PAT8 Homestead Building

This will have to be a shorter report then the previous ones. Reason being, that this test was all about Homesteading, and I barely managed to even start building my house yet. Therefore, the real meat will have to come with later updates, when the test-servers get opened up again.

Yesternights test started with some technical difficulties. While the devs could login just fine, some sort of bug caused all player accounts to show an “you are already logged in” error, and nobody was able to actually join the servers.

Subsequently, we spent the first 10 or so minutes of the test, just chatting with each other in Discord - all stuck on the login screen, unable to start playing.

The developers couldn’t possibly find and squash the bug that quickly - so they immediately started to whip up some workaround to bypass that “you are already logged in” check, so that players could actually get in. That’s the sort of stressful experience that you definitely don’t want for your Saturday free time. 😉

Other than that initial hick-up, the game ran exceptionally smooth though. I personally had “jidder” problems through earlier tests - where the player character would flicker back and forth a little bit, whenever you started or stopped running. The client and the server didn’t perfectly agree on exactly when you started/stopped, and so your position got corrected - not just once, but twice, for some reason. That’s completely gone now - already was gone Friday.

Other testers reported the grapple (a movement device just like those in Attack On Titan) working a lot smoother as well. The same was true for terrain updates when digging holes in the ground, or dumping materials, etc.

Dave, why are you standing on your head?

Tasty Tungsten

Now the stated goal for this test was to build a house - obviously. And after my previous building attempts during the last tests, that meant to me personally, I wanted to build a Fabricator and use that to create pre-fab building modules.

And while the XP-costs of certain skills had been reduced, and the XP-gains are generally massively boosted during tests - there are still a few things to be done, before you can start actually building your house:

• first you have to earn ranger XP - through surveying or other players using your camp
• then you have to spend that XP (in a camp) to max out the size of your ranger camp
• then you can unlock “homesteading” in your ranger skill tree (WIP, probably not gonna stay there) - in a camp
• then you have to earn Minerology XP - by mining
• then you have to spend quite a few of those XP to unlock Civil Engineering - in a camp
• then you have to collect the materials needed for the instaformer
• then you have to craft the instaformer - on a toolmaker in a large camp
• then you have to collect the materials needed to craft blocks
• then you have to craft those blocks - on a lathe in a large camp
• then you have to earn civil engineering XP by placing such blocks
• then you have to spend those XP to unlock prefab module recipes
• then you have to collect the materials for those modules
• then you have to craft those modules on the lathe - in a large camp
• then you can place your camp someplace and upgrade it to a homestead
• then you can start building by placing your modules inside your homestead

A few of those steps can be done in different order. Like, since you need Minerology XP early on anyway, it does make sense to right away go mining for materials that you’ll later gonna need to craft those tools and blocks. But that’s something you wouldn’t know, if you haven’t done it before. So, to a completely new player, who still has to figure everything out from scratch, that list above is probably the order in which to do things at first.

Portal to Temperate Planet

Mining Salt in a Cenote

Now, this is quite a list of things to do. And despite this test being the first to last for 3 hours, instead of the just 2 hours we saw in all previous tests - and despite already knowing what to do from previous tests - I ran short on time.

There were a few complications along the way, that cost me some extra time. Like for example, when trying to harvest metals in space, I repeatedly ran into issues with Ball Hives being stuck inside the geometry of asteroids - able to shoot out from there, where I could shoot them, as the my shots didn’t go through in that direction.

I also had to hunt a few creatures for needed materials - and there had been some combat changes that made things more of a challenge. Special mention goes to the Ball Hogs new ability to freeze you in place for a while, which is super annoying. Getting CC’d by mobs is never fun, is it?

Crafting the Fabricator also requires Plastic, made from Oil. Both Plastic and Oil are intermediate materials. You can’t find or harvest those - you have to make them yourself from other stuff. Which adds some additional steps to the process of getting a Fabricator made.

By the time the test ended, I had barely managed to unlock the first set of pre-fab building modules, but I still have to get access to the later sets - which include walls with windows in them, and other stuff.

