RELEASED Sandbound 1.3.1

Kaonicping submitted a new mod:

Sandbound - Putting the sand back in the box

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Interesting concept you have here. The old Starbound and the new Starbound both have their ups and downs; I, personally, prefer the newer Starbound over the older one.

despite that I still like the idea of making a mod that brings back the feel of some older versions of Starbound. I have a couple of suggestions that could expand your mod even further.

You mentioned that the Kluex Avatar and Big Ape are unavailable right now. Perhaps you could try making them into bosses who dwell in certain dungeons. Add a boss room for the Kluex avatar to appear in inside certain avian tombs, same deal with Big Ape. You can create a new door for these enemies ones that are hard to break and resemble the boss doors. With stagehands you can easily make the close open when the boss is around and open when the boss has died.

I also think that adding an object similar to how Tonauac functioned would be widely appreciated. Some kind of avian altar that gives the player the same blessings he did. The altar could be a drop from the Kluex Avatar.

Adding an augment merchant to Apex rebel camps, an NPC with Lana's shop pools for those who would rather spend pixels than find the stuff to craft an augment.

I also think that having to find the vault keys inside of chests could become a grind when you want to start terraforming planets. You could possibly make the key trader hang around the consoles to the portals.

(This one could get in the way of your "completely sandbox experience") I think you could put the Terramart, Frogg Furnishings, Infinity Express, and Treasured Trophies back into the game as things you can find in villages. Just have one or two of these crop up in certain villages. I would suggest making it so that they break when mined, but that is your decision.

You could also make it so that the gladiator quests from Nuru were instead offered randomly from the Floran Greenfingers.

Once again, nice mod. I can see this becoming popular with people who preferred the Koala or Giraffe days, or even people who wish to have a taste of an older fashioned Starbound.

 

I agree, in fact I do prefer modern Starbound simply because of all the nice features like mechs and Ancient Vaults that it brings, so my aim was to combine the best of the 2.

I would have kept more bosses in if they were simpler to do. Dreadwing and the Mother Poptop were nice and easy as you just spawn them in and they work just fine, but the Bone Dragon and Ixodoom were a nightmare to get working as they demand entity messages coming from other parts of the mission (eg timing with Nuru's dialogue): you can see this for yourself, if you just do /spawnmonster <bossname>, you'll see many of them will just float there and do nothing since they are waiting for something to happen. The Kluex Avatar will go into its first phase and act normally, but it won't progress into the second phase and won't die at 0 health. Big Ape is totally unfixable I suspect as it is quite a complicated fight and currently it just spawns as a glowing orb with 2 stationary projectors around it. So I might be interested in trying to get the Kluex Avatar back in, since it would be quite nice as a boss to just throw in the big Avian tombs. Hopefully I just need to slap it down and send one entity message or something.

I like this idea (it doesn't sound too difficult to do the Lua for it), so I will add it to the to-do list. If I don't end up adding the Kluex Avatar back I will probably add a rare item to Avian Temple treasure pools to craft it with.

The crafting recipes were meant to fill the gap that the lack of Lana Blake left, and they themselves use a beefy amount of pixels, so I'll leave this one for now. I've recently started a survival playthrough with this mod so I'll see if the recipes are too tedious. There are still augments in chests too, so I think it should be alright as it is (we'll see).

At the moment it seems a bit too easy to get the keys even; I'm at tungsten tier in my playthrough and I've already picked up a couple. I never really got into heavy terraforming though, so I guess I might need another way of obtaining them. I've sort of avoided NPCs so far, so I'd more likely go for a simple crafting recipe using Ancient Essence with the idea being that if you can beat the boss then you should be able to craft another key and make profit on top of that. This will go on the to-do list as well.

I was seriously considering adding Frogg Furnishings to Frogg villages since my current solution of adding all its stuff to the 'rareFurniture' treasure pool is pretty ugly and probably a formidable grind if you want to be a galactic landlord. If I do end up doing this I'd rather add an NPC than an inanimate object so it would fit better.
As for Infinity Express, I don't really feel the need to add this in since most of its stuff can just be bought from vending machines around the galaxy. Terramart might be a thing since eggs and grass seeds are currently chest loot (although they should be fairly common), so I'll have to see how hard it is to get a big fluffalo farm going. Treasured Trophies imo was right to be replaced as its trades are a bit weird and also I wanted something for people to do with spare boss drops, so I made them necessary for crafting Perfectly Generic Items.

I might want to add these back somehow, but I don't think I'd go for an NPC quest. Maybe a chance of hitting these from challenge doors? idk

Thank you for your kind words. ^^

 

Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Kluex Avatar

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I was a big fan of Choke le Fish (CleF) for breaking the rather rigid railroading of the game after Koala. The problem with it was incompatibility with many mods and dumb people trying anyways and complaining, and the mod author having a very, very confrontational attitude and some paranoia. Got in a big argument with the maker of FU and pretty much rage-quit.
My suggestion is stopping with what you have and ironing out as many bugs as you can, putting in stuff missed, then try and get in contact with some of the most popular mods authors that conflict with this about how to make this mod compatible with em, or patches for it if you still have the drive to do more.

 

If there is a lot of demand for compatibility with a certain mod (other than FU) then I'll consider it, although as it stands the only mod compatibility requested in particular is FU and realistically that's out of the question (Sayter thinks so too). With smaller mods I'd be happy to try to small changes to get Sandbound compatible with them, but there will be plenty of mods that require the Outpost in a major way and I can't make this compatible with those without basically re-writing them.
Looking at the Steam Workshop though, 90% of mods seem to be race or weapon mods or small asset tweaks so most mods should actually be compatible.

 

Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Bugfixes

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Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Bugfix + merchant update

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I originally planned to add Big Ape back in with this update, but I found that he wasn't functioning properly; he would just sit in one spot and use the same attack over and over and would also reset back to full health if you walked a short distance away.

Unfortunately this will be the last update for a while since I want to focus on other things.

 

Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Big Ape added + Ixodoom spawning redone

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Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Small bugfix

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Based on the file size change, this was present in the previous version on CF forums. It was caused by a duplicate of the aviolitecrystal.item file which made a duplicate item name conflict.

 

At some point I should make (another) copy of the Starbound folder to play with this and some mods that I assume would go well with it like CN Survivalist and EnhancedTempurature. I've been meaning to try out Survivalist anyhow.

 

Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Scanning Mode

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Nice mod, but how do I get colony deeds?

 

You can craft them at the Engineer's Table.

 

How do I craft an airtight seal? I have no idea where I'm supposed to craft it and it is required to craft the first EPP

 

You get the airtight seal by defeating the dreadwing, which can be summoned using a distress beacon.

 

Thanks mate

 

Kaonicping updated Sandbound with a new update entry:

Update to 1.4 + other changes

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