Need for Exploration overhaul and improved engineering challenges and motivations

I don't think that's the case.

What's not the case?

Currently there is no "reward" for vistiting a planet you could stay in space forever and would progress faster.

I think he wants to say give planets more and unique hazards and add some "loot" at those places like new ores blueprints, ...

I agree with Janik and OP.

With similar games Like Empyrion, certain ores are only available in certain dangerous places, making you think about going there. But the need for them, forces you eventually.

Gold/silver, and platinum gate advancement.

This is good.

But i think we need a lower tier gate for atmo thrusters, like Cobalt or Nickel. Otherwise, rovers never get built or used. And this stuff should be available only on the poles, thus encouraging us to build rovers and drive there to mine it.

And then we need a max tier ore, that can only be found in dangerous places, like lava worlds, deeep underground, or in pirate bases.

that would give us reasons to explore, reasons to learn about rovers and ground vehicles, and make us earn the power of flight. Currently, if you can build a rover, you can build a flyer.

Bull. I don't think tech should be gated away by necessitating travel to different planets. That's just a band-aid for a larger issue. Maybe ore patterns being more or less common in different areas, but a planet straight-up not having something? That's lazy programming and game development.

Utilizing a Grind-To-Learn system would have been significantly more influential than what we've been given. Having to capture pirate bases to learn their technologies and then having an extra rare piece of tech randomized in the PB of a District Headquarters would have been far better than what we got. Randomizing weapon loadouts on pirate ships so that you don't learn a configuration easily and always know the best avenue of approach would also do so much for the game.

I can guarantee you though, if they screw with the ore patterns like you guys suggest the number one mod I'll always load is one to remove that choice, and I'm not alone in that.

Grind to learn seems like a good alt progression system.

And you make a good point about raiding pirate bases for them.

I'm in favour of that.

Given that they have progression as an option, it should not be too hard to implement GTL as an option too.

Esp as there are at least 3 mods for it in the workshop.

"I don't think tech should be gated away by necessitating travel to different planets. That's just a band-aid for a larger issue."

Pushing players to go to different regions/zones/biomes should motivate part of the exploration's pillar of the game, and showcase the work done on those place (assuming those places have different feels and challenges from one another) and add the challenge of going there then settling or operating there, and so on.

But that push doesn't need to be utterly blunt or binary. It's a delicate balance that should take everything into account so I'm not going to go into specifics, but for example yes we can limit a resource to a single zone. Or, we can adjust the density of said resource points and the yield of those points. Like on planet A you get reasonable amount of small boulders of resource R, so a player will need to move around a lot to mine little yield. But on planet B, that resource R become common on regular mine point. And on planet C, you get only small yield R boulders even less frequent than on planet A, but you get a very small number of mine zone of R deep, deep into the core that have huge yield. And on asteroid cluster D you get zero mining R resource, but a AI enemy complex that receive frequent shipment of resource R from a mining complex on the other side of the solar system. And so on.

It's not just a binary present/not present. There's several parameters than ca be adjusted to vary the experience. And those could probably be either procedurally generated, or randomized a bit.

And, it's not just only planet A vs planet B versus space cluster Z. A resource can be varied (for frequency, yield per mining point, or type of resource like mining versus scavenging vs pirating) on a single planet, between valleys surface or near surface, top of mountains range, under ice lake, deep deep into the planet core, and so on.

A lot of different permutations and possibilities. With some randomization, that would help with exploration. And all of that should not be a "dreaming feature", it doesn't seem like it would be an unreasonable amount of work from Keen Software.

"Utilizing a Grind-To-Learn system would have been significantly more influential than what we've been given. Having to capture pirate bases to learn their technologies and then having an extra rare piece of tech randomized in the PB of a District Headquarters would have been far better than what we got."

I would agree, that seem like the type of systems and mechanics that would create emergent gameplay. Also known as a better game for the player while less work for the developer on the long run.

"I can guarantee you though, if they screw with the ore patterns like you guys suggest the number one mod I'll always load is one to remove that choice, and I'm not alone in that."

Certainly, but are you in the majority for this? That would be the question. Because I would think it's much, much easier to create a mod to undo that resource segmentation thing, than to write a mod to create it (and maintain it for years, with compatibility test for each new version of SE and updating on a regular basis).

So the question would be, given the limited and finite amount of time/work/money Keen Software is willing to put into Space Engineers from now until it's out of early access release, what would serve best the overall game and the most players (both now and in the long run).

