Search the Community

So, I'm on another play through of the game and I'm enjoying it just as much as the first. This time, I tried something different. I made a personal rule that I HAD to complete all surface portals before the core portal could be unlocked. My last game I landed in areas next to portals so that my base's power could be used to power up the portal quickly. This has been a bit more tedious but I still enjoy it. I'm finding myself trying to optimize mobile power generation in ways I never did before. This got me to thinking how some subtle tweaks could increase replayability: 1) Add option for how many surface portals have to be enabled before core is open (defaults to 1 for normal mode) - for the moons it could be rounded down? or both? 2) Option for indicating landing areas to be away from surface portals (defaults to false). This forces the player to figure out a way to get the power to the portal without extenders (or at least without a butt load of them). 3) Option to randomize the final ingredients of the planet cores (same ingredients, just move them around a bit, so I have to figure it out... honestly, if this could be a special recipe I need it would be even better). Perhaps the blueprint is downloadable from the center portal once you gain access. 4) Ability to apply a multiplier to tech costs (for example, I may want to pay 2x or 5x the amount of bytes for researching things to slow my own progression down). I went to Glacio first this game and I am almost done with the entire tech tree. 5) Could have an option for how fast Oxygen depletes. I think these would be simple... 'mutators' that could be added to the game pretty easily and really changes up the game play.

The recent change to the camera has completely inverted the upward/downward movements of the camera, so when you pull down, the camera moves down instead of up. It makes sense, but I've got the usual camera settings drilled into my head and this is just constantly throwing me off. Please make this optional!

I'll bold the actual suggestions as a tl;dr, so if anyone reads any of this, please make it those. I read it's best to split posts with multiple ideas up into separate posts, but seeing as this is mostly about control settings I wasn't sure, so if a mod thinks this would be better split up please say and I'll do so. Also I guess the controller refactor (if it's still a thing) will be in 1.0 so I understand some of these suggestions might not be applicable, but it still feels worth throwing ideas out there. This is all about giving the player the options to customise and control the way they play. When I say "free move", I mean like the behaviour of the cursor you bring up by holding left trigger. Camera: 0-100 Sensitivity slider. Option to either hold left trigger when holding an item to turn the camera, or lock the camera to character's back when holding an item and hold left trigger to free move item instead. You wouldn't have to drop and pick stuff back up or move it slowly to the edge of the screen just to turn the camera. Options to turn aim acceleration up, down and off for those that do and don't like it. Cursor: Option to turn down and/or turn off the stickiness of the cursor when moving it over items. Sensitivity/movement speed slider. This would hopefully make moving items around faster too. Press A when holding an item to snap it to the terrain tool. Would look as easy as this. Maybe have an alert pop up if there's no free slots. Simple things like inventory and base management can take a while in Astroneer, so these should help speed basic gameplay up. Terrain Tool: Sensitivity slider for the free move cursor. Option to switch hold left trigger for free move cursor to hold left trigger to turn camera. If you hold left trigger then bring out the terrain tool you get a faster moving terrain tool cursor with the regular cursor on the screen at the same time. I'd like for this to remain a feature with options for sensitivity for both added. The faster tool is useful for digging up resources for example, and the slower one for precise terrain manipulation. Option to turn off hold to interact or make less things require it: Things I can think of that use it and don't need it: Base modules, seats, habitats, research catalogue. Hold to interact does make sense on dynamite and the instant byte consumables on plants, rocks and dead Astroneers. It used to be double tap Y to get into the research catalogue quickly, do your thing then double tap B to quickly get out. Everything felt snappy and responsive. Different options for tether placement: Hold down on d-pad to drop a tether that requires use of the cursor to be picked up. Option to switch the current placement and my suggestion; hold down to drop a tether that acts like a regular item, press down to drop a tether that needs the cursor to be picked up. I like that tethers disconnect when you're almost out of range so you know when to drop another. I dislike that they behave like regular items and I can accidentally pick up a tether instead of my fresh research pod that I'm trying to carry up from the caves, which can mess up my tether line and make my research roll away from me. Auto save: Turn off autosave when you enter a vehicle Have autosave on a timer Allow saving where/whenever The game lags when it saves and feels like it worsens the performance faster, which is why I never really use rovers. Skyrim's autosave system was great. The first time you enter the menus it would autosave, then it would wait 15 minutes before entering the menus would autosave again. You could turn this feature off and also change the length of time I believe. I think a system like this would be great in Astroneer. Customisable UI/HUD: Options to turn off every piece of UI like resource icons, informational text boxes, even the blue ring around items. I loved how minimal Astroneer used to be but feel that the item info boxes and being able to see icons even through the terrain are a bit much now. The Witcher 3 did it well; it allows you to turn off many different aspects of the HUD so you can declutter it, turn it all off or have all the info on screen that you could want. Thanks for reading and I'd like to hear any feedback and other suggestions.

It's a shame to hear that players with gamepads were negatively affected by this feature and I'm happy to hear that you're improving the game. Did you consider that: * Some players may have just purchased the game since it went 1.0 (like my wife and I) * Some players may have relied on this amazing feature to quickly grab items (like us) * Some players might not want it, and some players might like it (even with a gamepad) Suggestion: Make it an option to turn off, instead of removing a usability feature like this outright. Bonus points: Detect if they're using a gamepad, and turn it off by default if that's the desired behavior.

I would like to turn off the view rotation when the cursor is on the edge of the screen. When creating ramps to the core of planets, I find that when I am placing tethers along the ramp, the view rotates up because my mouse cursor happens to be near the top of my screen. I don't want to rotate the view, I want to place the tether. If I want to rotate the view, I'll do it myself with the right mouse button. I would also like the ability to turn the Clouds completely off so that I can see the planet surfaces better. Trying to see Home beacons and placed beacons is very difficult when the clouds obscure them. I'm sure there are many other settings that others would like to see added to the Options page.

I have been using the Cross play with an xbox one and my Windows laptop. I have found that reducing the quality on my laptop helps the game run smoother (due to laptop limitations). The xbox one version also has a great deal of gameplay lag even when running the game from a connected SSD. Is there any way that options within the settings on the xbox one version of the game could be introduced to ruduce gameplay quality and help lose some of the lag?

Still getting a bug where every time I launch the game the audio options reset to a previous state (currently, muting music/effects). Resetting the options seems to stick for a bit, but then the issue reappears. ...on a related note, could we get nicer audio setting controls? Clicking a tiny arrow 30 times isn't the best UX.