A lot of work has gone in to the gate system today. We’ve been designing exactly how it should look and producing mockups. Most of the art here is George’s but I wanted to show you what we had so far.

It’ll likely change a bit by the time it’s finished.

Click for full sized gif!

Hi guys,

We’ve been in Brighton today for the develop awards and gamesbythesea, so not much to report today. I wanted to share our plans for tier 2 with you though.

-warning spoilers ahead-

After repairing the ships thrusters your ship AI scans the surroundings and finds a mysterious ancient gate floating in space. Flying to the gate allows you to land and examine the gate. Which is actually a long abandoned interdimensional transport system.

Traveling through the gate takes you to an asteroid in a pocket dimension where you meet other travelers that have also found these long abandoned gates and chosen to set up a trading post on the asteroid.

The trading post will represent the first static location in Starbound. With its own lore, residents and back story. It exists outside of the procedurally generated star map in its own dimension and can also be accessed from any gate the player finds in space.

At the outpost you’ll find people to give you quests, including quests that lead to a furnace upgrade and a quest to obtain breathing apparatus that allows you to visit moons. To complete these quests you’ll need to visit planets in the solar system the gate is in.

Once the breathing apparatus is obtained players can visit moons where they’ll find structures built from/mining moon stone. Moon stone can be used to fix the ships FTL drives.

On top of all of this of course will be new armors, weapons and crafting progression.

Today has been a long long day of bug fixing and balancing.

After many many play tests of the early game, including repairing your ship, rebooting your ship AI, completing new quests, new death rules and mining rules. I finally have the early game in the place I want it. It feels balanced, fluid, there’s very little to no grind and you progress quickly beyond the low tech / stranded portion of the game. The majority of recipes have had their values tweaked. Ore, minibiome, cave, chest and monster spawns have been entirely rebalanced.

I’ve been staring at a lot of these images today:

We’re moving on now to the quest generation system and connecting the new outpost work you’ve seen to the games progression. We’re building the quest system so modders can super easily add their own quests, which can be given by npcs, item pickups and even other quests. The quest system will be built on templates. A super simple example of which would be “Kill monster X and obtain item Y” where X and Y are wildcards specified in a whitelist. The idea now is to fill the game with optional tasks with cool rewards.

We’re going to be coming up with a bunch of quest templates come the morning, so feel free to leave your suggestions!