Hmmmm, good call! For coop it might be even better.
Personally I had the most fun single player but I dropped and the kids kept playing co-op and had a lot of fun.
Stardew Valley, Craft the World, DragonQuest Builders 2?
Hey @Clay, I just had a GREAT time with Raft, a 3D crafting / survival game where you’re floating on a 2x2 raft, and fish materials out of the drink to build and add things to it. Very lovely and chill and is huge in coop.
There’s a shark in the water that will chomp you, and that can be frustrating, and you can shoot at it with arrows or poke it with a spear. Check out a vid or two if you’re interested but want to know more.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I’m going to let them check out the videos, etc. for these. I love Stardew Valley but I’m not sure it will have enough adventure for my older daughter.
Temtem maybe?
As Starbound is on GamePass, I figured I’d give it a try, even though platformers aren’t my thing. I’ve beamed down to the planet and collected a few things, but I seem to be sort of stuck. Am I supposed to tunnel underneath obstacles to progress?
Also, a hint suggested I try eating a potato, but I don’t know how to do this. I really don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing at all, honestly. I never played Terraria. Still, I do like the ambience.
I would suggest playing Terraria first, rather than Starbound. I found Starbound to be quite obtuse for the most part, although it does get better once you get going.
If you do want to progress - yes there’s quite a bit of digging that’s required in these kinds of game. Find new materials, build new tools to find more materials to build newer tools. Rinse repeat to progress. Bosses occasionally gate progress to new materials and tools.
If it makes you feel any better, my kids didn’t like Terraria at all but they LOVE Starbound. I’ll bet they’ve put 300 hours into it over the past year. They are ages 8 and 10. Your first major task is to repair your ship so that you can travel to other planets. Don’t be afraid to use a getting started guide on the Starbound wiki. There is a lot of game here, so if it helps you learn the controls, etc, then it will just open up the rest of the game for you. They play in coop, by the way. It’s a good game for that.
I felt lost with Starbound initially. There’s a series of missions to follow from the start, just do those as best you can. It’ll get your basic abilities up and spacecraft ready to go. After that, find some easy worlds and mine to your heart’s content. You’ll need a base for food, and after that, well the space craft ends up being that base. Hugely addicting to setting up a nice farming colony and generally travelling the galaxy and steadily getting better items.
Thanks for the helpful replies. OK, I’ll keep at it. Thanks!
I’m befuddled by this game. I’ve crafted a campfire, but I can’t put the damned thing down. When I “drop” it with the Q key, I can’t use it; if I try interacting with it, it just jumps back into my inventory. I tried dropping a wooden platform first, but I had the same trouble. I’m obviously missing something very basic here, and it’s very frustrating.
Edit: Hmm, sometimes putting the campfire on my inventory bar and then clicking works? I may have figured it out. But now I"m not loving all the digging. Hmm.
Ah cool, glad you worked it out. It’s same as with the work bench and other crafting accessories to place them. And that’s where you might really come unstuck is the need to go to different machines to make different items…
The digging; yes it is tiresome. And the beginning moreso because you have the most basic iteration of the digging implement. It will get stronger with upgrades (ie: dig faster) have a larger range and also larger area to dig through.
The joy in the game for me was that sense of upgrading I think. There are some dangerous worlds out there, and to get to them, you need to craft up the right gear which means finding some fairly rare minerals (eg: tungsten). Good sesne of progression. But the game can be tiring too. I’ll admit I put it down one day and when I went back to it some months later, I had no idea what I was doing…
Thanks for your reply. I get the basic idea now. But my current quest is ultra annoying: to find 20 red core matter stones from the center of the planet. Well, I found four, then died, and that takes you back…to the very start of the level. Sigh.
I’m finding this bit tedious. I’ll take a break and try again tomorrow, or maybe later.
If you don’t enjoy it, then believe me, there’s nothing amazing you’re missing out on beyond other great games out there :)
The starting is the worst when you have the least mobility options.
I finally did complete that first quest. I made it easier on myself by crafting some ranged weapons and armor. The next few quests have been much easier!
It’s fun but a bit hard on my aging hands. We shall see how far I get.
For what it’s worth, Terraria is a bit easier IMHO. It’s also much more mature and VERY well modded at this point with a huge following. They both give me a bit of an eye twitch because I hate stepping back to 2D style platform games (or at least that look like them.) But once you get that behind you a bit, they can be fun. I agree with the others, the grind is part of the game loop but rewarding in and of itself.
I like the exploring and crafting, but I dislike all the combat, especially the mission I have now to retrieve crystals from a mine. The game doesn’t give me any checkpoints, apparently, until I reach the final boss. I can mow down most of the infected pink miners with my bow, but sooner or later one of them gets me, and it’s game over, restart the level from the very beginning. By this point my hand is hurting from all the repetition. Not my cup of tea.
It’s a shame, because I love the idea of exploring and upgrading, but other games in the genre (e.g., No Man’s Sky) are more my speed. I think I’ll move on.
I thoroughly enjoyed Starbound, but I had the most fun in the early releases before they made it so structured. I seem to recall the early builds were much more open ended and you didn’t have to do any quests to progress.
The current version wasn’t so bad after having the experience of playing so many early builds, but I could certainly see why it would be frustrating at times. There is a lot of good in there, but some definite road blocks too.