Starbound: 'Spiritual' successor to Terraria

[Stabwound]

Just Russian 4-packed this bitch -- $6 Starbound!

So,

1: What does this mean?
2: Anyone want to go in a 4 pack like this?

 

[Metro]

Perks of CDS Membership.

 

[sexbad?]

Metro do you mean you bought the 4-pack and are willing to sell, or did you just buy it for 6$ bux from a red

 

[Blaine]

Using any available method to gift, trade, activate, or otherwise obtain lower-priced Steam games (from a Russian Steam account or website, for example) as a resident of the US or EU is inadvisable and risky, since Valve is perfectly aware of the practice and you'd better hope they don't take notice. All methods can easily be Googled.

I'm not sure why people don't just pirate the game in question instead.

 

[sexbad?]

Using any available method to gift, trade, activate, or otherwise obtain lower-priced Steam games (from a Russian Steam account or website, for example) as a resident of the US or EU is inadvisable and risky, since Valve is perfectly aware of the practice and you'd better hope they don't take notice. All methods can easily be Googled.

I'm not sure why people don't just pirate the game in question instead.

Presumably like Terraria it has multiplayer where you can autism with your friends. I'm not sure though. I haven't looked much into the game. Piracy is not ideal in such a case.

Maybe Valve can find me in this thread suggesting that 6$ bux is a nice discounted price for a D1P, but I should hope they don't have access to my PayPal history to incriminate me for simply receiving a gift copy of Starbound!!!

 

[Metro]

People have been doing it for years and Valve hasn't lifted a finger to stop it. Why? Because it's still money in their pockets that people probably wouldn't have otherwise spent at the higher pricepoints.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Using any available method to gift, trade, activate, or otherwise obtain lower-priced Steam games (from a Russian Steam account or website, for example) as a resident of the US or EU is inadvisable and risky, since Valve is perfectly aware of the practice and you'd better hope they don't take notice. All methods can easily be Googled.

I'm not sure why people don't just pirate the game in question instead.

They sell the 4-packs for the express purpose of people giving/trading the other 3 away, and run a trading system and everything. Why would doing what they designed it for be risky?

Side note: My game doesn't work, just a flood of error messages as soon as I click on launch. Still better than X Stillbirth amirite?

This will need to be the shortest Beta phase in history as they promised to release the full game in 2013 as one of the stretch goals.

 

[toroid]

Is it accurate enough to say that pretty much all of the content in Starbound is procedurally generated? (didn't read thread lol) Is there any hand-made content at all, aside from the progression scheme through tiers of materials/equipment (if that even exists)? There seems to be some kind of hand written questline, but the rest of the quests appear to be procedural filler. Unless the procedural generation is extremely complex it seems like this would reveal its shallow nature over the course of a few hours and then proceed to get boring quickly. To compare, Terraria had procedurally generated worlds but it had an enormous amount of content that was hand crafted and actually had some personality.

So far what I've seen of Starbound reminds me of A Valley Without Wind, where the gameplay is reliant upon you being willing to grind through infinite levels worth of procedurally generated content. There wasn't a visceral tangible reward for playing nor was there a fulfilling sense of progression or accomplishment; the generic infinite-grind nature of the game saw to that. If this is the way Starbound is going to be then fuck all that.

edit:
Just looked through the development roadmap and it looks pretty damn ambitious. Though, I'm still suspicious that they are overly reliant upon procedural generation to provide content. Time will tell, I guess. Modders will fix it.

 

[Zewp]

Starbound is still in early beta. You're currently looking at the skeleton. The story has yet to be implemented.

 

[DalekFlay]

People have been doing it for years and Valve hasn't lifted a finger to stop it. Why? Because it's still money in their pockets that people probably wouldn't have otherwise spent at the higher pricepoints.

I think the core point I would make is that if you don't care about fucking over developers to save money, why not just pirate the games?

 

[toroid]

Starbound is still in early beta. You're currently looking at the skeleton. The story has yet to be implemented.

Are the story and the main questline the only things that aren't procedural? I wouldn't expect the story to deliver much satisfaction in a game like this, and it certainly wouldn't be a driving factor determining whether I buy it.

 

[Metro]

People have been doing it for years and Valve hasn't lifted a finger to stop it. Why? Because it's still money in their pockets that people probably wouldn't have otherwise spent at the higher pricepoints.

I think the core point I would make is that if you don't care about fucking over developers to save money, why not just pirate the games?

Is buying a game on sale fucking over a developer? This way I just create my own sale. Given the choice of $6 vs. nothing I'd say a developer would prefer the $6. And fuck regional pricing, anyway.

 

[Blaine]

Yes, Metro, human beings are masters of self-justification. It is known. Suffice it to say you're cheating a system put in place to ensure fairness across economic boundaries, this in spite of Valve offering deep discounts on a wide variety of games. It seems you now feel entitled to pay next to nothing for everything at any time, while clinging to the notion that you aren't a freeloading parasite. I suppose you're only three-quarters of a parasite. Also, tolerance of a certain number of parasites doesn't change the nature of the parasites themselves.

Personally, I find it absolutely disgusting that many Codexers demand games be free or extremely cheap—I'm not referring to iPhone casual one-offs here, but to proper computer games. The tightfistedness of many monocled gamers has been a major contributor to the decline. While you pay $6 for an intricate PC-native game that can be played for hundreds of hours, consoletards shell out $60 + $60 for DLC for six-hour-long AAA shovelware. Not only are there far more of them, they also pay 20x what you do for a shittier game—but I'm sure there are no implications to be had from that comparison.

In any case, I digress.

