Greetings from London! I’m here in the office for a few weeks, so Tiy and I have been talking a lot about our plans for monsters and making more big changes. Many players seem to be having trouble with the current monsters, especially at the very beginning of the game or when beaming down to new planets, so we’ve been reworking the difficulty to provide a smoother ramp up into the game. One component of this will be changes to the spawning system to prevent monsters from clustering around the beam down point and to make their levels scale more with biome depth. Another component involves changes to the monster types and how they relate.

Small monster variants are going to be weaker, more common, and have a very limited selection of attacks (no projectile attacks, for example). Large monster variants will be rarer and stronger, with more special attacks and abilities. We may also try returning to the ‘family’ concept for monsters, where small and large variants correspond to each other directly, possibly even advancing from the smaller variants to their larger counterparts under certain conditions. I’ve gone through and made the existing biped and quadruped types consistently named and structured to facilitate this change, and I’m working on changing the spawning changes as well.

The main thing I did, however, was implement the large flying monsters that we’ve just finished the art for! Similar to the ground monster types, these are much larger, stronger, and rarer than their small brethren, and we’ve removed projectile attacks from the small flyers to compensate. Here’s one example to show just how much bigger and more detailed they are:

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Hey guys! Looks like nobody stepped up to write the update today! Allow me to remedy that situation. :)

Afraid I can’t get too in-depth on what everybody else was doing, as I was mostly continuing with the work I described on Tuesday. I did however spend some time helping folks out with their tasks, so I’ll give you a quick summary of what I know!

– George has been working on a whole bunch of stuff. He’s updated a number of our outpost objects to look even slicker than before, as well as some really cool stuff related to the spoiler-laden post written by Tiy yesterday. If you want the progression kept a surprise, I don’t recommend reading it!

– Kyren has continued to work hard on our new tile rendering code. To my non-coder brain it looks incredibly complex, but by the time she’s finished, the game’s performance overall should be markedly better, which is always nice!

– Metadept continued his excellent work with the monsters. Now once a monster goes aggressive, they will remain aggressive unless you trigger them into a fleeing state (which not every monster will be smart/cowardly enough to do).

I’m afraid I don’t know what everybody else was working on, as I tend to get pretty absorbed in my own stuff. It’s not much, but here’s a small sample of the kind of things you can expect to start finding deep underground. We want to add some entirely unique, non-racial stuff too, but for now, this is what I’ve got to show.

I’m always open to any feedback, positive or negative. What kind of things would you like to find deep underground?

Until next time!

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.