Frontiers Observations/Wishlist

[ThrashNeon]

Love the new base building updates, but there are a couple of things that I wish had been addressed:

You are able to upgrade inventory slots on your ships and multitool (great!), but not your suit . Seems like an odd omission, and forces you to grind for slots.

Still no ship appearance customization (at least colors, please!), and character customization could use some love (e.g: there are non-editable accent colors on some gear, and some pieces seem to have a tint even if you choose a different base color).

Increased save slots are truly appreciated, but manual save management is still a bit… weird (PS4). You can’t load manual saves until AFTER loading the last autosave?

Internal ladders are simply ridiculous for more than two floors. Have to climb all the way up, and jump down at an angle in order to go up one floor. Need a button to get off the ladder.

Mission management. If you start a main game mission in creative (e.g. New Beginnings/base building) accidentally or on purpose, there doesn’t seem to be any way to cancel/reset it from the mission log.

I haven’t started messing with settlements yet… looking forward to it!

Hopefully, I’ll have time to see if my previous “strategy” thread needs updating:

Creative mode "strategy tips" - Updated for Origins

Here’s how I’ve been doing creative mode (updated for Origins):I guess there might be spoilers in here, if you are totally new to the game. For creative mode, personally, I want to settle in a Tranquil galaxy, so my goal is to get to Eissentam!. The quickest/easiest way to do this is to do the Artemis quest. When the game starts, I immediately install the economy and conflict scanners, and launch to check the current system for cool home planets and the galaxy map for decent system economie…

[sheralmyst]

Hoping for elevators.
Need the return of flipping objects. Can only rotate now.
Still hoping for more Lore.

[Clemm]

@ThrashNeon

Increased save slots are truly appreciated, but manual save management is still a bit… weird

And, for heaven’s sake, let us name saves so we know which is which. This is especially important now that you can have 15 saves!

[jedidia]

The one thing I don’t quite get about frontiers is how they had an element that seamlessly ties into the core gameplay (exploration), and essentially made it useless for that…

I mean, settlements are a cool thing to find as you go. But they’re all very similar, small hamlets eeking along at the brink of existence and will stay that way, unless the player decides to adopt it and build it into something bigger.

How does that fit the exploration core of the game? I mean, the feature that I can take over a town and influence it is very neat, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day, I’m a traveller, not an itinerant mayor. I might do that with one town, hey, maybe two. But all the other towns in the universe will always remain these small hamlets with no development, desperately waiting for a player to save them, mostly devoid of surprises.

But the procedural system they created for these settlements is effortlessly capable to make settlements that vary significantly in size. From what I can see, there’s not even anything preventing the use of a “procedural mayor” that makes all those decisions the player makes (could be as simple as purely random, for all I can tell) and give the whole settlement some history that you could learn by looking at various buildings and talking to people in any settlements you come across.

Somehow I feel the settlements would have done much more for the game without really any additional effort, while still providing the current functionality…

[sheralmyst]

I would give you like 10 Likes but I can’t

[sheralmyst]

SM did state that they would be adding to this new feature

[jedidia]

He did, but somehow this would have felt like the most logical first step, considering the game is exploration focused… I have no idea how they arrived at the decision to do a minimalistic managment sim first, and use the huge potential to spice up exploration later.

[sheralmyst]

Maybe the SM face mod was finally too much and their hand was forced…

[Jupiter.blues]

Wishlist:

New ships, to coexist with the current ones. Larger than current pilotable ships, no more than 3 times larger. But there would be one for each type: explorer, shuttle, fighter, hauler, exotic, living. So as to not make current ships useless, the larger ones can take 3 times more materials to upgrade, cost 3 times more to buy and uses twice as much fuel and are slower when flying it but same speed when using hyperdrive. Can stop completely on planets, fly in reverse, and can get out of ship in mid-air. More suitable for players who have played long and have so much money and materials they dont know what to do with it . but still accessable to newer players. Using the smaller ships would be faster when exploring planets and more economical too.

