game is 1. Spend time collecting resources, 2. Spend time crafting, 3. Use crafted resources to attempt a goal, 4. Repeat. In order to create meaningful gameplay, there has to be an element of risk associated with possible failure. From the gameplay loop you can see that penalties should primarily include taking away resources (raw or crafted). I personally lose interest if death is a slap on the wrist. No Man's Sky is a great example of this. Beautiful, well executed exploration game, and I find it so boring. One step up from exploration is an arcade-style puzzle game, which I also do not find particularly fun, but I do see the appeal. I want to say that preferring those game styles are perfectly valid opinion, it's just that mine is different. It seems to me like Empyrion is in development to be a simulation-type game where a certain amount of explainable reality is required. It simply does not make sense that you would retain any of your possessions when you die. (Nor does it make any sense to be able to "respawn nearby.") This type of expectation-meeting immersion is important to me and I happen to be happy with the expected death penalties that go along with a simulation-style game. That immersion can still work, though, while returning your items since this is a sci-fi game. And they have already introduced various forms of teleporting, so I think some sort of reanimation chamber that returned your corpse with possessions could make sense for end-game-tier craftables. Maybe the HV/SV version would allow it if you're in logistics range and the CV/BA version would work for the whole playfield. Woo hoo! Adrenaline alert! Sounds like fun to me!
It's worth restating that death as a solution to survival challenges is just as much of an problem. Death should never do anything good for you, only bad. The balance is in making the player feel the sting, understand they've made a mistake, and get them right back to doing it better this time. Let's imagine a scenario; a version of Empyrion without the "Respawn Nearby" option, but with toolbar retention, gear damage, and status effect persistence through death. A players rolls up in their HV on an Unknown Helix POI. They try to jetpack up the spiral hoping the Alien Horrors won't follow. The player is very wrong. At the top, two horrors attack, infecting the player with dermal parasites and knocking them off the helix. Jetpacking prevents death, but they still suffer a broken leg. Scorpions soon finish them off. The player respawns automatically in their HV's cloning chamber. The respawn notice informs them of their cause of death, which conditions still need to be healed, and presents a list of their gear and its current durability (reduced by one fifth on death; you get to keep your gear, not infinite tries) Their HV's medical device heals their broken leg and open wounds, but the dermal parasites were advanced to endo parasites by the scorpion attack, and must be cured with anti-parasite pills, which the player lacks. The next two choices are (a) whether to go find a cure at a base with the right equipment or gather materials in the field for medicine, and (b) whether or not to first recover the corpse box and finish looting the helix. Only the contents of the tool bar were retained, after all. The player's ore detector, night vision goggles, and other items were still dropped where they died. Currently, a status effect in this situation is almost a non-issue, and the death a non-event. Upon respawning in the HV and recovering the corpse box, the player is right back where they started. They can immediately go back to what they were doing, but without the sting, there is no incentive to learn and improve. There is no problem to solve. It's not even a slap on the wrist. This is the other half of the issue. Death loops are a problem that not only needs to stop, but also needs to be replaced with something more engaging, diegetic, and "immersive", if you really must. As for an in-character excuse why'd you keep your toolbar, just retcon the cloning chamber into an emergency teleporter. If you do something fatally stupid, you get your subspace lead yanked back to your ship before you completely expire. You'd be denied the dignity of accepting the consequences of your actions, and instead simply look foolish on record. Maybe that respawn notice from the scenario should include a wry comment from IDA. Little bits of writing like that add a lot of flavor.
