Hello humans and non-humans, and others!

Have you ever dreamed to decorate your house with reeds? Sleep on reeds, sitting on reeds, or even eating on reeds? Starbound will make your dream come true!

As you know we are working on new minibiomes now. Next step (for my part) will be more oasis things, a bedouin outfit, and a throwable coconut.

Have a good space night!

As per usual, I’ve been juggling a few tasks the past couple of days.

Work has continued on the Glitch mission I told you guys about last week, though a gameplay decision that came about midway in its development has made me have to re-think the overall structure a bit. It turned out that having a larger scale structure didn’t necessarily equal more fun for the player. None the less, it’s coming along nicely and I’m looking forward to getting into scripting it. The old structure will likely end up being utilized elsewhere down the line.

As part of our restructure of the tiered progression, the mining experience is currently under the microscope. You may recall some time back, Metadept was experimenting with the matter manipulator as an upgradeable tool. Many who have tried the nightlies have likely experienced this in the form of the completely unbalanced and relatively weak starting iteration. The reason we haven’t addressed this yet is because we decided it didn’t make sense to focus on balancing the tools until we had tackled the larger task of rebalancing all of our tiles.

Every tile in the game has its own set health that governs how difficult it is to break. Since we’re having biomes split up by tier during the initial progression (note that all biomes will be available with higher difficulty levels at the end-game), it meant we needed to balance the large number of materials based on their biome and their place in the overall progression. At time of writing we have 140+ different types of tiles that each needed to be assessed and reconfigured, so most of my time the last couple of days has been tied up with this task. For now it’s looking good, but it’ll likely require adjustments as we test.

In the wake of the matter manipulator becoming the primary mining tool, it bears mentioning that the pickaxes won’t be going away altogether. Instead they will remain in the form of rare drops that, depending on your luck, could end up being one markedly more powerful than your matter manipulator at the time. The trade-off is that they will no longer be repairable, so you’d want to save them for the toughest of blocks.

The next step is going to be balancing the matter manipulator and its upgrades. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop!

On Friday I decided to make a small change to the treasure table format. I got a bit carried away and ended up spending a bunch of time over the weekend to clean up, organize, and rebuild ALL of our .treasurepools files, which I finally finished. It was a lot of work but the results make treasure much easier to work with and a much better system in general, so I’m very happy to have completed it.

For a bit of technical detail: our treasure pools are specified as weighted lists of items. The weight associated with an item determines how likely it is to be randomly selected, relative to other items in the table (not an absolute percentage chance). This means that adding new items to a table changes the likelihood of each of the other items in the table being selected. As you can imagine, this makes it very hard to edit and balance the tables! The engine change I made was to allow treasure tables to reference other treasure tables. With that functionality implemented, I rebuilt our tables by splitting loot into categories. For example, here’s the new table for a single general treasure item, such as you might find in a plain surface chest:

{“weight” : 0.4, “pool” : “money”},
{“weight” : 0.1, “pool” : “ore”},
{“weight” : 0.1, “pool” : “food”},
{“weight” : 0.1, “pool” : “healingItem”},
{“weight” : 0.1, “pool” : “fuel”},
{“weight” : 0.05, “pool” : “thrownWeapon”},
{“weight” : 0.05, “pool” : “weapon”},
{“weight” : 0.03, “pool” : “tool”},
{“weight” : 0.03, “pool” : “seed”},
{“weight” : 0.02, “pool” : “shield”},
{“weight” : 0.01, “pool” : “costume”},
{“weight” : 0.01, “pool” : “instrument”}

As you can see, the probabilities are now specified for general categories of items, each of which has its own separate treasure pool. Now, when we add (for example) a new weapon, the probability of getting SOME weapon will stay the same, as will the probabilities of other categories within this file. I’ve also split several of these categories up into sub tables, divided them based on threat level, and massively reorganized things to make them easier to work with. The end result is that we can now move ahead with our work on biomes and progression (more on that later in the week!) without creating huge amounts of redundant configuration files and future work in the process.