SES_J

Ha, I do have some ideas for this, but they don't involve the tethers at the moment. Picture the new idea as being sort of the "upgraded" version of the tether lines, conceptually right in between the clunky, unwieldy resin base hubs and tethers. The rough idea would be a printable item that would take up an entire backpack slot (unlike the tethers which take up essentially 1/11th of a slot). And which would allow you to extend out much longer base conduits without it making a giant hub with the 2-slot at each little juncture. You could make any individual conduit line as long as you'd want, and then connect them to other bases, hubs, and and vehicles at either end. And then, of course! Rails. Potentially these little one slot items (or a separate printable item) could be use to add a little rail cart to any conduit. The first tier of a rail cart could have a single 1-slot that could carry single resources all the way along the conduit until it hits a hub/building/vehicle and transfers the resource when it gets there. The rail cart could be upgradable into a 2-slot that you could do the usual 2-slot things with, like add a storage rack or other secret things we're planning to add, that would all have nice contextual functionality the player could discover. SPOILER: The obvious endgame here is the ability to build roller coasters. Slap a seat on your 2-slot rail and hop in.

I think the interesting aspect of hunger would be its potential for how it interacts with other big aspects of the game, including basebuilding and in the future, farming. There is something about this overall fantasy of carving out a long-term niche on an initially hostile world that's appealing about this. I agree with the sentiments about how it would be silly to add another bar to the game/backpack indicating how hungry the Astroneer is and then just kill them when it hits zero. Makes me wonder if there wasn't a more interesting and interactive way to incorporate the benefits from eating. For example, offering slight upgrades to different parameters of the Astro's functioning, such as speed, fall damage, and resilience to hostile elements such as cold. It's conceivable that hunger could also eventually kill you, but given that the player respawns (the game's relatively unpunishing death mechanic) you would just regain the ability to go for hours without eating again. The altering/improvement of personal attributes also opens up more avenues, and coordination between mechanics. Different foods could alter different abilities, and part of the exploration of the mechanic itself could be the alchemy or what have you of farming/harvesting/synthesizing the food that helps you in what you're trying to do. Sorry, I played a lot of Morrowind. Thirst is another mechanic to potentially explore, although it would essentially be subject to the same above thoughts. Water is a resource I'd like to introduce for other reasons, and may also help solve and interact with some of the game's other problems. One narrative we could push is that some planets (including the starting world) have water vapor in the atmosphere and thus you don't have to subject yourself to this mechanic if you don't want to leave. But as always, pushing yourself out into hostile worlds could net you greater rewards. The initial idea (that we didn't quite finish) for the fuel condenser right away would be that it was one of two devices, one to harvest H2O from the atmosphere, and the other to perform a reaction to produce hydrogen based fuel. Once we have more Automation type mechanics players can work out means for doing this, but it would require more work than the current fuel condenser, which would be good. One of my favorite aspects overall of how we've handled survival is that we don't have "Modes" in the game. There is no Easy/Medium/Survival/Roguelike nonsense, we can just bake it all into the worlds. Nobody's requiring you to travel to the planet that will burn you to a crisp and force you to bring a spaceship full of supplies, but if you do then you get bragging rights and a reward. And new players won't have to juggle a thousand different meaningless mechanics just to get to the core gameplay. Anyway, I'm open to input on all of the above.

Hey Everyone! I've just put a build live to the [beta] branch, which you can opt into with Right-Click-ASTRONEER, Properties, Betas. As always, please only do this if you're willing to put up with things like broken save games and generally buggy behavior! If you'd like to help us out, play 0.2.109.0 in the beta branch and look for any new bugs that you are unable to find in 0.2.108.0 on the live branch. Please ONLY comment if you know for sure that you've found a bug that only exists in the new build (not just an already existing bug). If we're confident that we haven't broken anything big in the new build, and it is an overall improvement, we'll push this to the main branch! Here's the list of things to look for in the new build! Fix issue where resources hover out of backpack on loading save. Allow the 2 backpack Expansion Slots to be used for Filters/Tanks/Tethers Fix bug that would not allow a full Oxygen Tank to rescue an Astroneer from suffocating Fix exploit the would allow players to trade for infinite resources by thieving them like a pirate after launching Cut the value of Fuel in the trade module by half Increase the amount of time a trade takes on the trade module Double the power requirement and production time of the Condenser (Probably more we should do here to make it even less OP, will consider changing up the fuel mechanic in the future) Fix most (if not all) of the cases where placing items on a storage on a truck would cause all kinds of flying physics behavior. Fix bugs that would allow player to make building platforms even after the conduit hub has been branched Change the Shuttle/Spaceship hub to be the same type as the habitat Allow Shuttle/Spaceship to reattach to previously created hubs Improve algorithm that picks the height of new base platforms, allowing for flatter bases Fix creepy T-Pose corpses that everyone's been finding Fix being able to pick up your own seat while seated inside Fix being unable to leave an unattached seat Add ability to get in a seat no matter where it is attached Add ability to get in printed Habitats when they are attached to shuttle/rover Fix bug on Habitat that would generate crazy flying terrain if attached to rover after save load Fix the Popper Hazards spawning new research items on every save load. Attempt at a fix for the joining client in MP games being unable to click launch buttons with mouse. Fix for controller cursor disappearing on host when client joins Fix for Inverted controls also applying to cursor motion After we get 0.2.109.0 on main, we'll migrate these notes to the Patch Megathread and archive this one. And by the way, if you don't know me, I'm Jacob! I lead up the design over here at System Era. I'm starting to whittle down on all of my big buggy issues from launch and so I promise you I'll be starting in on more gameplay discussions here as we move into the phase of rebalancing existing content and adding new features. So please leave your requests/discussion of all that for elsewhere! The faster you can help us test our [beta] branch builds, the faster we can keep growing the game! -Jacob