I don't want to focus on points where we disagree because I agree with a lot of what you say, but there's two points I think really need considering: Wouldn't this still be a death loop if the player isn't near medicine? Would it perhaps be better to keep a significant "sting" of dying with an appropriate penalty, but allow them to move on from the mistake and try something new, by removing the status effect. Otherwise one simple mistake (a bite) could be responsible for multiple deaths, and perhaps a extremely lengthy and frustrating trip to a medical or trade facility which might not be available in the immediate area? I mentioned a little earlier, I think this is extremely immersion breaking. Why don't any NPCs use this, given how useful it is? Why can't I then teleport straight back once I'm healed? Why can't I send a big bomb back instead? Why can't it grab my backpack and for that matter all the loot containers too? By instead making the clone chamber into a constructor that has to rebuild both you and a configurable set of your equipment (or at least temporary equipment), you get a reasonable penalty that's proportional to the difficulty of the POI, the penalty is already customizable via equipment costs in the config, you avoid the death loop, you get an immediately restored toolbar, and you don't have to rely on anything that breaks immersion.
It would take a good bit of tuning. The most damaging and debilitating status effects are certainly couldn't just continue. In the case of diseases and injuries, these would be reverted back to an earlier stage a player can deal with. Mutilation or alien parasites are much worse than a broken leg wound or endo parasites, for instance. On respawn, these would revert to lower-tier stages. You can deal with some blood loss or extra hunger while you figure out treatment. You might even decide empty your inventory entirely to avoid damaging it if you expect to have to respawn again. Environmental and privation hazards would similarly give the player a bit of a mulligan, but still need their consideration. The player's condition should be improved just enough to let find them food, work an O2 condenser, or escape somewhere less inclement. This is also another incentive for building well-equipped ships. Freezing/starving/suffocating to death and respawning still cold at a tent should suck compared to respawning inside the heated cabin of a warm pressurized HV with a mini-fridge. The is idea is to present status effects as yet another problem to work out a solution for. Think of those times you ran out of antidotes in an RPG dungeon and had to deal with on-step poison damage. You can decide to gut the damage and push on though, retreat back to town and restock properly, reload your save from before you entered and try again with better preparation, or look for a cure in the dungeon itself. Curing a status condition can itself be the catalyst for an unexpected side adventure. The biggest reason to let players take their toolbar with them through a respawn is to preserve their agency. By making the toolbar something they know they own and can rely on, it become another avenue of player expression. A toolbar becomes their specialization, their carefully chosen loadout. If they designed and used it well, the consequence is loot. If they did so poorly, the consequence is equipment damage. Gear durability is already a fully functional part of the game, but it's very underused. Twenty percent damage on a weapon's durabiltiy means you only get four our five chances before you have to retreat and repair. Imagine the implications of this loss on the decision to use epic weapons or a plasma cannon. The possible risks are well known to the player this way, letting them make an informed risk calculation. A cloning chamber producing gear for you on respawn seems like yet another incentive to cheese death. Players would use it gain free guns and ammunition. Even if it took raw materials, death and respawning would become a way of rapidly manufacturing weapons for sale to traders. I expect even if respawn gear was undroppable and/or even temporary to prevent this, people would probably just prefer to use the respawn gear because it's simpler and more reliable to purposefully die and get more. The ensuing respawn zerg would probably have negative implications for PVP as well as PVE. You know how players are, always taking the path of least resistance. Plus, the cloning chamber would have to be tied into the logistics system to provide materials, and that's a whole other ball of wax. As far as immersion goes, I have no comforting answer. I have no great respect for immersion as most people explain the concept. I'm more of a mind with Pratchett than Tolkien on such things. The flow of the experience is more important than the details of it. The inner workings of a laser sword mean nothing to me compared to a scene where a man throws away a galactic empire because he still loves his son. Emergent lore inconsistencies are an opportunity for cleverly-written hand-waving, not a barrier to engagement. For this, I point you at Subnautica. It's widely hailed by people who don't mostly play survival-crafting games as the best example of survival-crafting games. At one point, the devs decided they didn't want the player to have guns. Lore was written explaining how an incident happened in the past, so to avoid liability issues, you can only have a knife. It's funny writing and an interesting gameplay restriction. So whatever explanation is given as why you still have your stuff after respawning from yet-another pitfall trap (if any, Subnautica certainly didn't bother), people will accept it as long as it's charmingly written and the mechanic itself works well.
