A project where I tear down most of Starbound and rebuild it to my liking. At this point just a design document discussing many of the gripes I have with Starbound and how I would improve them.
Will probably never be finished, but it's fun to think about how to unlock Starbound's full potential. And even if this will probably never happen, I might make a mod about one or two things I write here someday if I drift off into modding Starbound for some reason.
Unsorted Notes
Planet Types A planet that at night is frigidly cold and at day a burning landscape, with only the interrim being lifeform friendly. I have the visual image of an small, scientific outpost on a frigid, cold planet. There's an intensive snowstorm outside while someone rests with hot chocolate and a blanket inside, thinking and studying the yield of today's field work. Now, of course yanking out 99% of all NPCs resembling any race at all makes this a more lonely experience. I've read on a patch note somewhere on the Starbound wiki that space stations were planned as a late game structure which would be owned by guilds. Bio-Barrier (only allows a specific group of players through) Doors with Bio Barriers One of the primary reasons I dislike Starbound is with how unfinished everything feels to me. Villages (with their generated sidequest, basic structure that becomes boring after a while), Combat () & Tier Progression (This seems so arbitrary to me. There are so many procedurally-generated weapons that they make my head spin and confused on what weapon I should use on what planet)
Nicknaming solar systems and planets. Drawing own star charts. Creating worm holes on the galaxy selection/solar system screen to easily warp between two distant places. Regrowable resources like coal (charcoal), fuel (charcoal, liquid erchius fuel). Novakid ships use coal more efficiently? (Balance breaking?) This is mostly useful in a multiplayer setting Fully customizable space stations. Key doors, key items, keypads so only certain players can enter. Block protection generator/setting. (With area drawing?). Toggleable via wiring. Ventilator blocks that produces a draft. Making parkour blocks accessible (Timed fire spewer, Laser shooter, homing missile firer). Directional shield blocks. Less floaty & more snappy movement? White Grid block Drone / small Top down racing thing for mini games. Blizzards thatll very quickly freeze you to death and lower visibility by a lot. (Weather intensity levels?) Its janky having to build a hut everytime you fish because a random hostile bird could come along at any time and attack you. To give more building freedom to the player. For example, space stations are boxes with clear boundaries that you cant modify, leading to sterility and sameness. Sure, the reason for that because it would else be hard to implement space and not space zones, but I find the implementation of "if there is no background wall, let " Tech/item (ZeroG Jetpack) to increase mobility in space to make building easier
The idea being to remove any semblence of randomly generated weapons, making everything handmade - most should be craftable, while some are dropped - just like in Terraria You can play this game without crafting any weapons or armor just by getting randomly generated weapons from chests and buying statistically distinct tiers of armor. I haven't crafted any tool. The Matter Manipulator scales independently of other things such as armor or weaponry since you could potentially just grind out 50 low level planets to get every MM-Module you'll ever need, which gives it a distinction compared to pickaxes or drills. Granted, I've never tried using pickaxes or drills because it takes resources to make compared to the MM, which has infinite durability. A lot of the unfinished feeling I get from Starbound seems to come from many half-fleshed out ideas that don't quite fit the mark - random encounters become boring after encountering them for a few times, with low variety making that problem more apparent. Most planets seem copy-pasted. Planets are more or less single biomes in Terraria scaled up to full planet sizes. What would it be like if every planet is a Terraria world? That would make planets very samey, but also make them have a lot of more gameplay. A planet that's hard to find and/or a real challenge to do something with, like how Mario games often have extra worlds at the end, or an especially challenging level to challenge the player. Places that are hard to stumble upon and need to be detected via special equipment Is it possible to spawn different types of enemies in different areas with different spawnrates and other parameters (max)