Repost of my earlier suggestion from temp forum. Creatures of pure energy, both benevolent and malicious. Immune to most conventional weapons, they should be real pain to handle, requiring to change your tactics and equipment to fight them. Weapons that can damage them can be annoyingly ineffective in most other situations, being slow to flire, prone to misses, weak, et cetera. Basically, it should be a group of weapons no one ever uses, "because they suck". Turns out, not always. Various "elementals" are probably in related category. And they are cool bunch, but they aren't what I am talking about. These energy creatures are closer to fusion of pixies and ghosts. Actually, they could be somewhat close in appearance to these phantoms from first unsuccesful Final Fantasy movie. Yeah, it's been bad, but phantoms looked very impressive. Oh, "phantom" is not bad name, by the way. Threat level: high.
May I ask what they really bring to the game here Zomg? Why would we have a phantom creature like this really? If I recall the ones in terraria were just plain annoying. and besides that every creature in this game can be captured.
Sure. But first of all: are you speaking of these spectres in hardmode or something else? They are not what I am talking about. Now, answer. 1. Just plain "the more the merrier", variation of encountered beasts. 2. "Energy beings" are pretty common trope of space fiction. Nod to that direction, may be interesting to people fascinated by this idea. 3. Most importantly: they break monotonous powerplay. Will expand on that. Let's say that some player finds that he is very good with sniper rifle of some sort. He can kill everything with one-two precise shots, ammo is plenty, and his current rifle is very powerful, he actually just changed his previous one which he used for very long time. Or this player may be sword guy, who is agile and bold enough to beat anything in melee range, using pure reflexes and some health syringes. That's cool, but repetitive. Now let's say that both players had some experience with flamethrowers, but found that kind of weapon distasteful. Sniper prefers to stay in range, and flamethrower lacks good range. Swordmaster relies on his ferocity, clicking left button as often as he can, slicing everything to pieces, and flamethrower seems somewhat sluggish. But then they encounter phantoms, who are immune to bullets and swords. Or maybe semi-immune (95% resistance). Or maybe they can be damaged by flaming bullets and flaming swords, but players either don't know that or don't have access to that equipment. But flamethrowers are cheap and common "rubbish" item, and this time they actually ARE useful. Sniper and fighter, using flamethrowers as secondary weapons, fight through horde of phantoms, feeling new experience again. These monsters are not something you can chop or snipe as everything else. They require another tactics, which is exciting and prolongs enjoyable game experience by "forcing" you to adapt. In the end, sniper and fighter are done with phantoms. They completed their quests, they reaped their rewards. And they now know that even most useless weapon in the galaxy, flamethrower, has its' place in the grand scheme of things. They will tell this story to their grandchildren, and when they will finish, their eyes will go to the trophy wall, where their old rusty flamethrowers are hanged, reminding them of that epic battle.
Again, as I said before — they are supposed to be creatures, probably even sentient creatures, made from pure energy. It may be not makes sense from hard sci-fi standpoint, but it definitely goes well in more broad soft sci-fi, which Starbound seems to be a part of. And while I remembered Final Fantasy: Spirits Within phantoms, I did it only because of their great appearance. Trailer. Unfortunately there aren't many of these phantoms in this trailer. They are that orange semi-transparent beasts of various form and size. While they are basically undead spirits in context of that movie, that is totally irrelevant. When I am talking about these phantoms, I only propose to borrow their pretty cool appearance style. And maybe a name, but name is absolutely unimportant. Which is important, considering this suggestion, is "creatures from pure energy, non-corporeal or corporeal, with high resistance or immunity to lots of conventional weapons, with purpose of pushing players to use less popular weapons to spice things up".
I am all for this since I loved Spirit's within and like the idea of needing certain weaponry for those unique kinds of monsters.
Creatures made of plasma that can pierce/destroy certain materials and cut you up if not well protected LAZER DOLPHINS These creatures could be random universal events, like a storm of phantoms of various intensities that floats around the universe harvesting "souls" or even creating new life (good spirits perhaps, suddent rain of healing to every creature in the planet affected)
I think these things should be on a gas planet that you need some kind of well armoured ship to get onto and bullets shouldnt affect them. That means i support.
