Continuation

[DarianLStephens]

If you're no longer interested/able to continue development on this mod, would you be okay with me adopting and remaking it for the current Space Engineers version? I'm a big fan of Better Than Wolves, and anything which can make this game more fun is a must. I'm particularly interested in ship classes and uncraftable blocks, as that would mean carriers and tugs would be almost necessary, and having some recommended mods like Rexxar's Shipyards (Basically a giant welder-box that only works on stations) would add some great sense of progression, akin to what Flowerchild was talking about.

[SimonMeskens]

I haven't played the game in years, I added a permissive license, have at it :)

If you need help brainstorming the design, feel free to ask. If you ask here, it'll email me and I'll respond quicker :)

[DarianLStephens]

I know how to technically recreate the mod, but I might need help with the balancing aspects. I may love Better Than Wolves, but I've never progressed very far in it. What I've experienced has been some of the most fun I've had in Minecraft, though. In Space Engineers, I've never played with scenario-making, but I imagine I could just upload a world to the Steam Workshop intended for use alongside this mod. One thing I'm concerned about is whether or not I should wait for Keen's new survival overhaul, in case it breaks everything or needs more serious rebalancing after the fact. I don't know if you've kept up with the updates, but they're planning a lot of early-game blocks, with the apparent goal of making starting from scratch on a planet possible.

[SimonMeskens]

That's the reason I stopped developing the mod, the rapid update cycle made it impossible to maintain the mod. I'll have a look at creating a design document that the original was based on.

[DarianLStephens]

A design document would be a great help, thank you. They have recently added the ability to revert to specific branches of Space Engineers, so if worst comes to worst, I can pull a true Flowerchild and never update to newer versions.

[SimonMeskens]

The readme apparently has most of the design document near the bottom. The idea is that you want to make salvage a mechanic. Remove certain key resources from being crafted, add them to hostile ships. Instant hardcore!

The readme also links to the original thread where Dave and FlowerChild came up with the ideas for it. There's also this thread: http://www.sargunster.com/btwforum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8623

Which has some more debate over it. I haven't played the game in years, so I'd have to get up to speed over what's new and how to work it in. Feel free to brainstorm your ideas on how to get a similar experience in the current game, so we can have a look at the available design space.

[DarianLStephens]

If we're going to incorporate planets into the design, we might want to take a page from mods such as Scarce Resources. That mod in particular makes certain resources exclusive to particular planets, and removes most resources from asteroids, making pirating and mining bases on multiple planets (Multiple bases would encourage automated mining and transport to/from bases, along with setting up satellite relays between bases) the only ways to get certain resources. To help catch you up, Atmospheric thrusters are like giant fans, only working within an atmosphere, Ions have been made practically useless anywhere but in space, while Hydrogen works at full strength anywhere. Just to help you prepare for the next part, because I talk a lot about thrusters.

Then there are atmospheric thrusters. We could make them more expensive, or using the Planetary Cargo Ships mod, make them unobtainable or prohibitively expensive to get without stealing them. The problem with making them expensive means that you could get a lot of resources from disassembling the engines you don't need. Perhaps if we made some of the components just take ages to produce/take apart in an assembler, or to weld in/grind out, meaning you'd want to keep the completed blocks around rather than take them apart, which could encourage something like a warehouse to take parts from and attach to your ships, and maybe a quick-swap system if the blocks take a while to repair, so you can swap damaged thrusters out for repaired ones and send the damaged ones off to get repaired in the meantime. Anyway, expensive thrusters encourages wheeled vehicles, and that means you'd have to bring down ships that fly over from the ground. With Hydrogen thrusters, they could consume hydrogen much faster, so you use them as a short boost, which means you could make hydrogen-powered missiles to launch at ships, while keeping them too expensive to use for general transport. With clever usage, you could have atmospheric boosters to bring you half-way to space, then use your hydrogen to boost you the rest of the way. Then stage a base somewhere to capture cargo ships to steal space-worthy thrusters, or head off to a planet/moon which has platinum if you want to go the long route. You'd need an insane amount of hydrogen stored, though, but if we remove ice from asteroids, that means it's much more difficult to stock enough hydrogen from planetary ice to make it to another celestial body, and you might not even be able to carry all the hydrogen you'd need before it weighs too much to be worth the increased consumption just to get it up. On the other hand, it could encourage automated transport of hydrogen to space, where a ship gathers hydrogen, uses atmospheric to get half-way, then burns enough hydrogen to drift to the station, where it will stop, deliver all its hydrogen, and then maybe get pushed back towards the planet with a piston or something, where it will come to a stop with its atmospheric thrusters and fly back to the planet-bound ice mine to repeat the process. That could get you enough hydrogen to make it to and land on a moon to get platinum for Ion thrusters, but it would still be more efficient to just steal them from passing ships. I would be concerned about making hydrogen just a stop-gap between Atmospheric thrusters and Ion thrusters, though. Then again, depending on the amount of thrust it outputs, it could be invaluable for quick getaways or preventing your target from outrunning you. Then if the thrusters and hydrogen tanks are cheap enough to produce, it would still be amazing for missiles. Okay, I feel like I've been rambling a little, so I'll stop and let you read this.