A well designed and setup CV in good hands can generally trash those very quickly with minimal shield loss. Just maybe takes a few iterations of design and approach to find the right combination for you - keep trying I would guess this is why they added the space defence thing to make them not quite such easy kills and instead demand that an attacking CV can also put up a defence to counter-attack too. At first encounter in the wrong CV and not backing off when you shields get low, then sure - you will mostly get trashed and not immediately realise how deep you are within their fields of fire until you loose half your ship in the inevitable retreat
In general: Instead of using time on "whining" about Death Loops and such, learn the game mechanics. Think ahead and anticipate you might not be good enough yet or a bug/issue occur. Find tactics to beat a POI (or a cluster). Do not expect to just do a POI on first or 9th try. You might have to invest some time into the game. Think of other games where you might have to do boss battles repeatedly until learned how to defeat it, or give up and do cheats (or look for how others solved it). Suggesting (is a section for that) specific changes and maybe starter options regarding death is another matter. Peoples have different wishes, so options to customize the experience of the game would be nice. Then there are the matters of SP/Coop and PvP/PvE. SP/Coop then you have admin rights or access to config files, then use commands or customize your experience, if not quite happy with current default options available (easily). MP then you better find server that suits you, nagging admins/owner to change stuff to suit you probably is waste of time. If something is too easy, then you are not forced to use the options. Like do not spawn close or recover your death pack. Use T1 and low level weapons. If too hard, then find another server or start an easier SP (or tweak stuff, there are no rules but your own). Maybe supposed to team up and faction. PvP can be very grindy and time consuming. If want specific pointers doing stuff and POIs, then try ask. Good Luck! Edit: When die, you still keep your suit with boosts, along 2 out slots (cooled) for the personal constructor. I use to have energy bars and maybe a portable constructor there. If to travel in space or on a very cold place, put on EVA Boost. Have BluePrints ready for spawning, maybe BA spawning platforms.
While I disagree with him/her on specifics, I have the impression The Big Brzezinski is not only very familiar the game mechanics, he/she has thought quite a bit about how they can be improved. I have also raided POIs countless times and know most available techniques. I don't think that's the issue. It's about where a small mistake results in 10 or 20 pointless deaths due to there being no real way to recover your position. This is my personal opinion, but I don't want Empyrion to play like the sort of arcade style game you're describing. I'd prefer not to rely on memorization of a POI. I'd like many different POIs with a range of difficulties, allowing me to choose a difficulty I (or my team) can handle or feel like at that particular moment. I'd like death to be rare if I plan carefully and come prepared. But I'd like to death to "sting" when it happens because it's a survival game and the struggle to survive should have meaning. To me this means there must be a risk and penalty associated with failure/death. I think you've suggested some sensible tweaks to your suggestion to mitigate the disadvantages. But it does still seem like mitigation, when the other option of a "stinging" death, then moving on from that seems to not have the same problem that needs mitigation. This is a good argument and an interesting game mechanic. However, I still wonder if it fits with a momentary mistake in the heat of combat though (given that in some circumstances melee critters that cause status effects can appear right next to you). Perhaps such status effect puzzles would better arise not from battle, but as a part of longer-term survival planning, or as part of a mission or quest? I like the way you word this, very well put. I'll say this though - a well designed expressive toolbar setup could also be achieved with the clone-constructor-setup option. It removes the annoyance of having to put everything into the toolbar manually, but it adds a proportionate risk. The clone chamber could even have multiple equipment setups to select for your next spawn - sort of like a custom character class. I would never suggest they would be free - they'd cost the same as normal. I don't think respawn would make sense as a manufacturing strategy when you can almost instantly line up 100 weapons, armour, tools with a couple of clicks on a constructor. Can I again commend your eloquent wording. I agree the flow of experience is very important. I'd certainly agree that to achieve willing suspension of disbelief, fiction does not need to always be realistic, nor does it need to explain everything. But what is explained needs to be consistent. So when you point to the knife limitation in Subnautica, I think this is there for gameplay (not immersion), and it's explained in a way that doesn't obviously clash with any other proposed rule in this fictional world. Yes there's a funny explanation that distracts from possible questions that might be asked, but the game's wonderful immersive experience is not because of this, it's in spite of it. The less "this doesn't make sense" feelings players feel, the better. People forgive a certain amount as a trade-off to get fun gameplay (same as we can put aside smaller questions about consistency during a movie) - the knife trades a tiny bit of immersion for an immense gain in game design and dev ethics. But if we trade immersion and consistency away too lightly, the game becomes a series of colourful but trivial events, rather than the flow of experience you describe.
