Hullo. The title is rather vague, so allow me to explain. Bear with me. Feel free to skip to "What I'm talking about" if you don't care to hear the reasoning. I've been following Starbound long before the beta, and while I've enjoyed the game throughout all these years, I feel there's always been one very glaring issue: despite all the neat features and mechanics that Starbound has, the universe feels so empty and hollow. There's no better example of this than the recent 1.3 update, where, despite being one of the largest updates to date, you could experience everything it had to offer within the first day or two after release. It's not Chucklefish's fault. The problem is that the scale of a universe is infinite, and in order for the game to be a fulfilling experience, you need enough content to reasonably fill that out; which I'd say is a near-improbable task for even a Tripe A developer with a $100 million budget. It's also a major reason why I'd say Terraria feels so rich and feature-complete in comparison (perhaps overly so), as the scale is much smaller. So I thought, why not a system where you could turn to the users to help with that? Yes, there is a great modding framework currently in place, but I'm not talking about that. The problem with a modding framework (unless you flesh it out to Bethesda levels) is that it's unwieldy and unapproachable to the average user. Most modders are also more interested in designing new mechanics or features than improving on the existing game fundamentals. There is also always the looming fear that the next update could break your mod, and then the author disappears from existence. What I'm talking about, is a user-friendly editing system of sorts that allows users to easily design their own dungeons, locations, space encounters, space stations, missions, etc; allows other users to download those as a packaged file (drag and drop them into a documents folder or something), and then have them appear in their universe as part of the procedural generation. It would also be great to have some QOL mechanics attached to this system, such as being able to mark what planets / biomes that your dungeons / locations / etc would spawn in or what type of loot would spawn there (perhaps even allowing for custom loot designed through use of admin commands, as the Subreddit is very fond of). It's also a system where no future updates would break whatever you created (unless it relies on mods). Think of Spore, but designed more with Starbound in mind. Spore's user-friendly system added a lot of life to a game that was a lot more shallow than it appeared to be. There is already a very strong sharing community ingrained within Starbound, and it would be a great way to build on that. I often see all those "Build of the Week" submissions whilst lurking on the Subreddit, and often wish those could show up in my game. It is, however, a fairly tall order. It doesn't necessarily need to have a full-on editor. Just some framework would be enough. I'm sure the modding community would happily do the rest. It's a fairly vague concept. Anyway, I don't expect this to gain any traction (or even a rapport with whoever's reading, necessarily). But I just wanted to kick in my two cents, as the game has always felt too empty for me to fully enjoy on anything more than a screw-around sandbox basis.