Back in Space

Already during the initial waiting phase, while the login was broken, testers were starting to organize a city.

Now, there is no city stuff in implemented in the game yet - so what people meant was just everyone getting together, and building everyone’s houses next to each other. Wisperin and Beanstalk started building the outlines of a city wall and laid down some roads in the middle, so that people could build their Homesteads around that.

There have already been some organized, cooperative building attempts during the last few tests, but the fact that during this test players were - for the first time - able to gift each other materials and items from their inventories, helped a lot. This rudimentary “trade” feature allowed people to work together more closely, and help each other by providing and exchanging materials.

I only joined the city at the very end of this test - it had taken me most of the time available to unlock all the skills, craft all the tools, and just craft a few foundation pieces. I can only hope that there will be a few follow-up tests that are timezone-friendly to me, so I can actually build my house. Because I really want to. To me, this feels like the first time there’s a really strong pay-off to the things you do in the game. Like, sure, you could previously complete surveys - but those didn’t produce actual maps yet, all you got was “a sense of pride and accomplishment”. Sure, you could max out a few skill trees, by gaining and spending XP - but there was no real economic use to any of those. You unlocked and trained them, just to try them out.

Being able to build a really nice house for yourself, to me feels like a really satisfying and rewarding application of those skills, and use for those materials, you spend so much time unlocking and harvesting. You are actually producing tangible results - and that’s just very enticing. I WANT to build that house, and given the chance, I’d spend many hours just tinkering with module placement, moving things around, seeing how stuff might fit together, placing walls upside down, or lying flat - just figuring out what can be done, and trying to come up with something unique and interesting.

But for now, all I have to show are some foundations, and a single corner wall:

Very Early Beanstalk City

Update Dec 12

Another two hours of playtime: Got some actual house building does time.

I used the first set of building blocks I had unlocked, to build the ground floor, and some railings (made from upside-down walls), and then I stupidly unlocked ramps. It probably would have been more clever to unlock windowed walls first, because I really didn’t have much use for the tile from the ramp set, and didn’t get much XP from placing that either.

So, I had to resort to just repeatedly placing, removing, placing, removing, placing removing the same piece of foundation over and over again. For 1 xp each time. Until I managed to get back up to 100XP again, to unlock windowed walls as well.

Making windowed walls does require glass - which I didn’t have any of. So I tried prospecting the jungle planet for sand, but the tool said, the entire planet had only 320 sand in total. Trying to find that seemed too much of a hassle, so I took a little detour. Traveled to the desert planet to pick up some glass there (chronophaser-melted sand) and since I already was there, I picked up some sandstone (chornophaser-lithified sand) as well. And on the way back, while I already was in space, I stocked up on some more Iron too. I still had a bunch of tungsten - so all my building needs should be fulfilled with that.

I went back, made and placed some windowed walls, and some more ceiling tiles (another floor finished) - only to notice that I was about to max out the height of my claim. Now I wonder if there might be a way, to get a second claim placed above my first one, so I can continue building up…

But at that point time ran out and servers were shut down anyways. There will be a new build for saturdays test, with some bugfixes and minor improvements. It’s still gonna be the Homesteading test though - not a new wave of tests. Here goes hoping that the update is not gonna require a reset… so I can continue my build a little bit. I feel like I only just got started!

Building a House

Update Dec 14

Well, after the size-changes to the homestead, so many of my walls got stuck… (well technically a few were already stuck before), that I decided to delete my first homestead and start up a new one. Was hard to find a nice spot - the place is really getting crowded now.

Building another House

Update Dec 18

Aaaaand it’s done. Well, done-ish. For now. I’ll probably come up with changes I might want to do later… it’s like, you can tinker with those things forever - it’s never done.

But I tried to build something a bit more creative - not just a plain box. And I think I did achieve that - so I’m pretty happy with that. You can’t look at it too closely - there’s some gaps letting through light, there’s Z-fighting everywhere, many places where things just don’t line up right. That’s because I’m using building pieces in places and orientations they were not meant to be used.