@Average (and any others) Why shouldn't a small mistake result in 30 deaths? That might be a part of what gives a difficulty level for a POI (or whatever). That "stings" it seems Arcade style games are not the only genre that have types of "difficulties" that can require many repetitions until manage to master whatever game mechanics. How a "boss" situation is presented in a game can vary a lot. Unless you in EGS have tried a POI or mission, you really do not know the difficulty, relative to whatever other difficulty options have been set. Along with what equipment you have, including vessels or whatever. Some have tiny SVs to use inside a POI, or spawn HV turrets or walls, choices of tactics and game mechanics possibilities. You do not need to "remember" a difficult POI, it just helps reducing the chance of possible Death Loops, along do the POI without fiddling (if wished), maybe using "secret" shortcuts. Also your choice to continue with a loop, or see it as a loss. Try play with an "Ironman" mindset, no deaths (all hard). Certain Scenarios and servers can have so many different POIs that enough will feel "new". If I remember a POI, then it might take me a minute or 5 to have removed the core, maybe even by gatling blocks to get easy access. Sometimes I scout around a POI to try find blind spots, or create one, then get there with the HV/SV and take it (then more loot by having turrets to multitool, along with saving ammo).
@The Big Brzezinski (and others) Keeping the toolbelt in EGS is something I would have expected an impatient newb to wish for. A noob want it all. "Oh, I died, how do I get my death pack, particularly the T2 weapons I had on my toolbelt. ... Uhuu, I died for 20th time, spawning close to death place and trying to get my death pack. I wish I could keep my inventory stuff on death, or at least the toolbelt. The Abandoned Factory should be much easier". Suggest tell the whole story about a Death Loop. What POI (and where), inventory/toolbelt/suit content, what difficulty, what gamestart, what progression state, what kills you over and over, what way do you try to get the death pack back, what vessel did you use and how, and so on. Recording link? Then I might tell what the mistakes were, why you looped, so next time you might avoid it. My only Death Loop worth mentioned were on a PvE server with medium difficulty, that kept restarting due to patches and bugs, A10 experimental probably. So have had 3-4 new starts already, still on the starter planet. Just got a starter nomad HV with gatlings and done some POIs and gotten some T2 weapons. Started taking down a cluster of 4 Zirax POIs covering each other, starter level with some turrets. All with drones and a lot of patrols around, also several with rockets. Started clearing out drones and troops and turrets, ready to take the cores. I already had the habit of transferring loot to the vessel regularly. Then the server got a patch and restarted without warning. The small HV stood in the middle, my character spawned close to it, getting fired on from all directions, managed to access the cockpit - big mistake - then the vessel got shot and cockpit destroyed and I died. I tried re-spawning 10 times to get my death pack, but realized that just forget it. So re-spawned on another location, had no base so here we go again. The plan were to just get a new vessel and try again, see what to be salvaged and if could get the death pack. Of course it took some time to build up again, along with some more server restarts. Hooked up with a faction and helped them, before we then headed for the POIs and took them. No way the death pack survived, but fortunately I have built the HV so storage were kept and not that much to repair and replace of devices, even the core were there. But I had a vessel so just transferred the stuff and multitooled the rest. Of course annoying loosing stuff, but I saw it as part of the game, had no big wish to keep toolbelt or inventory. **** happens. Also one of the first servers I tried, so "server noob". After a couple of other incidents shortly after regarding server behavior, I started thinking much more ahead. Trying to anticipate issues in situations and how to behave to reduce the impact. Like having BluePrints ready and extra materials. Creating a spawn point close by, and/or getting back fast, what to have in inventory and not. Happened several times that after server restart while using a vessel. It spawned where it should, you spawned way back. SV/CV on a planet often were high up. This were before the ability to use registry to power off dropped the vessel. Or the time I just activated CV warp beyond SV warp range, server restarted. The CV warped, I did not. Yes, I had a plan for that, without help (even said no thanks to a ride offered, would had to wait a while too ... ). That could have become a Death Loop.