Starbound is shaping up to be pretty nifty. I managed to plant some crops, dig some mine shafts, loot some abandoned buildings, craft some armor, locate a village, and I discovered an exploit: When you enter a quantity of items to purchase from village merchants, you're only charged for 1 of that item, e.g. you can get 999 Boltroots for 4 Pixels.

There's a lot of variety, complexity, and attention to detail to be seen already, and this is fairly early in the beta. A year after 1.0 and with some modding for good measure, I expect there'll be a shitload of decorations, blocks, biomes, creatures, tools, weapons, etc.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It seems you now feel entitled to pay next to nothing for everything at any time, while clinging to the notion that you aren't a freeloading parasite. I suppose you're only three-quarters of a parasite.

But yeah, I can't really blame him for buying games cheap from ruskies. It's the same as waiting a few months and buying it on a 75% sale, which we do while patting ourselves on the back for supporting developer X.

 

[DalekFlay]

And fuck regional pricing, anyway.

Yeah, since average incomes and economies are all identical it really is super dumb.

Hmmm...

 

[Blaine]

But yeah, I can't really blame him for buying games cheap from ruskies. It's the same as waiting a few months and buying it on a 75% sale, which we do while patting ourselves on the back for supporting developer X.

I don't. If the game is incline from an incline developer, I'll buy it for full price. I use Steam sales to pick up marginal titles on deep discount that I'm unsure of, that I simply overlooked, or that I dismissed initially for whatever reason, but never because the price was too high. Case in point: Saint's Row 3. I assumed the game was a stupid-ass wannabe thug wish fulfillment simulator, and it absolutely is, except it's also much more fun than I'd expected. I bought Saint's Row IV on release at full price. Granted, SR almost certainly qualifies as decline of some sort, but the principle is the same.

More recently, I've pledged several hundred/several thousand dollars apiece to various Kickstarters.

 

[Metro]

In any case, I digress.

You do that a lot to stroke your own ego. Anyway, I figured since you paid $500 for Starbound it picked up the slack for me.

 

[Zewp]

Also, the Hunting Bow does shit damage and is really annoying to use, so I hope I figure out farming soon. I can't seem to figure out how to actually pick mature crops.

I'm genuinely surprised that the only way to gather meat is to use the bow, which is really difficult to use. I've resorted to whittling down a monster's health with my sword and then shooting it with the bow when its health is low enough, but even that is pretty difficult.

 

[Blaine]

You do that a lot to stroke your own ego.

This from the guy who made a point of using an entire post just to brag "Just Russian 4-packed this bitch -- $6 Starbound!"; when others predictably asked how you obtained said discount, you produced some smug nonsense about Codex Electronic Arts Fan Club proprietary secrets, rather than explaining yourself as a non-douchebag might do.

 

[roll-a-die]

In any case, I digress.

You do that a lot to stroke your own ego. Anyway, I figured since you paid $500 for Starbound it picked up the slack for me.

I wonder how many people on the codex realize that simply posting two sentances+an image does not an argument make.

Metro, do you consider an ad hominem personal attack to be a legitimate response to someone making an argument about spending practices you partake in?

Or perhaps do you feel guilty, but the inner repressed self doesn't want to admit defeat. You don't want to let the arguement go without an answer, even if in certain cases, that would be an adequate response.

Somehow I feel that you responded in this way purely to continue something pointless, because doing anything less would be losing.

Do you perhaps feel that you don't want to lose at anything, even textual conversations with people whom you neither know, nor really care about to any degree.

Is this perhaps why you purchased a mac?

 

[Blaine]

I'm genuinely surprised that the only way to gather meat is to use the bow, which is really difficult to use. I've resorted to whittling down a monster's health with my sword and then shooting it with the bow when its health is low enough, but even that is pretty difficult.

At the moment you can buy near-infinite food from villagers and farming crops is fairly easy in any event, so the only reason to hunt past the first fifteen minutes is if you need leather. I'm not entirely sure what leather's good for at the moment.

Note that if you loose your arrow when the bow flashes to indicate the arrow is fully nocked, it deals more damage. You can also build an improved Iron Hunting Bow at the anvil. That said, more damage doesn't really compensate for taking 2-3 seconds to draw, significantly slowing movement, and being difficult to aim at creatures whizzing through the air.

 

[Turisas]

http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/1s620n/some_of_the_changes_coming_tonight/

Patch tonight - the lowered pixel costs are welcome I guess.

 

[Blaine]

The biggest issue I have currently is the fact that there are eleven thousand different building materials and decorations—which is a very good thing overall, except that if you want to stockpile everything you find, you need shitloads of 16-slot chests in order to do so. Also, you need a lot of blocks to build a base of any significant size; even with a gold pickaxe, it takes quite a while to demolish enough metal and stone building materials to construct even a basic base.

A much better (or at least more convenient) system would be to allow building-type blocks (e.g. not resources for gear) to be scanned into the 3D printer and then mass produced cheaply. Same goes for decorations. As-is, you can't print building blocks, and decorations cost an arm and a leg to print. It'd be nice if you could scan one of a decoration into the printer to obtain the blueprint, then "sell" further decorations to the printer, which would add Pixels to a reservoir usable only by the 3D printer to print building blocks and decorations (so that you can't sell gold statues for a fortune and then use the resultant Pixels as normal game currency).

 

[Turisas]

Grab those crates etc. from the bases you raid and stack them, chests aren't the only storage you have at your disposal. But yeah the 3D printer clearly isn't feature-complete yet, I wouldn't be surprised if we see something like what you're proposing.

 

[sexbad?]

A game called Darkout got up on Steam the same day as this, and it appears to be roughly the same thing. Has anybody got experience with both to be able to say which is a better investment?