[SimonMeskens]

If you have parts that can't be made more expensive because of the disassembler (I'm personally in favor of just removing that blasted thing, as you can read in the thread I linked), the idea is indeed to make them salvage-only.

So here's how I tackle stuff like this:

• State your goals
• Figure out the design space. Which elements of the game are really interesting and deserve shine?
• Figure out the stuff that's holding the game back

It seems like your goal is to keep the player on planets longer, force the player to travel more planets, etc. That actually pushes you into Empyrion territory. Here's something I wrote about Empyrion:

"I think energy use is the Achilles' heel of the whole design and by listening to the community, they'll screw it up. Oxygen use is a fine limiter for early game and a nice way to force you to use vehicles (and thus fuel) to explore a planet. The point where you travel to the crashed ship is one of the better moments in gaming I've experienced in a while, with me going "okay, what do I need for this expedition?" naturally, without the game forcing me to, just to go visit a wreck I could see with my eyes. That was working really well.

The big issue is the status quo. I think there's an issue with forcing people to invest time just to maintain status quo in their games. In BTW, before renewable food, there's a tension going. That's fine, but only because it resolves later. The hardcore spawn is fun too, as it occasionally sends you on a nostalgic trip back to that feeling. Fuel is like food in BTW, it's a major bottleneck and it makes you decide which things to do based on availability. It has that same tension.

Problem is, by listening to the community, they'll just eradicate that tension, while the solution is something that fits into the design. I agree that maintaining a base right now isn't fun, as you'll constantly be mucking about in the game's worst UI window, trying to figure out which things you want to shut down to preserve energy. Then you go down planet-side, to monotonously mine resources (mining is even more dull than in Minecraft). On top of that, once a planet is mined out, the game decides for you that it's time to move on, making planets very throwaway resources. It feels like the punishment is in there, but there's no resolve for it. Instead of eradicating the punishment, they need to work on the reward, the opposite of what they're doing by eliminating oxygen and energy requirements.

I think the tether idea is nice, as you mentioned, and it's pretty unique to this game right now. I would play that up I think. Maybe introduce planets that are almost entirely made up out of fuel, so they allow you to be extravagant with fuel, build bases, mill about, but only in that planet's range. Basically, in the later game, you force players to find fuel planets and then tether them to those planets. Any solar system not sporting a fuel planet will have that tension going, so with the chances of finding two rare resources in one system being low, the player will want to visit these high tension areas. This whole system would rely on some way to limit the amount of fuel a player can carry, so you can't turn your capital vessel into a fuel planet of sorts and skip all the tension altogether.

Another way to accomplish this would be rare suns that give off a different light. You introduce a new tier, solar energy, which is free, but only available near these suns. The bonus is that you can spot these from far away, so players could hop from rare sun to rare sun, make bases there. When they explore anything in between, however, there's that tension again. Maybe the rare suns could be black holes and the energy could be generated form gravity tidal waves? Dunno, sounds trendy and sci-fi.

So yeah, they are in the unique situation with that tether mechanic that they CAN provide excesses within the tether bubble, as long as players have a need to go out of the bubble. It's interesting design space and I'm very afraid they won't recognize it anyway."

