NPC Meet Your Other Characters as NPCs

The idea is simple. If you create multiple characters, you should be able to find them in your travels when you're not playing them.

I think there are many ways to implement this. You could meet them while exploring a cave system on some remote planet, that'd be weird. Or you could randomly find them just hanging around your base, like they're just visiting or something.
Maybe they'd be wearing the armor you last equipped them with. Maybe they're just wearing their regular clothes. Could they fight for you? Could they trade items with you?

I just think we should be able to encounter our "other selves" and see what they do when we're not in control of them.

Main Concept: You can find and meet your characters as NPCs. You can choose which of your characters can be found around the world by adding them to a list of "wandering characters". If you do not want to experience this feature, you simply do not add any characters to that list.

Additional Ideas:

• Character NPCs can trade with you (Not sure if trading is a thing in Starbound, actually, so I dunno.)
• Character NPCs can occupy houses
• Maybe they can fight for you?
• You can talk to a Character NPC to start playing as that character, rather than having to leave the world and come back as that character.

Multiplayer Ideas:

• Only your most recent (or, your current) character can be found on the server as an NPC, after you've logged off. None of your characters can be met while you're online. Once you log off, that character continues to run around for a while.
• Control over this is given to both the server owner and the individual players. The server owner needs a whitelist of people whose characters may be found. Each individual character must be on a separate list from the one mentioned above (see main concept) in order to wander on multiplayer servers.
• Your NPC can't trade with people, and others can't talk to them to start playing as them.

To be honest, I don't really like the idea of having this suggestion in multiplayer. It seems too cluttered and messy. I dunno. If the devs want to, they can treat it however they like, but I'm not going to say that the multiplayer elements are necessary for this suggestion.
Edit 1:

Edit 2:

Edit 3: Multiplayer ideas

P.S. Some of the ideas here came from this thread, but I already had this idea beforehand and wanted to make a thread more open to current discussion.
In that thread, somebody suggested that there could be a way to "retire" your characters, so they appear on a list of NPCs that the game can randomly generate. That's a pretty neat idea.

And, just a reminder, guys, remember to upvote this suggestion on the suggestions page (link will be posted by a bot below) if you like it!

 

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This is actually a really interesting idea.

 

Nice thinking. +1

 

Yes, please happen. I like the idea of them hanging around in your base.

 

I fully support this resurrection/revamping of the idea. Glad to see someone else liked it enough for this!

 

I would LOVE if this were to happen! Let a dev see this! It would create an interesting dynamic, and it would also be cool to have to house your other characters. Maybe they can even follow you around and protect you?

 

What if you just made a bunch of other characters just so they could follow you? Maybe just one other character can follow you at a time.

 

omg yes

 

Maybe since worlds will be global across all of your characters, maybe your characters would sort of wander around where you last signed off with them?

 

The thought occurred to me as I was writing this suggestion, "What if people just created a ton of characters for the sole purpose of milking this idea?"
Well, in the case where your other characters could fight with you, you'd want them to be well-equipped, right? You can't create an army of characters and expect them to be effective without giving them weapons and armor. It would be incredibly time- and resource-consuming to get all of your characters properly equipped, assuming you have to equip them by switching to each character to equip the armor.
It would basically be more effort than it's worth, and it would probably take a WHILE to pay off.

Yeah, that's how I'd imagine it playing out. I wouldn't expect characters to be anything more than regular NPCs, except perhaps slightly less useful because they won't sell you anything. At the most, they might be able to trade with you.

Oh, here's a good thought. What if you could simply start playing as one of your other characters simply by talking to them? Like, instead of having to leave the game to switch characters, you could simply talk to them to start playing as them, and then your current character would become an NPC. That would be incredibly neat!

 

It gets better and better! This idea is infinitely awesome.

 

I wouldn't mind having junk items that my other NPCs would sell to me (at a price that isn't player determined), say they are a higher level, I could buy up some old weapon that I loved from them as a lower level character.

 

In the IRC, somebody raised the question of how this would factor into multiplayer.
My thoughts are that it simply wouldn't.

Like, there's no reason to meet your past characters in a multiplayer server nor any way to sensibly implement it. Like, would they spawn when you log onto the server, and then just disappear when you log off? This suggestion seems, simply put, too individualized for multiplayer.

Anybody got any ideas for making it work in multiplayer, or any opinions on that idea? I dunno, to me it just doesn't seem like a necessary line of thought to follow.

 

A slight departure from the original idea, but a multiplayer variant could include "people who've played on this server" instead of "your past characters".

 

I think that would maybe get a bit crowded. But, I can sort of see how that would work. I think if it were to do that, it should only include the last character used by each IP that connects, and maybe it'd only do that for IPs that connect for a certain amount of time within the past few weeks/days.

//

Somebody on the IRC mentioned that they downvoted this idea because they simply didn't like the concept. I'd like to address that with some ideas to make the entire idea a bit more controllable.
In the older thread for this idea, somebody mentioned having some option to "retire" your characters, to put them on a list of NPCs the game can spawn. I think that's a good concept, though I don't know if "retire" is the correct word. There's probably a better word for it, but I don't know exactly what that word would be.
Anyway, I feel like having control over which characters you can encounter, if any, is an important part of this suggestion. After all, if people don't want to come across certain characters, or they don't want to meet any of their characters at all, that's totally an option.

 

Nice idea!
+1

 

The "put them on a list of NPCs the game can spawn" could also apply to multiplayer. Players that have logged on, if the server has it enabled, would be added to the list. This could probably lead to some shenanigans when players meet themselves.

Also, vanilla/story NPCs could have a higher priority so popular servers don't bog down with people meeting all the player NPCs and none of the important ones...

 

Achievement gotten: Déjà-vu

 

Interesting.
I think it'd need to be restricted to one character per unique player, though. The list concept could come into play, yeah, like only the specifically approved characters could stick around after the player has left, but I can imagine some guy setting all of his characters to walk around as NPCs, and that could quickly get on my nerves if I don't specifically care about that person's characters.

This whole suggestion probably has more personal appeal, to be honest. It wouldn't be as cool to interact with another person's personal NPCs. It should only be the one most recent character, and there should be a server-specific list.

Actually, there should be an option specifically to add characters to your single-player "wandering" list, and then an entirely separate option to allow your characters to "wander" on multiplayer servers. And on the server admin's side, they would have their own whitelist which allows people's characters to be represented as NPCs.