Yeah I don't know if your toolbar should just respawn with you after death. If you consider PVP then having your toolbar respawn would make it annoying to kill other people, you could never loot their stuff. That and also the fact that death should be a punishment for not properly being prepared when looting a POI. If you could just respawn like that inside a POI then it would essentially be easy mode. You could die over and over again, find the core, destroy it, and loot the POI in less than a minute.
Personally, I strongly oppose durability loss on items of any kind upon death. It merely serves to punish new and poorly skilled gamers while not really rewarding anybody. At least with dropped backpacks you can get back exactly what you had when you died just by getting a new loadout and trying again thereby feeling like you accomplished something. That to me sounds like player agency. I hate the timer on backpacks, too.
The idea behind the durability reduction is that you don't automatically go from being ready for action to being helpless, but it still costs you something, making death avoidance important (it'd probably be a world difficulty option anyway, though). Remember, there are only so many slots on the toolbar. Any weapon with its ammo takes two slots. Do you also want your multitool? C4 charges? Meds? Food? Oxygen? It adds up very quick. Anything in general inventory would still be dropped. Even Dark Souls doesn't make you retrieve your weapons and items on death, just your souls. I'm assuming the Respawn Nearby is going away at some point, so players are going to have to setup a respawn camp or similar outside the POI. So if you die, you wind up outside with your tools still intact, but you still need to go back in and recover the loot. And you can immediately do this, provided repeated deaths didn't break your gear entirely and require you to go find a repair station. This means you can't death zerg either, i.e. repeatedly run into the base, do a little damage, die, respawn, repeat. People do this already with survival tools now. It is painful to watch. I imagine PvP would follow the tradition of not damaging gear when killed by a player, but would be up to the server operator. Dropped general inventory is enough of an incentive for the attacker. For the defeated player now back at their respawn point, their retained equipment gives them choices to make. Rush right back there and fight to get your stuff back? Call for backup? Bug out? You're not destitute, but you still lost some stuff. Is it worth risking more to recover it? Do you call, fold, or up the ante? Meanwhile, the other guy now knows there's someone out there armed, angry at them, and knowledgeable of their location. Is it time to walk away with your winnings? Try to ambush them for loot again later, this time with less of a surprise advantage? Maybe find their respawn point to remove them from the area entirely? What if they respawned from a combat HV or CV? What if they find your respawn point? The fact that both players remain combat effective means the fight keeps going. When you can just shut down the other guy instantly and permanently, there is no fight.
