PAT10 Refining

A new test wave has landed on Jan 25. The new feature this time around was refining, which allows you to turn crafting materials into different crafting materials, using a refining station.

Previously there were only a few recipes for this, and for a lack of a dedicated crafting station, they happened on the stove: You could turn shale or wood into oil, and then turn oil into plastic, which was needed to craft various tools and items.

Oh no! I’m PlayerCharacter and my real character stands here…

Now that refining is it’s own headline feature, there’s a lot more recipes. And I mean a lot lot. There’s so many in fact, that finding the one you want in that long list does get tedious. There is no search function yet - but that is planned to get added later. And with that many recipes, it’s sorely needed. As an intermediate relief, the devs want to at least sort the list alphabetically, for the next tests.

hooby, hoobi-er, hoobi-est - I’ve invented a new form of character progression!

Now, while you still need oil and subsequently plastic to make tools, weapons and equipment - many of the other recipes produce materials that don’t have much yet. But it’s definitely helpful that you can make some more items, instead of having to find it all out in the world (hoping it hasn’t been mined dry yet).

Right now, you can unlock refining and five groups of recipes in the Mineralogy skill tree:

• Refining (gives you some basic recipes)
• Sedimentary
• Metamorphic
• Ingneous
• Alloy
• Other

Refining unlocks - Part 1 Refining unlocks - Part 2

This is of course WIP and will change later. Also, this does not include all the recipes currently available - there are some you have to discover yourself. Like for example, you can unlock the plastic recipe by successfully creating oil. Other recipes might be unlockable by finding (or chronophasing) certain materials or through other conditions.

But for now, the only other recipe you might need - next to oil and plastic - is anti-gravium. Anti-gravium is needed for crafting the Gravmesh (think jet-packs), and can be made from anti-matter. Anti-matter can be looted from Shroomguards - little flying insect-creatures that seem to guard a special kind of mushroom (which when domesticated is the other known source of anti-gravium).

Disco Dancing

You don’t even have to fight or kill the Shroomguards - they are very happy to explode themselves whenever you are within their blast radius. Since they always come in groups, it’s highly recommended you either come equipped with a shield - or you make good use of the terrain and obstacles like trees, the reduce the number of direct hits you take. If you already have a gravmesh - do not try to fly away! They are faster than you, and in the air you make for an easy target. Also keep in mind, that the invisibility frames of the dodge roll do currently not protect you from area damage - they only negate direct attacks.

So happy to explode!

The fact that Shroomguards just explode and shower you with loot is to be considered a bug insofar, as that you are not actually supposed to get that stuff that easily. In a future version they will likely only drop stuff when you kill them - but not, when they explode themselves. Funnily enough that might lead to anti-gravium scarcity again, since killing a Shroomguard before it explodes is not easy at all. They are so incredibly eager and happy to kill themselves, you don’t really get much chance to do any killing.

Shroomguard Remains

A discussion topic that showed up in voice chat briefly, was the “swiss cheesing” of the game worlds. Right now, because everyone starts with a Terraformer and is pretty much required to train some skill in Mineralogy, at least to unlock other professions - you have 100% of players dig holes. That might be somewhat different once “Miner” is a profession you have to actually choose, instead of being forced onto everyone. But even then, there will be holes, because someone has to get those materials somehow.

Starting a new Homestead

And right now, paired with the still just 1km by 1km sized planets (planned is to eventually increase that to 4km x 4km) and the high population density (all testers of all testing groups share the same 4 planets) - we see large-scale destruction of the landscape, to the point where near the portals it’s getting really hard to just walk. Because the ground is so pockmarked and cratered.

Building a House

So the discussion was about how that could be avoided - and it probably can’t. It’s not the goal either to completely stop that from happening. In the final game there will be many planets, and obviously a good chunk of those will be mined, messed up, discarded and eventually get deleted to make space for newly generated, pristine planets.

Gashogs don’t die, they get bigger

Of course, planetary governments will be able to prevent it - by just being very strict about who does get digging/terraforming premissions, and in which parts of the planet. But what is lacking right now, is players’ ability to undo or heal any of the harm. Even if you tried - you’d only end up making things worse, since the available tools really aren’t well suited to the task.

You have to kill them 5 times in a row

The main idea then would be, to give players the ability to “smoothen” terrain. This should probably go on the Paver and be part of the Civil Engineering tree - as least as things are now. And using that tool to make things pretty again should be fairly low effort and low cost. Not require materials - but just take the crater peaks to fill the crater bottoms. And it should be time-effective as well. Less time consuming than messing up the place.

Before you get any sweet loot.

The question whether that’s enough to incentivize people to keep the ground in better shape or not, couldn’t really be answered yet. Ideas like adding extra rewards or special minigames to incentivize cleaning up the mess have been thrown around - but I personally am not a fan of this form of external motivation. Cleaning up the terrain should be intrinsically fun to do, and getting beatuiful terrain should feel rewarding enough to do it - just my thoughts.

I think it would be best to start with creating some tools that make it fun and easy to smooth out the craters - and then just see what happens. Right now, players couldn’t really clean things up, even if they wanted.

More House Building

Another interesting tidbit from the current test is, that there is an alpine tree on Pyromycis that causes some sort of error to pop up in the engine on loading. The tree still works as intended, and everything still runs fine - but if there are 5000 trees on the planet, the game has to track 5000 errors when loading in, and that takes a while - and can noticably slow loading times.

Even more House Building

In order to alleviate that issue, a few players have taken to torching the place (some jump at every excuse to cause a flaming inferno, whenever they can), and burning down as many trees as possible. Funnily enough, that doesn’t work though! The planet does have a certain limit of trees that should be there - and if the actual number is less, then trees can reproduce. If there’s free space they basically just drop seedling, and a new tree starts growing there - allowing forests to naturally regrow. It’s quite fun to watch, especially since it happens unnaturally fast - but it also means that all these attempts to reduce the load-time problem by decimating trees were extremely shortlived.

Not me though, I would never

In order to actually change things, you would have to import error-free trees from other planets, and plant those instead of the alpine trees you cut down - in order to keep the total number of trees in balance, while reducing the relative number of problem trees. I tried doing that a bit, and it actually works. With a bit of effort you can supplant one species of trees with another. Then the server crashed, the state rolled back, and all my planeted trees were gone, and all the alpine trees had returned… in the end, my attempted permanent fix proved even more shortlived!

Large Clearing

Another thing that was happening during last test-session, was a group of players teaming up, to cut loose a huge junk of rock that formed a huge arch, in order to collapse it. Between the regular wipes, rollbacks and character losses to corruption bugs, many testers really like to just mess about and see how far they can push the simulation. And if you want to see some of the impressive results of that, you’ll have to check out the game’s official discord. There are plenty screenshots and gifs of this in the #wow-moments channels.

Oh Noes, Server Crashed

I think it’s always a great sign for the viability of a sandbox, when players can have the biggest fun just messing about and enjoying themselves. Less quest-rewards and checklists full of busywork tasks - and more explorative play in the form of “Ooooh, I wonder what I could do with that!”. In a good sandbox you are never short of ideas what to do or try next.

Log Back In - Dead Floating In The Cavern - Far From Where I Was

And once a bit more permanency is established, people can also take on greater building projects and more impressive landscaping efforts, and all sorts of stuff. Right now, you’d rather just build a quick house, since it’s soon gonna be deleted again anyways. And even with highly increased xp-gains, and decreased material costs, it still takes a while to actually get building. And there’s only so much time to be had, each test wave.

And all the Trees are Back