How worth it is pushing on with story stuff/is it just me or are the default distances kind of silly?

[Jubal]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

it kind of boils down to individual player preference

The core point here for me still being that you, an experienced player who has played many worlds, have all the information you need to adjust the game to your exact preferences, and a new player doesn't. But anyway, I'll leave it there, I don't really think there's any point carrying on this discussion: fundamentally given your bar for 'casuals' goes up to people who merely invest triple rather than quadruple figures of hours into a game, and you want the baseline game/plot to gate out a bunch of people who would like to enjoy playing it because of a sense of purism about it needing to be sufficiently 'serious', we're just not going to agree and that's not a design philosophy I'm ever going to endorse. I totally get wanting to be challenged by a game, and I think it's good when games have lots of ways to provide variance and extra difficulty for hardcore players, but I don't think I'm ever going to understand this philosophy of actively wanting new players to be kept out of or put off things they'd enjoy especially when that doesn't actually need to affect your personal experience of play at all. So yeah, let's leave it there.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As regards the temporal gear discussion: I think from my perspective finding ways to make trading a bit more interesting would maybe be a useful element, I'd like to do more trading but it's not hugely interesting at present and I suspect there could be more mechanical interest added. This might be partly connected to the lack of groundedness in the whole trading system at present so hopefully it's something that can be developed.

I also agree with CastIronGear's assessment above re where most players are likely to be re the temporal gear stuff.

[DarkGold]

2 hours ago, CastIronFabric said:

I feel fairly confident that in a full playthrough the large majority of people do not have a ton of T gears to be throwing around about 10 times while they make a trip to 20,000 blocks and back.

This is something that makes me think.

Firstly, if this was the intended strategy, it would be nice if the game let me stack temporal gears. Carrying 3 on my elk and 1 around my neck is nice, but far less than the 10 I'd want to carry.

Secondly, this is what has led me to try and build a terminus teleporter; to avoid spending that many gears. I have relatively high confidence that I could get to my destination without dying too frequently, which means that it would cost me less gears to respawn when I die than to preemptively reset my spawn point every so many thousand blocks or so, to avoid retreading ground if I die on the journey.

The problem I see is that if I change my respawn point at the destination of a story location (because I expect it to be dangerous), I can no longer use a base return teleporter to get back to my base. Which means I have a choice:

• Do not reset my spawn at the destination, be prepared to foot the cost in temporal gears when I die several times.
• Do reset my spawn at the destination, be prepared to take the long journey back, employing the incremental respawn update strategy to make the cost of retreading ground on death lower.

This ignores the challenge of making these machines in the first place, which is no small challenge, as you can't choose to hunt for specific Jonas parts. I am 1 part away from being able to build a terminus teleporter, so I'm interested in trying to get that final part. I don't think I'm close to being able to build the base return teleporter.

It would be nice to be able to set the base return teleporter to a specific block, rather than wherever the respawn point is currently set to.

Edited 1 hour ago by DarkGold
Added thought about change to the base return teleporter.

[Facethief]

21 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

When it comes to planning journeys, NPCs shouldn't have to tell you to bring food, weapons, armor, or medical supplies--that should really be a given. If an NPC is saying an area is dangerous, it's a very good idea, I've found, to take those warnings very seriously, since those warnings aren't just narrative dressing.

The problem with this is that in most games, the warnings are entirely narrative dressing, so the base expectation may be that something similar to the rest of the game will be present at the story event.
However, the NPC telling you about chapter one (which is the one that I’m mostly sure has a warning of its dangers) should by all means have an excellent idea of what the player should bring with them, at least in general; it is their job, after all, to go on that kind of adventure.

16 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I suppose if the argument is that the location distances are too far, then the question to ask is...what exactly constitutes a reasonable travel distance then? It's easy to argue they should be shorter, but what does shorter actually look like, and how does such a change impact the story and game as a whole?