The idea is that tethering is fun. First you tether the player to local resources, then to local planets (and in Empyrion local suns, etc)

[SimonMeskens]

I tried looking for my old design documents on where I wanted to take the mod, but unfortunately, that hard drive is broken :/

[DarianLStephens]

I don't know if it's necessarily a problem to be able to disassemble some components, just not all components. I believe you're now able to prevent a component from being assembled/disassembled in certain types of assemblers, or to massively increase the processing time, so that could solve some issues. You could make it so that you're only able to disassemble/assemble certain components with the assembler you can build, and you're required to 'acquire' a fully-featured (Relatively speaking for this mod, if we limit it) one from passing ships. However, it does take a lot of iron to make armor, which means you could have all the iron you'll ever need by grinding down and disassembling a ship's steel plates. Then again, we do have the ability to make certain components return a different component now, so perhaps we make it so that armor returns scrap metal rather than steel plates, further encouraging you to pull ships to pieces and assemble them differently. I would be worried about tedium in misplacing blocks, meaning you have to grind it down and re-refine the scrap metal, but it might be worth it. Or make blocks be started with an invisible, pointless, infinite component so you can plan things more easily without wasting steel plates. Or people will just have to be more careful, maybe use a projector to build. Actually, that could make it easier to build as well, if people build areas where they can make a projector project in single blocks at a time, which would be welded by their shipyard at the press of a button.

The risk of storing large amounts of hydrogen increases exponentially as you store more, because it's explosive, and a single bullet in the wrong place could set off a chain reaction, unless you store the tanks very far apart and away from delicate components, but then that requires a lot more resources for proper shielding to prevent them from blowing up anyway. Then again, if your base is well-defended enough, that might never be an issue. Still, accidents do happen, so you might accidentally collide with one, or a stray bullet could catch it?

Perhaps laser drills which constantly produce an amount of resources, but don't ever deplete? Or which deplete, but recover over time, meaning you need to have multiple bases going or to have the bases move themselves every so often to keep your supply going. The drill could get different resources depending on the planet, so we still have the uniqueness of them. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant?

Okay, local resource tethering. Let's say Earth has enough variation of resources to get you off-planet, but not advance in space. Asteroids no longer have anything but iron and silver, so the next logical step it either trying to capture ships with the hydrogen you've got (The only way you can maneuver in space at this progression stage), trying to get to another planet, or landing on and building wheeled vehicles on Earth's moon. Let's say moons' unique resources are platinum and gold, meaning to get ion thrusters (And thus energy-based space travel), you need to spend some time there, mining and refining to get them up and running. Then, you are able to move through space much better, and can start pirating ships better. Actually, were you saying that things like Ion thrusters would only be capturable things? That would greatly increase the requirement of ferrying up (Or making something to do it for you) hydrogen, and being more efficient in using it so you can capture ships.

So, would you say this game's main strength is pulling things apart and putting them back together again, and building awesome moving structures to do it for you?

[SimonMeskens]

I think deciding which parts to make only capturable is probably the main design space for a hardcore mod, yes.

I think the game's main strength is probably in stripping for parts, rebuilding, yes. The disassembler kinda ruins that. The best comments I received on the original mod was people having to capture certain parts from wrecks, then welding them onto on their ships using merge blocks. That mechanic was apparently very novel.

[DarianLStephens]

I guess it's not enough to have a percentage of components destroyed when grinding blocks down then, huh? Actually, now that I've said it out loud, that sounds like it could be very annoying, but I also think it could work if balanced right, so most common blocks can still be made, but it's more difficult to just disassemble and reassemble them. It's not impossible, but it's more practical to tear chunks of ship out and merge them in place.

[SimonMeskens]

most of the common resources, I'd just leave as is. Pick your fight. You indicated that progression is kinda based on thrusters these days, so just make all thrusters non-craftable, then figure out where progression breaks, just enable that one thruster for crafting, etc. The bit you wrote above about thrusters seems to indicate you more or less know which ones you want to gate in which way.

[DarianLStephens]

Aha, unplaceable blocks, but using resources you can still produce/steal yourself! That way, you'd want to build protection around these valuable pieces but could still repair them if they get damaged. Making some components unique to these blocks take a while to install could still encourage a system to swap out damaged blocks for functional ones you keep in storage, while you repair the damaged blocks with spare components. If the refinery was removed or greatly reduced in effectiveness as you suggest, then you'll never be stuck, but you will still have motivation to steal, because it's orders of magnitude more efficient. Plus there's still the whole 'Unplaceable Blocks' thing. You could even have upgrade modules (Blocks which, when attached to a supported block, can alter the way that block functions) hidden amongst some ships, so you can still upgrade your capacity for self-sufficiency further down the line. Oh, or if the the upgrade modules are on well-defended ships in dangerous territory, or the blocks are in stations on hostile planets or something.