Nerf the jetpack in survival

anonymus anonym shared this feedback 4 years ago
Submitted

There are some issues with jetpacks, which are not pointed out in other posts yet, and I dont wanna repeat them.

To get to the point: Jetpacks are also overpowered because you can abuse them with suizide. There is not even a reason (beside its irritating) to spend ice in getting hydrogen (or oxygen) for your jetpack. If it is empty you can just suizide and you will respawn with a full amount of hydrogen without any death punishment. So you really have to implement serious death punishment (and/)or let people spawn without hydrogen to have at least some balance. People still have ice and a h2/o2 generator in their startingship, so its not even causing trouble in the earlygame if you spawn without hydrogen.

At the moment (especially in combination with the jetpack being just OP - look at other posts), there is often no point in building vehicles to, for example, get some unnokwn signals or traveling to another point (because you are even faster with a jetpack than you could be with a vehicle). And isnt that the main gameplay we actually have in Space Engineers? Building stuff to make other stuff possible. So give players reasons to build and nerf the jetpack. I mean you dont even have to build a rocket or spaceship if you wanna get in space because you are can do (+you are faster) with your freakin jetpack. All you need is to grab some bottles of hydrogen and you will never need a rocket! Thanks for your attention. Love <3

Replies (11)

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True, I flew to the other side of the earth with 6 h2 bottles

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While playing in survival I'm actually not a fan of suicide just for refilling jetpack hydrogen (unless in case of emergency, like ship floating in the air and I'm on the ground without hydrogen) maybe because I'm kinda lazy in some ways LOL.

If it must be nerfed I'd prefer just to reduce respawn hydrogen by 2/3.

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This makes little sense. Vehicles serve more than one purpose (larger tools, way more storage space, bigger guns, better ore detectors, etc.) so you points are invalid, unless you are messing with the custom settings to the point where making a "fix" like this already would be invalid. I don't know about you, but even with a "starter" vehicle, I can transport 90k+ kg of ore, where as using the jet pack I would have to make over 90 trips.

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It's extremely unrealistic and immersion breaking.

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I'm with SirGouki on this one, it doesn't make any sense. In fact there is already a way to nerf jetpacks at the start of the game, just set your game configuration to start without a jetpack. There is also several mods to nerf jetpacks with too. So this is completely unnecessary.

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There are several mods to nerf jetpacks because vanilla jet packs are OP. Visually they make no sense. They are clearly for zero G maneuvers. On ground side they shouldn't be able to get you off the ground at all as their engines are small as to not allow someone to kill themselves in space. Also the engines are the type that only work in space. They should never them to 10 percent strength and introduce a personal parachute for recovering from atmospheric mishaps.

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Agreed. Make jetpacks behave like Ion-thrusters. Low effect on planets with gravity while working better in zero-G.

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Then run with those mods on your game, this request to nerf jetpacks is completely unnecessary.

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Nerfing jetpacks to a degree that you can't use them in planets would be too much for a default setting. The reason is simply because you need the jetpack for building, especially bigger ships. Those that like ship building on planets in survival have no alternative for jetpacks. If you attempt to build scaffolding as an alternative, the already daunting task of building larger ships will take 10 times longer.

But that could of course be made an optional setting for those who want a smaller-scale, more hardcore survival experience. It could be interesting for many people too I guess, since there are many mods out there with such nerf settings.

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I nerf my jetpack such that it does nothing on a planet. It doesn't have enough thrust to lift me, and it runs out of fuel in a few seconds if left active.


In survival, this means I mechanise. Since i'm also playing with realistic inventory size, the engineer isn't a building tool. The engineer is a button pressing tool. I have hovering platforms, flying and rolling building and welding vehicles, and a printer so that I can make more of anything I build that's useful.

Scaffolding, heh. You're just going to fall off that.

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Hi KHS,


One implementation of a solution is having a Game Setting for each world that toggles two jetpack modes: original and reduced (i.e. an ON/OFF setting like Wolves, Progression, In-Game Scripts, etc). For players who like it the way it is, this changes nothing. But for players who want that level of immersion/difficulty/limitation this will make a world of difference (pun intended).

Specifically, the limits of a jetpack strength reduction could be defined by the thrust/fuel ratio of the individual character fully loaded with hydrogen bottles (on normal inventory settings) not being large enough to break the gravity boundary of a planet.