IMO, a good distance would be 5-6km between different things. That’s about a strenuous day’s travel, so this would probably work for my personal taste if applied to chapter two. Although, I don’t think that the chapter one location really needs to move.

Adding to the respawn discussion, I think maybe having set respawn points at some locations would work well. For two in particular, it would make quite a bit of sense. As for how they could work, I’d have them need a simple interaction to activate, and have them deactivate once the player gets far enough away, although how far “far enough” is would likely depend on the distance between the nearby story locations.

[CastIronFabric]

26 minutes ago, DarkGold said:

This is something that makes me think.

Firstly, if this was the intended strategy, it would be nice if the game let me stack temporal gears. Carrying 3 on my elk and 1 around my neck is nice, but far less than the 10 I'd want to carry.

Secondly, this is what has led me to try and build a terminus teleporter; to avoid spending that many gears. I have relatively high confidence that I could get to my destination without dying too frequently, which means that it would cost me less gears to respawn when I die than to preemptively reset my spawn point every so many thousand blocks or so, to avoid retreading ground if I die on the journey.

The problem I see is that if I change my respawn point at the destination of a story location (because I expect it to be dangerous), I can no longer use a base return teleporter to get back to my base. Which means I have a choice:

• Do not reset my spawn at the destination, be prepared to foot the cost in temporal gears when I die several times.
• Do reset my spawn at the destination, be prepared to take the long journey back, employing the incremental respawn update strategy to make the cost of retreading ground on death lower.

This ignores the challenge of making these machines in the first place, which is no small challenge, as you can't choose to hunt for specific Jonas parts. I am 1 part away from being able to build a terminus teleporter, so I'm interested in trying to get that final part. I don't think I'm close to being able to build the base return teleporter.

It would be nice to be set the base return teleporter to a specific block, rather than wherever the respawn point is currently set to.

the 'indented way to play' is to play how you want to. This obsession in the community to fixate on playing 'how the game should be played' in a game that is 1. a sandbox by definition 2. one of the most customizable games ever made can get exhausting for sure.

So on that, here is what I am doing on my playthrough, I am making multiple bases BEFORE any one base is completed on purpose. Not only do I want multiple bases, I do not want to wait until absolute end game so that all I am doing is building bases for no reason. So I am applying my own personal rule set that gets me out in the world making multiple bases.

 

Now, I gotta ask you? How many people have an elk and about 10-20 T gears to waste while going down 20,000 steps to get some Poppy seeds for the alchemy mod in mid game?

 

[CastIronFabric]

2 hours ago, Jubal said:

The core point here for me still being that you, an experienced player who has played many worlds, have all the information you need to adjust the game to your exact preferences, and a new player doesn't. But anyway, I'll leave it there, I don't really think there's any point carrying on this discussion: fundamentally given your bar for 'casuals' goes up to people who merely invest triple rather than quadruple figures of hours into a game, and you want the baseline game/plot to gate out a bunch of people who would like to enjoy playing it because of a sense of purism about it needing to be sufficiently 'serious', we're just not going to agree and that's not a design philosophy I'm ever going to endorse. I totally get wanting to be challenged by a game, and I think it's good when games have lots of ways to provide variance and extra difficulty for hardcore players, but I don't think I'm ever going to understand this philosophy of actively wanting new players to be kept out of or put off things they'd enjoy especially when that doesn't actually need to affect your personal experience of play at all. So yeah, let's leave it there.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As regards the temporal gear discussion: I think from my perspective finding ways to make trading a bit more interesting would maybe be a useful element, I'd like to do more trading but it's not hugely interesting at present and I suspect there could be more mechanical interest added. This might be partly connected to the lack of groundedness in the whole trading system at present so hopefully it's something that can be developed.

I also agree with CastIronGear's assessment above re where most players are likely to be re the temporal gear stuff.

The way to play the game as its indented is to play the game as you like. I do not know if the developers have said that specifically but considering the fact that the game is 1. a Sandbox game if not even the first choice to use an example for describing what a sandbox game is 2. is one of the most if not THE most customizable game ever made.