All would have a very small walkable interior (maybe about a 2x2 fountation sized interior?) and its appearance/layout would be different based on the type of ship as well as its perks.

Fighter would have a more militaristic interior. there would be posts to man weapon turrets as its perk and a small on-board storage unit.

Hauler would have an interior like a luxury first-class commercial jet with small windows all around and its perk would be that it have a large sized on-board storage unit and a turret bellow used for mining from the comfort of your ship.

Shuttle would have an interior like a millenium falcon such as a couch, a table with different mini-games to play and a medium sized on-board storage unit.

Explorer would have a science-y interior with plants inside and robot pieces laying around, would have an advanced on-board scanner that allows you to choose what to scan for and can find it from a much larger distance including creatures, plants, minerals, structures, and more. Scanner would have to be manned like a turret and manually point towards the target to find it. Can still get credits like you would if you scanned it with the current method.

Exotic would be a highly luxurious and futuristic ship interior, its perk would be that it has a medium-large storage unit on board and can can manage your settlement(s) on board through an on-board “butler” and have a built-in base teleporter. Would have glass floors and glass/holographics used extensively.

Living ship would be gross but have a perk such as feeding it can have it “digest” and return you tainted metal, or feeding it tainted metal can turn it into nanites. The ship can also auto-defend itself if a ship gets near by, by hitting it with a sort of tentacle. Acts and sounds eery and pulsates strangely the closer you get to an abandoned freighter. Ship will also speak to you if the abandoned freighter has hostile creatures on board ahead of time.

[sheralmyst]

You don’t ask for much do you?

[Jupiter.blues]

oh boy. I didnt realize how much I wrote! The larger ship option is the actual wishlist. The rest is just an idea on how they would work to give variety to a variety of play styles.

[stryker99]

While I like most of the ship ideas - well, all of them actually - I’d trim them down to a few bullet points.

• Larger ships also have more storage, seating and tech space - they really need to allow us to expand tech units more.
• Fighters are still single seater, though large Fighters seat two. Explorers seat two, large ones three. Shuttles seat four or six, large ones eight. Haulers seat two in the cabin, with more optional in exchange for cargo space.
• I really really REALLY want ship customization and painting. In fact, I want a shipwright which will build me a ship to my specifications, though the price should be much higher. I would include Frigates and Freighters in that also, but imagine the cost would be quite high.
• Frigates and Freighters should have the option to enhance defensive and offensive systems.

My story is one long wish list. I should get back to painting and wishing.

[temp]

I’d like old missions to go away.

[Clemm]

I suspect Hello Games views them similar to milestones. OTOH, once done, you don’t need them around anymore. The same could be said for Milestones, of course.

They do need to appear if you start a new game.

[anomaly]

I have an idea but, it may be either really easy or really difficult to implement.

Portals that you build, can have addresses

Or

When you use a portal it shows you addresses that the owner saved to that portal.

[jedidia]

By portals, you mean base teleporters? Because portals can’t be built. There’s one of them per planet, period.

The issue you’d run into is address space, though I’d expect that to be addressable with a long-long, so I don’t think that’s a deal breaker. The question is, why though? There’s already way too many fast-travel options in this universe that suck half the fun out of it (like, literally… I think the game would be a lot more interesting if it didn’t render distance utterly meaningless), and you can always join another players game to get to their base…

[Polyphemus]

Hello, @anomaly . Welcome to ETARC CSD.

I’m scratching my head here. What you’re proposing sounds a lot like the teleporters we already have.

Presumably I’ve missed something.

[sheralmyst]

Welcome to the forum @anomaly . So you want a portal repository. There is a group that does that.

The Portal Repository | Catalog of NMS Portal Addresses

But we do hope you will stick around and share your NMS adventures.

[Mad-Hatter]

I think what was being proposed was a buildable teleporter but with a ‘shareable’ address.

[Polyphemus]

@Mad-Hatter

a buildable teleporter but with a ‘shareable’ address.

Well I already see other people’s addresses in my teleporter list. Although, I must admit, I’ve never bothered to work out how they got there.

Magic, maybe.