Even if respawning nearby is removed, you could still "zerg" because you would most likely have an HV or CV nearby with a clone chamber/medical pod. Its not like the POIs are particularly large, they can only be 250x250x250 blocks in size. Also your backpack shows up in your hud view, so finding it in a maze isn't much of a problem. Now while zerging can be done with a survival tool, its not that efficient since you have to A). make it in your survival constructor which takes time, B). kill enemies with it while it deals very little damage, and C). do it all over again once you die. The people using that exploit probably have enemies set to easy since it would take way too long if it they were on hardmode. Since everyone already parks a CV or HV right next to where they are going to fight a POI, clearing a base with actual efficient weapons through zerging would be made easy through toolbar respawns. As a matter of fact meds would become useless, since you can just die and respawn. Also you wouldn't need a multitool since you do that after the POI is cleared of enemies. Just take a single powerful weapon and all the nine other slots in the toolbar can be filled with ammo. Same with PVP, why have meds in my toolbar and other useless things when I can bring a plasma cannon with ammo in the other slots? I'll just respawn in my HV nearby and continue to unleash unlimited dakka on the people trying to attack me. They would never be able to destroy my HV since I would respawn with that fully loaded plasma cannon, and my inventory would be kept empty since I have everything in my toolbar for PVP. So there would be nothing for them to steal as well since I wouldn't even leave behind a backpack. But lets just say I was keeping stuff in my inventory and they caught me off guard. It still doesn't matter because my HV is so close by I can arrive back and unleash moar dakka upon them instantly in order to get my stuff back. Now we begin to have the problem of PVP devolving into a comical back and forth game of nearly limitless supermen just killing each other over and over again pointlessly. This ultimately turns PVP into an endless show of Tom and Jerry. Nothing of value is gained so then people stop PVPing altogether.
It sounds like it's time for some collation. The suggestion on the table looks like this; First, remove any positive effects that might perversely incentivize death. This means conditions carry through respawns, though some may be reverted from stage three to previous stages if they are too debilitating. Oxygen and food levels start much lower. Radiation- and temperature- related conditions would revert to their first stage, and the player's body temperature and radiation levels would only revert to just outside the safe zone. Death also causes 20% damage to the condition of the player's armor and all equipment in their toolbar. Second, the Respawn Nearby option goes away. Tents and their respawn point function is already covered in the tutorial. It might be necessary to also add cloning chambers to SV for respawning in space playfields, especially as space content develops, be we can worry about crossing that bridge after we've reached it. Third, have the contents of players' toolbars travel with them through the respawn process. Any backpack items are still dropped as usual. Players should be notified on respawn that their equipment was damaged in the retrieval process, and of its current condition. Fourth, all these changes would be selectable as world difficulty options. I'll go back and update the OP with this list.
I feel like a better alternative is the following: Remove respawn nearby (agreed) Add an equipment constructor to clone chambers/tents, and add clone chamber to SV The equipment constructor automatically builds the hotbar+ammo for your next clone/respawn, based on how you configure it, using regular resources like normal constructors. On death, your inventory (including armor) takes damage (some items may be destroyed) before dropping. There is a long lasting recover time for what's left. On respawn, you appear at clone chamber/tent, getting automatically re-equipped from the constructor's pre-built equipment Drop timeout, destroy and damage rates are configurable in the config. Advantages: The penalty for death is proportional - equipment cost. Basing the cost on the equipment you use means harder POIs that require better equipment also incur a greater and proportional risk. The cost is in materials which represents your progress in the game, and it's going to be much higher for late-game players carrying fancy equipment. The penalty for death is immediate - You aren't forced into lengthy re-equipping. You also won't repeatedly die from 1 mistake, and you don't have to stop what you're doing an fly several sectors away to solve status effects if you don't have the medicine. This encourages you to change tactics and try again. The penalty for death is hard to cheese or zerg - You can't repeatedly respawn without cost, and while your first respawn is instant, you constructor will need time to make another set of equipment, eliminating cheesy zerg respawn tactics. The cost is impossible to avoid if you want to start with equipment. More immersive - No teleportation or other immersion-breaking technology required (an emergency teleporter back to ship is problematic - why not teleport out the enemies into space, or teleport loot straight out of a POI). The two very easy ways I can think of to configure your clone chamber would be to walk into it and "save" your current inventory+hotbar, or alternatively you could drop template equipment into a container and point it at the container to duplicate the contents. This would save a new user interface being needed for the constructor-clone chamber.