I honestly don't know, but hopefully Keen have some real metrics on players expectations and feedback.

I definitely agree with all of what you said, and think Neraph isn't just taking in what it means to limit ores to other planets. Right now when you think about it, you can land on earth and get every single ore except for platinum I believe, I understand that earth is supposed to be an easier start, but in terms of progression, while they can add a whole gate system for building where things need to be built before you can build later tiers, you can grind out the entire play through never leaving earth.

I know that space enginners' gameplay allows for awesome builds without actually being in SPACE, but the idea of having to build a rocket to go out of your planet, land on another one safely, setup a base there to process whatever ore only exists on this planet, and then setting up some kind of link between the two bases or what not sounds so much more fun, not even in the idea of exploration like subnautica, but the overcoming challenges in factorio.

It would also give other items that are really just more for fun to play with better uses, like the jump drive can be used to get away from enemies or move quicker through deep space, but you could use it to travel closer to a far away planet that has an ore you need, and so on.

Restricting ore to other planets and not just one, in my opinion is not sloppy coding, it's forcing people to go out and actually find the missing ore, plus while all the ores right now are ones you can find on earth IRL, if they add ores that are alien, why would they be on earth for instance?

I think changing the ores can both boost exploration, as well as replayability and the way you play will have to adapt to the being forced to go far or travel at all to get specific ores.

Yes.

And on top of that, it could gel nicely with survival improvement like better PVE, smarter and more complex AI enemies, and other other general improvements. And give more tools and flexibility to people writing scenarios for Space Engineers.

I agree the game needs more incentives to go to other planets and also to create Risk Reward situations for the player. You want that platinum ore vein? Unfortunately, there is an AI base and they are already mining it.

Yes SE is a sandbox game which rely strongly on intrinsic motivation, but still, sandbox games need and usually have some extrinsic motivations for the player (Minecraft, Subnautica, Terraria, Conan Exiles, etc.). SE is still lacking in those and it looks like Keen does not want or does not know how to solve that.

Right now SE is basically two games: Creative and Survival.

Creative is great and works nicely. I have spent so many hours building stuff and playing around with those. But the survival part is unfortunately quite lacking and to be honest from what I have seen from the current "big survival" update so far, it won't solve the survival gameplay issues if it doesn't give the players actual hazards (environmental, AI, etc) to build solutions for and some incentives for exploration. It will still have the same major issues like now.

But as I said, this won't happen in SE as it took Keen about a year for the new blocks and this lite progression system.

"Bull. I don't think tech should be gated away by necessitating travel to different planets. That's just a band-aid for a larger issue. Maybe ore patterns being more or less common in different areas, but a planet straight-up not having something? That's lazy programming and game development."

Of course, tech should be locked behind special places. Tell me one good game that is like SE where you can get everything at one place.

Just look at Minecraft for example you need to go to different dimensions to progress. First overworld then nether then the end. And every of those dimensions has their own specific ores/resources. And on top of this there are many, many different biomes and everyone got at least one new item that can be used for decorative or practical purpose. Imagine how boring Minecraft survival mode would be if everything the game has to offer could be gained without ever leaving the biome you started in.

Survival mode should confront the player with problems they need to solve by building differnt structures. Adding planet specific ores would add the problems of tarveling between planets landing and launching, as well as mining at different planets with different atmosphere/gravitation.

Scarce Ressources. That's just it. That mod is simple enough but work great.

Iron, nickel and silicon are available everywhere. But you want cobalt ? Only available on Earth. Uranium ? Only on alien planet. Platinum ? Only on Mars. Silver and gold ? Go to the moons. Want tons and tons of iron ? Asteroids.

With that you have a reason to go to the other planets, and it does not much cut possibilities. Starting on earth, you have all the main ores needed to make a fairly descent base and a first ship to reach space.

Yes, it can be difficult, you don't have access to the all-powerful-magical-solving-power-issues-uranium and have to think about other sources of power (that we now have, with wind, H2 engines and half-cost solar panels). Yes, it's engineering. And yes, it's great.

Agreed Cassin, but that's exactly the type of things we want to see in Space Engineers as a game about engineering, construction, exploration, and survival. Although as I said, there's less binary and more subtile ways it could also be done.

Mods are great and full modding support is absolutely necessary, but they should not compensate deficiencies in vanilla core gameplay.