PAT16 Better Gardens
If you are new to Stars Reach, I would recommend reading the previous blog post: PAT15 Physics Midterm first, as it gives a nice and newcomer friendly first view at the game.
In this post, we will look at the Better Homes & Gardens Update - which came with build 6219 of the game. While there is a larger range of various changes and improvements this patch brought, they seem to mostly fall nicely into two groups.
Plant Life
Plants have seen a lot of changes, and many (but not all) of them are geared towards giving players more options in using plants as decoration in their homesteads, and to improve the farming of plants.
In the past, most plants just disappeared when harvested, but now many plants will instead reduce in size, then grow back to their full size before being harvestable again:
An alien mushroom, ripe for harvesting
Hitting it with the harvesting beam…
…makes it shrink down.
Smol mushroom can’t be harvested until it’s big again.
This way, you can plant flora once, and then harvest it again and again. And the flora out in the wild isn’t going to be depleted by people trying to train their botany skills. The only way to actually remove these plants, is to burn them down (for now).
Flowers (like the glowing rose right next to the mushroom in the screenshots) are still getting pulled out by harvesting. Like other plants, they will create their own offspring and propagate up to a certain limit. That means, harvested flowers can regrow - as long as at least a few of them are left.
Bushes also sport the same size-change mechanic:
Large bush
Smol bush
But there are now thickets as well, which can’t be harvested:
Thicket
And they will block your movement as well! Regarding movement, the speed of that is now also dependent on whether you are going up or down a slope, and what kind of ground you are walking on. (And on steeper or more slippery slopes, you’ll even start sliding now.) Roads laid down with the Paver are amazingly fast. Peat and dirt will slow you down. I personally would like to see the same for grass and bushes as well. Not just a binary block or walk-through switch - but slowing you down to varying degrees, based on size and density. And some rustling sound, when you crawl through denser shrubbery.
(Sadly, all of my screenshots this time ended up being night-time shots. I brightened them up just a little - which is why the colors might appear a bit washed out. I really have to take more care about when in the day-night cycle I take my screens.)
Trees can now vary a lot more in size as well - but it’s not tied to harvesting in the same way. Growth speed has been reduced, so that using growth beams and growth pods makes more sense now. The max height a tree can reach is somewhat randomized and/or dependend on it’s health and how happy it is with the soil and water and everything.
The forest on Pyromycis grows a lot denser now
But inside their homesteads, players can now also adjust the height of trees and size plants as they want, and then lock it in, by stunting the plant’s growth. It will then stay that chosen size forever. Which is great for decoration:
Some plants used as decoration inside a homestead
XP and Skills
There’s soft grouping in the game now, which means you get some bonuses and benefits from just being in the vicinity of other players, without having to actually form groups (which aren’t even implemented yet).
XP and loot will be shared and receive a little extra bonus, as soon as there’s two or more players using the same tool near to each other. That’s only for tools and not for weapons, as combat XP already is being shared according to how much aggro the player generated. But loot sharing for combat is now a thing as well! You can now freely pickup combat loot without “stealing” it. It will automatically be shared among everyone on the aggro list of the creature.
Now this might not seem like much, but I personally believe that small things like can be very, very important. Let me explain.
I’m sure we’ve all been there - trying out a new MMORPG, playing your first hours, and coming across another, possibly new player in the starter area. Seeing the other struggle in a fight, with their health dropping quickly. My first impulse is, to want to help them. Pull out my own weapon, and contribute a few attacks, to take down the mob and save them from death. And in doing so, I have ended up being accused of kill stealing or loot stealing in the past.
And I see that as a huge problem. The game is fostering a mindset of playing by yourself and alone - and telling you that you may not help others that you come across. Dy doing so, you would deprive them of some of their XP or rewards. And to me that’s like one of the biggest mistakes an MMO could possibly make: punishing people for playing together - instead of just next to each other. Stricly limiting “playing together” to trusted groups of tight friends - but not something to do with strangers. Making the game rely on pre-existing friendships, but not supporting the creation of new ones.
I want to be able to just help that person - without causing any downside for them - and then maybe they say “Thanks” and I say “You’re welcome!” - and we move on. And then maybe the next day, we meet again, and they ask: “Hey, I remember you! Wanna group up a little?”
But if instead, I get scorned as a kill-stealer… then I would argue that something is very, very wrong with that game. Or at the very least, it’s not really the type of game I want an MMORPG to be. Because, even if it’s just a little thing - it does kinda set the scene for what this game is abot, how it intends player-to-player interactions to play out. As competing for who has the higher numbers, and holding others back, in an attempt to overtake them.
