How about the devs add blocks of the same "category", such as dirt, wood... but diferent. An example of this could be ice-dirt, or hell-dirt... if you see where I'm going. This way, depending on the planet, you could find diferent materials for you to build with: another reason that would make you explore. Then each material could have properties that differ from each-other, but not getting technical: I don't think there should be any downsides to the material, else it would be useless on certain situations. It would just be for the looks, for collection... ... and for certain crafting recipes! Now I can see 2 posibilities: 1.) Certain types of wood makes the diferent items get diferent special effects when crafting it (with the diferent types of wood, ex: crafting a sword with ice-wood would make enemies go slower). This also means it doesn't matter what wood you need to craft that item, it will only alter some of it's status. 2.) You require a certain type of that material to craft the item. In the same case as before, if you want to craft an ice sword, this time you'll need special wood (ice-wood), but in reward, the item could have even more enhanced "buffs" (in this case freezing for alot of time on critical hit). If you can add up to this idea, or just give an opinion, reply .
Well, they are making procedurally variant weapons/items in the game already, so why not introduce some procedurally variant blocks? You could have dirt with various consistencies of minerals/chemicals that could produce varying results with crafting/building. Also, you could alter it's stickiness and slipperiness to produce textures that affect how walking on them would work (some would be close to slippery as ice, while others would slow character down while walking on them). That's just dirt. Imagine the variations on ores/rock/sand/water/...etc! Just a thought!
Oh yes, definitelly a good idea to this ! Slipperiness sounds awesome ! But I think you should be able to modify them by machines/crafting, aswell as them being able to be found naturally. So many ideas with this .
I concur with the modification idea. The ability to find them naturally is what rules out farming for blocks to some extent. You can't really be sure you are going to get what you expect, unless you can see visually that a lot of it is there. Of course, limitations can be added to prevent players from simply making every kind of block that they could find, because then they would still have the incentive to go out and find them in the first place (not that they wouldn't be going out for other reasons too, but still).
Yes, that can be a good idea, but I'm not sure about if the devs should force the players by doing that.
I just checked out the suggestions compilation thread that Blue has maintained, and it has a listing for an almost identical thread topic as this so we might want to check it out. Also, a moderator could probably move this discussion to that thread, since it came first, but they might leave it here anyway, because I think we began to break new ground on this enough to warrant its own thread. EDIT: it's called Procedurally created materials. In the Mechanics section.
I like the procedurally generated block properties, and possibly appearance, but i don't think you should be able to craft many of the blocks you can find in the wild. This would take all of the exploration out of the game. It would also be cool to have generated liquids, so liquids that flow slower, or that you can sink into faster or slower.
Like I said above, follow that link to the other thread to check out some other related (if not more in-depth) ideas on this matter. It appears to have come first as well, sorry Zero, but it looks like you weren't the first to start this discussion man.
Ah, no problem ^^! The important thing is everyone gets this feature from the devs ! Well, moving on ~~
lol, good sport! OT: As a game designer myself, I find it very difficult to do this sort of thing when coming up with a design that involves a lot of other elements. Each aspect of a game vies for the attention of the developers, and, when it's finished, the players. In this case, the Starbound Team already ha a highly appealing concept in the works, that, with or without different types of blocks being somewhat randomized, will draw a massive fanbase, and probably sustain it if they continue to update the game/allow modding. I wish I had thought of this first, tbh. I don't quite have the programming skill some of these guys have, but they had to start somewhere, and I could probably piece together how to build a game like this with enough time and patience. Congratulations to Tiy, and Demilogic(Redigit) for coming up with Terraria, and opening up the path to the games that will follow (Specifically Starbound).