Feedback Hard Mode (Idea Throwing)

Moderators, go ahead and move this thread where you feel it is most appropriate, but let me summarize first.

I want a more difficult and challenging mode in Starbound that isn't Hardcore mode where you have a single life which usually ends in misery. I would throw this as a vanilla suggestion but I also believe this could be responsible as just a 3rd party mod. The idea of hard mode is to challenge veteran players with a more difficult experience where your characters can still walk away (or respawn) from mistakes and unfortunate events. This is what I have so far to make the game more difficult, and these suggestions are what make me believe it would make for a better mod than patch.
(Ahem, from my gameplay notes)

• Crafting time 2x longer
• Crops growth time 2x longer
• Sapling growth time 2x longer
• All Regeneration 2x slower
• Fuel Consumption 2x more expensive
• Complex Recipes
• Drop 50% pixels on death
• Longer Poison Debuffs
• Single Purpose EPPs.

What do you guys think? Anything you agree/disagree with? Other ideas for a Hard Mode? Maybe the game is hard enough as is. It just feels a little too easy for me, but again, all of your work in Hardcore mode can be erased in an instant unless you base share.

 

I like the idea of a new hard-mode game type but making things take longer and unbelievably slower is too boring. If veteran players with a lot of experience already know how things work in the game, why would you change them? Things like Crafting time, Crop growth, Sapling growth are all things players learn from the base game in vanilla. Going on more scavenger hunts to find even more materials to craft basic things would also be a little too tedious for those who learned the recipes inside out and know where to get the materials. Rather than changing the time it takes to do things, think of ways to make players use their knowledge of base game and reward them for certain skills they're gotten overtime.

It would be nice if new hard-mode exclusive weapons / items were released. An interesting idea for hard-mode weapons would be weapons that gradually get a damage / fire speed / swing speed for consistently killing enemies without taking damage, or having weapons that have a fill-up bar when filled, lets you use a unique hidden ability the weapon possesses. This would encourage smart play style and reward those who take time, and you could even add a slow decay-rate to weapons for not getting enough enemy kills.

 

Well I get boring, and I want to avoid boring, but what I want to do is make the game more challenging. A proper hard mode that veterans can throw them selves against, but of course finding the line between challenge and overly tedious and boring is the difficult part.
I want food to take longer to grow so that the player can't rely on a farm as much, forcing them to forage and buy more food.
I want regenerating health to not be as easy. You can fall 10 meters and break your legs but all you need is a power nap or a quick snack.
I want fuel to actually mean something. I am currently sitting on two tanks worth of fuel just from raiding ships and a stroll on the surface of a single moon.
I want recipes to be more complex. When I said complex recipes, I did not mean more resource types, I meant more crafting components relatable to batteries.
I definitely believe that a 50% pixel drop on death is justified for a hard mode, so nothing to comment on here.
Poison is more of an inconvenience here, and I think it should be more serious. The only way poison kills you is if you are already low on health or you are in combat.
The EPPs are essentially upgraded to be able to handle all types of environments which means that you become immune to all of them eventually. This just makes the game much easier but I don't want them to change it in the normal game.

I guess with the food issue, the game kinda compensates with the short growth time with small yield. Just think about it, a single harvest from a bananan tree only really yields 1-2 bananans. Yes, I said bananans. It has always seemed strange, however, how incredibly fast things grow in Starbound, like trees. You could plant some saplings, go caving, and the trees would be fully mature by the time you came back and depending on the size of the tree farm you could build half of a house. My beef with crafting is that it is too easy. Just slap some wood, titanium, and copper together and you have yourself a... thingy station. I'm talking about ways of making the game only slightly harder, a more advanced mode. I don't think adding new weapons or buffs are very fair to the other difficulties. And besides, do you know how hard it is not to take damage? there are 101 ways to take damage in Starbound, even just a little bit. You could be smacked by an animal or a bird, you could fall just slightly too far, you could get hit by a stray bullet, you could step in poison, fire, lava, etc. And the rest of what you said... no, I will not scorn you for the silly ideas you said, because they don't sound like Starbound at all. Exclusive items, gradual effort buffs and bars, and weapon decay for lack of kills sound like a completely different game, but in order to not kill my interactive support, I still encourage you to keep going.

I'm sorry, really, but I don't pull punches, but I also don't want to discourage people from giving input.

 

The only thing i really agree with here is the increased pixel drop on death. everything else seems like "tedious mode" rather than hard

 

I suggest trying Frackin Universe. Hardcore mode does not kill you permanently, but you do lose all your items and 50% of pixels. It also opens up huge new crafting trees and the EPPs only protect against one debuff each. You are able to craft new EPP modules to protect against 2 things, but that's the best it gets. It also adds more character effects when traversing different block types. It's not going to be an answer to all of your requests, but it definitely covers a lot of them.


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