The main issue is integrating a game built around zero-gravity physics with large-scale gravity systems (planets) introduced after the main engine was created. The speed limit of 100m/s is a hard limit that creates a top-end barrier for the extreme cases of the game mechanics, so calculations like deformation don't take 5+ minutes to render a collision.

Next to that, the character speed limit of 107m/s is a key design idea: I'm sure we've all accidentally hopped out of our small ship traveling at 100m/s through space with our space suit inertia dampeners on, then crawled our way at a relative 7m/s to recovery.


Assuming I'm not missing another purpose of the 107m/s speed limit (which I probably am), that means this mechanic is **only required in space** since ships that "get away" in atmosphere will eventually crash (or hover for fuel time). As such, the jetpack strength in atmospheres/gravity fields (which one is the limiting mechanic is another topic) can be reduced to maintain the thorough and complete utility of machinery for most non-micro tasks on planets.


Personally, and as an example, I find it irritating that it's easier (the purpose of engineering, in a game with Engineering in it's name) to travel from a planetary base to a mining site 5km away by zipping over with a jetpack rather than requiring a vehicle. That being said, any sort of cargo transport (etc) still require a vehicle. But for a game about "engineering," at least on planets, I wish that projects required more logistic management of your individual character. In space however, zero-G is a different ballgame where the lack of damping forces allows for easy individual traversal.

Again, I strongly recommend this be implemented as a setting toggle or series of options, with the original settings still remaining possible.

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You forget that with jetpack you can go to the space only with a couple hydrogen bottles, and the jetpack speed is so ridiculous ( you can reach 110 m/s in the earth like a spaceship)

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You can also disable the Jetpack altogether from the game settings menu. That way any vertical movement requires a vehicle.

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No...this is another example of let's make everyone play the game my way. If you want to change it, change it in your game and leave the rest of us to play our way.

It's always easier to take stuff away then to put it back.

Let's not go down empyrion's road please.

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I agree. Mainly because most calls for nerfs are for that exact reason. They think people are "playing the game wrong" even though this is mostly a sandbox game where you play your way.


If they really want to nerf the jetpack they can download a mod for it or set Jetpacks off on their game. There's already a solution in-place. No need for "nerfs".

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Add it to the difficulty sliders, next to the inventory sizes.

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Many people have suggested making any such change optional, which I agree to, because a lot of people would complain otherwise. I agree the jetpack is too OP right now, but I also didn't quite like the existing jetpack nerf mods out there, so I ended up experimenting with my own settings and basically built my own mod :)

First of all, our jetpack is hydrogen-based so it makes no sense for it to have different efficiencies on a planet vs space, so I equalised that, but I did increase the fuel consumption considerably (since dampening will need no force while standing still in space, it is obviously still a lot more efficient there). And then, I nerfed the thrust power of the jetpack, but left it powerful enough to still be used on planets.

The biggest change I made though was seriously nerfing the dampening of the jetpack, so it requires careful braking and maneuvering, because the dampening and braking speed is currently ridiculous in the game. It stops you as fast as a car crash would, and that I believe is what makes it so OP to use, especially on planets. If you nerf the dampening to a point where if you jump off a building and turn on your jetpack after falling more than a few meters it won't be enough to stop you from hitting the ground hard, you end up with both a relatively more "realistic" jetpack that is difficult to fly across half the planet, especially considering the increased fuel consumption too.

This really does give a lot of incentive to use vehicles to get to even a few km away, because flying the jetpack actually feels like flying a ship already with these settings, except that it is a tiny, puny ship, and you'd rather take a better one you built. It adds a feeling of momentum to jetpack flying. Both the flight mechanics feels relatively more realistic and the game feels more balanced.

And so this is what I would recommend for Keen as well, as an option maybe. A 3-option system could actually be the best as far as I see from the other comments.

1) As it is now (Easy jetpack) - also could be the default option for Creative mode

2) "Balanced"/call it whatever jetpack, the one I described (Default)

3) Realistic jetpack - where jetpacks aren't powerful enough to work on planets (Hardcore)

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That sounds a lot like this mod, which is mostly the same without the (silly, IMO) requirement that it works on planets. I guess it just nerfs harder. It's the mod I use whenever I can.

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That sounds like a horrible idea

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