I want the game to make being helped out by a stranger be a joyful experience! Becase that’s how I think it should be. And I believe this does apply to other things besides combat as well - and this kind of soft grouping is a great step in that direction.
Having someone else harvesting near you, while you are harvesting as well, should not feel like they are stealing your plants and harvestables, and that their presence is to your detriment. Doing stuff together (or even just next to each other) should be beneficial and fun. Not so much, that solo harvesting is seriously disadvantaged - but defenitely enough, that the other harvesting player is welcome - and not an enemy or competitor.
Don’t underestimate how much of a knock-on effect something like that can have!
Other changes include some skills and skill trees getting re-arranged and a few new ones being added. Cooking is now it’s own thing, seperate from crafting - having it’s own cooking XP. Medical XP have been split off from combat XP as well. Some recipe unlocks have changed. And a few more things.
The Road to 24/7
The developer’s big goal right now - the next major milestone in the game’s development progress - is to achieve always-on servers. As of now, testing happens during officially announced, three to five hour long time windows, a few times each week.
While those test sessions are spread across different times of the day, they still don’t work out as well for every timezone and region. Having servers available all the time, every day of the week is going to be a necessity for an Early Access launch as well. For now servers still need to be monitored (and players supported) while they are running, which is why there’s always at least one dev present, and why testing windows are preferably kept within developer work-times.
More things are going to be needed for the EA launch - but 24/7 servers are the next big step they are currently working on. And I believe the fact that we had no wipe this patch, is a sign of that. Because the servers aren’t only supposed to be available all week - they are also supposed to be able to keep running without wipes and data loss and other resets.
Of course, some wipes are going to be inevitable. Some changes will just outright break the existing state on the server, and sometimes a start from a clean slate is gonna be required to get useful testing data. But the changes we saw in this patch, previously would have mandated a full wipe.
The changes to the inner workings of plants, did mandate all existing plants to be removed and replaced with their new brethren. For the first time we saw that happening, without the planets being reset entirely. The plants got reset - but all terrain modifications, roads, homesteads and buildings remained in place.
In the same vein, the changes to the skills and skill trees did mandate a skill reset. And again, for the first time we saw that happening without it being a full character wipe. For the first time, all the skill XP were just refunded, allowing players to spend them again. I feel that’s a major step forward, towards more continously running servers.
The game is still in pre-alpha, and there are many more breaking changes are going to happen. Being able to do partial resets instead of full wipes, for a at least some of those changes, also allows other parts of the game to be run and tested for longer. What happens to the CASIM if it runs (and is interacted with by players) for many months? Well, no way to ever find that out, if you reset it every two weeks.
Sure, you also end up with a somewhat messy hodge-podge of states and data, some of which were only possible in older versions of the game, but can no longer be created like that in the current patch… but truth is, that exactly the same thing is gonna happen in the life game. You need to have experience and ways and tools to deal with that mess, that does NOT include wipes. Because there will be changes and patches after the final release of the game - but no more wipes after that point. You absolutely must know by then, how to best introduce a larger change, without breaking the game and without requiring a wipe. That too needs trying and testing.
So to me, the no-wipe patch feels like major progress!
Things To Look Forward To
The last two patches set up crafting to become increasingly separated from the usage of the crafted items. The players using or consuming the crafted tools, weapons and foods no longer have to be able to craft these things themselves. Instead they can be gifted or traded.
Cooking has now been split off, and gets it’s own cooking XP, instead of sharing crafting XP with everything else. The same thing is going to be happening little by little to all the crafting professions. Until they all are their own separate thing, earning their own specific XP.
And at some point, players will become unable, to train all the skills and do all the things on a single character. Even now, we already see players developing diverging appetites. Some prefer to mine, while others prefer to build. Some prefer to plant and farm flowers and trees, while others like to cook. And so on, and so forth.
And while there still is little reason to trade and to keep doing one things for any other reason than the enjoyment of doing it - larger building projects like for example Mycityum (the big mushroom city build on Pyromycis) already see people take on different roles, supporting the project in their own preferred way. I’m sure we will see increasingly more of that, as development progresses.
The introduction of an ingame currency will be a big step towards more trade and less of every player doing everything by themselves. So will be traders.
There are plans for introducing item storage - so that players are no longer limited to just their inventory, but can stash some stuff. This feels especially needed for botany and forestry, as the number of different seeds and seedlings you collect grows huge pretty fast. And constantly running out of inventory space is slowly but surely turning into a pain.
As I’ve already said in the last blog post - we are currently right in the midst of a shift away from sort of a survival game, and towards a full MMORPG. That switch from every player doing everything for themselves, to players specializing and trading - that is key.
