I think Starbound is quite a bit better in that regard. They’ve redone the crafting progression again in this last 1.0 update, but it’s been pretty clear to me so far. There’s a little tutorial robot guy that will give you some advice on what to do (“You have some wood on you, you should build an Inventor’s Table. Now build a Foraging station so we can start working on getting some food…”). You can see recipes of what you can make in the crafting menu, if you don’t have the resources it’ll be grayed out and tell you what you need.
You can also learn recipes by picking up resources for the first time. You’ll get a notification that you’ve learned to craft x, although it doesn’t tell you specifically what crafting station you make it at. A lot of them are pretty self-explanatory, though. You’re going to make food at the kitchen table, not an anvil, that sort of thing. So, the first time I pick up sand it says I’ve learned how to make sandstone blocks. I know there’s a crafting station focused on building structures/blocks, so I check there.
I’m still pretty early on in 1.0, but once I built an anvil I could see what armor/weapons I could make. I saw that there was an armor set that I couldn’t make because I needed Tungsten, which I’d never seen on my world. So I figured I’d need to travel somewhere else to get it and sure enough, once my ship was fixed, if you click on a planet it will give you a geological survey of what resources can be found there. So I found a Tungsten planet and went to town.
I hope that description gives you some idea. It doesn’t exactly lead you by the nose step-by-step, but I’ve yet to look at the Wiki. Some things weren’t explicit but they weren’t too arcane to figure out without pulling up a web browser. For instance, I’m not sure if it told me exactly how to use a hoe/watering can, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out that I needed to till some ground to put a seed down and the fact that I saw a watering can to craft made it pretty obvious that plants would need water too. Again, I played Terraria before, so I do have some background on this type of game (sounds like you do too). Hope any of that helps.
If you’re just starting out you may want to start on Casual at first, just so your hunger meter isn’t depleting while you’re dinking around in the UI. It hasn’t been too onerous but some people don’t want time pressure when they’re trying to figure out the basics.
That does help a ton, thanks! I’m not opposed to some amount of ambiguous discovery by the community, but what you described was exactly what I was hoping for - something to at least get me comfortably situated in the game instead of needing to consult outside resources from the instant I started playing.
Yeah, I only had to check the wiki to see in which kinds of planet I would find a certain kind of ore, but even then, it was just to save time, since I would find out by exploring (eventually). With the changes coming for 1.0, perhaps not even that will be needed.
I played it a bit so far. I kept wiping on the starter dungeon ( the mission to get the crystal mine working again) and gave up. None of the weapons I had found at that point were any good. I started on survival, but then moved to casual. I can deal with food, but not, you lose everything on death. Pretty much everything that constitutes your progression / level is your gear. I guess I just do not have to worry about farming now, although it would be nice if food had buffs and stuff. Later on, is there any kind of automated crop watering?
Better food does have buffs associated with it. In terms of Survival, you don’t lose your equipment on death. Whenever I’ve died I’ve kept my armor, weapons, and torches.
There is a sprinkler system you can build which automates watering.
EDIT: There’s also a mod out that removes the item drop on Survival but keeps the hunger mechanics.
It’s been a while since i played this game, but why don’t you put your stuff in a chest? When you die, your stuff is still retrieveble from the chest. Of course the most essential stuff you have with you disappears when you die. But you can always have a spare one in the chest.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I’m finding the hunger mechanic annoying because of how you eat food. There doesn’t seem to be a way to just eat the food directly from your inventory. I’ve had to open inventory, move the food to one the spots on the hotkey bar (usually replacing something else that I found important enough to have there), left/right click to eat the food, put the next piece of food in that spot, left/right click to eat that new food, lather-rinse-repeat until my food bar is back up, then navigate to my items bag, find the thing that was originally in that hotkey bar spot, move the deplaced back in to the hotkey bar and finally close my inventory.
Am I just doing it wrong? Is there a way to eat directly from the inventory space?
There is. Open inventory, click on food (it will go your pointer). Then click and hold anywhere outside of the inventory window and it will “use” the item, which in this case, means you’ll eat the food. You can do that with all consumables (like food, blueprints) and also use a similar method to place some (or all) placeables (like crafting tables and most decorations).
It’s a bit cumbersome, but less cumbersome than putting it on a slot.
Yeah that’s a little better but it’s still obnoxious and tedious to be having to do that constantly. I like the hunger mechanic and needing to keep an eye on my food supply, but when my guy gets hungry he should just eat some of the food in his pack. If I want to manually eat something in particular because it’s going to go bad or because I want a particular buff that’s fine, but it should just grab the first food item and eat it when hunger starts kicking in.
Personally, I’m playing in casual mode, because I don’t want to worry about hunger or anything like that, at least not for now.
BTW, not sure if you know this, but you have two toolbars, and you can switch between them pressing X. I use one for weapons and other gear, and the second one for things like dirt, food, etc, so you might want to try something like that.
Yeah, that’s my current setup. I hadn’t known about clicking outside the inventory window, so I’ve been having to dedicate a few hotbar slots to food (because food doesn’t stack).
I think I have finished the tech progression part of the game, and am now starting on the story part. However, I am finding this quite tedious because I need to find a bunch of fish people artifacts (I forget their name, its the mission after the florian one). Now I just go to some planet and run across it hoping that it will have a colony of the type I am looking for, I know the mission says ocean worlds, but holy crap do you move slow. I went across one entire world and found a sunken and abandoned city and found just one item out of like 10 I need to scan.
This is terribly tedious and dull. I did notice there are vehicles, I wonder how well those would work. Has anyone bought one? Has anyone messed with colonists or other income sources other than selling looted weapons?
I sure hope this games gets a lot of mods that really change things up. I am at the final mission in the unstable branch. Tonight I plan on copying my game to the release version and finishing it there. I am not sure what the future of the unstable branch will be.
Anyway, I basically teched first and then did the story. The story missions are very boring. Just locate a few planents where race X has a presence and scan everything. Then teleport to an area and fight a boss, each more ridiculous than the last. It is just that sense of discovery and “oh that is cool” from terraria is missing. I also am not impressed with the weapons.
The only upgrade is going from tier planet to one higher. However, imagine that you are on a tier 5 planet and find a fire element shotgun with a grenade launcher. Great. Now you go on looting that and other tier 5 planets and collect another 20 elemental shotguns with grenade launchers. None of them will be any better. Some will do a bit more damage, but will cost a bit more energy to compensate. Some will fire slightly faster, but do slightly lower damage. In other words, there is no real loot hunt in this game.
It would be also cool to find rare armors that were really good and if your backpack had multiple upgrade slots. A custom gear creation system would be nice. Or a system to add mods to existing gear.
All in all its just kind of an “ok” game. I am not sure if there will be any point in continuing to play it after I beat the final boss.