Having said that, although I have only been playing this game for about 1 1/2 years, I am retired and I spend nearly every day either playing or watching videos of people play. I personally know people who play, I have been on public servers and I have watched many different youtube channels covering VS lets play from heavily modded ones, newbie ones, tutorials, live streams etc.

In aggregate of all that experience what I can say based on that experience is this, I am confident that the vast majority of people likely do not really care much about the story or lore other than a side note at best. Regarding farming for TP gears during storms, I have personally experienced one time on a public server of people doing that one time in about a month of game play. I have seen about a total of 2 videos of people farming for TP gears during a storm. Now just becasue people are not recording a video of them doing it does not mean they are not doing it, but it does mean they do not see it as compelling content because most people likely do not care about that. It also might be possible that youtube algortim knows I do not care and thus does not show me but on that I doubt it highly that it gets that granular within one game.

 

Edited 1 hour ago by CastIronFabric

[DarkGold]

20 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

the 'indented way to play' is to play how you want to. This obsession in the community to fixate on playing 'how the game should be played' in a game that is 1. a sandbox by definition 2. one of the most customizable games ever made can get exhausting for sure.

By intended, I just mean "supported and encouraged by the base game". By all means, you can play however you want, and that can involve modding the game to avoid certain challenges or create new ones. I can fill my a lot of my inventory with temporal gears, it just creates the logistical challenge of not being able to carry other things that I might want to. Sometimes that will be a frustration players want to grapple with. Sometimes there might be a different way to solve the problem that avoids that frustration.

I like to play the game without mods (on my first play through at least) because I like to try and solve the problems the devs designed with the tools the devs provided. The game is still unfinished (most of the story is not implemented yet), so it's possible (maybe even likely) there will be other ways to solve problems in the future, and creative mode is always an option, but I am interested in playing the standard version of the game.

You could say I treat the game as a series of puzzles to be solved, and I presume the puzzle designers wanted me to have fun while solving it. So if the first way I come up with to solve the puzzle isn't very fun, I look for another way to solve it that is more fun, without trying to change the bounds of the puzzle.

Edited 1 hour ago by DarkGold
Added thought about game as a puzzle.

[CastIronFabric]

26 minutes ago, DarkGold said:

By intended, I just mean "supported and encouraged by the base game". By all means, you can play however you want, and that can involve modding the game to avoid certain challenges or create new ones. I can fill my a lot of my inventory with temporal gears, it just creates the logistical challenge of not being able to carry other things that I might want to. Sometimes that will be a frustration players want to grapple with. Sometimes there might be a different way to solve the problem that avoids that frustration.

I like to play the game without mods (on my first play through at least) because I like to try and solve the problems the devs designed with the tools the devs provided. The game is still unfinished (most of the story is not implemented yet), so it's possible (maybe even likely) there will be other ways to solve problems in the future, and creative mode is always an option, but I am interested in playing the standard version of the game.

You could say I treat the game as a series of puzzles to be solved, and I presume the puzzle designers wanted me to have fun while solving it. So if the first way I come up with to solve the puzzle isn't very fun, I look for another way to solve it that is more fun, without trying to change the bounds of the puzzle.

I am suggesting it goes much deeper than 'allows you to play as you want' I am suggesting 'play as you want' is a core tenet, fundamental, main pillar, it IS specifically 'exactly how its indented to be played'. Now I am not saying the developer has said that, I am saying the evidence suggests that its likely accurate.

In a game where 'making it mod friendly' has been a core pillar for the architecture of the game from the start it begs the question, doesn't the developer intend for you to use mods?

EDIT: To be clear if how you personally want to play is the default settings that is of course your personal choice, but those settings do not make them 'correct' becasue there really is no 'correct', its just an option nothing more.

Edited 41 minutes ago by CastIronFabric