@The Big Brzezinski @Average (and any others) Already you can choose to not use spawn close. You can chose to not pick up death pack or only pick up tool belt or whatever. Trash weapons if had some deaths and below a certain repair threshold. And so on. In SP you can use commands to "cheat" (I call it define your own rules), like item menu and teleport, fbp and sbp. So it just get a bit more fiddly if to work around restrictions. Also as long as the game is in Early Access, issues/bugs can happen and balancing still not finished, with more functionality to come or change. It is mostly for PvP restrictions could have some impact. In PvE you can role play rules, can blacklist those that do not want to follow. Someone already suggested some server/scenario settings so can customize death behavior, then up to those that set it up. But then also optional to change it for SP/Coop. A couple of death options could be added to the difficulty start settings though, but not all. Later on some might make a mod where you easily do some changes to config files, a kind of enhanced option page. Now you have docking vessels to vessels in any way, as long as not "nested" (can not dock with something that already have something docked to it). So You can have a small HV with clone chamber and turrets, docked to your attack SV, and place it down close to a POI before start the assault. Your suggestions seems only to make it more fiddly to play, particularly for newbs. For experienced players maybe just annoying. But up to the devs anyway, if they find the suggestions worth using time on to put in.
I'm not a big fan of the cloning chamber making gear for you. That said... Survival tools. The basic respawn weapon in such a system could be an upgraded survival tool. A simple tent respawns you with a basic one. Adding resources to/or a higher tier cloning chambers could give you better ones. Survival tools don't use ammo, so you can't cheese respawns to make a bunch of ammo without ponying up for a real constructor. Same for respawn-milling guns for wholesaling. You could have four tiers of survival tool requiring nothing, iron ingots, titanium rods, or zascosium ingots respectively. The trick would be finding the balance between a combat-effective survival tool and normal guns. The basic survival tool is almost useless against anything but the smallest and fluffiest of animals. If it or better versions of it were powerful enough, they'd usurp normal small arms. This might not be such a bad thing. The best survival tool being the ammo-less sidegrade to first tier shotguns and assault rifles could work well. It would take play testing to sort out.
@The Big Brzezinski (and any others) Disagree, do not need to complicate the game with several types of survival tools or such. The purpose of the current survival tool along with suit constructor is to just to get you going. Then you are supposed to use your brain to figure out how to avoid Death Loops and other challenges the game can throw at you. To keep surviving and maybe "conquer" the galaxy (or part of it). Or be the best on the server to PvP. Get multitool (T2) and weapons and bases and vessels and so on - while acquiring resources to do this. The best ways to flatten (preferable avoid) a Death Loop are to learn the game mechanics and understand how to utilize them. Most games require you to play a lot until starting to get good. Else you can always play Animal Crossing or similar. PvP rarely suits peoples that are impatient or do not want to put in the work required. Often extra "grindy" and expect to loose stuff often and die a lot, Death Loops can be a regular occurrence while fighting other players. Seal clubbing and death camping and similar, maybe. Normally forget getting your stuff back, without initializing a new fight where you win, maybe. PvE is mostly for if you want to do stuff with others, without the PvP "danger" of loosing stuff beyond your control. Normally peoples will help if issues, like if caught in a Death Loop. SP/Coop if want full control, play it your way without interference from others (except those invited). Use it to learn the needed ropes to take on difficult POIs and missions, to prepare for MP. Can use console commands to reduce the impact of any (possible) Death Loop, if feel it should be easier workings in the game. Or the opposite, to worsen deaths by not use options available, throw away stuff, use lower level equipment. Up to you to define the rules, allowed within game mechanics.
Sure, there are already plenty of ways to avoid death loops in the game, both in pvp and pve. Problem is, they all revolved around exploits, cheesing, and avoiding main gameplay mechanics like a malodorous plague. Ravien and company put a huge amount of work into their POIs and encounters to present the Project Eden experience. Blowing a hole in the side of those POIs, destroying the generators, and generally glassing everything is probably not the intended way of engaging with that experience. It is from this type of content that I want to stop death loops interfering.
