Survival Kit built from back pack or from only stone

Feddas shared this feedback 5 years ago
Submitted

I just watched https://youtu.be/Sc4MHDptm5Q?t=150 and totally agree with his point that the Survival Kit should be "pulled out of your back pack".


I understand "pulling from the back pack" would change how the inventory UI functions. Instead, it would be about just as good if you were able to start with just a drill and welder in your inventory. To do this, the Survival Kit could only require raw stone to build. This would allow the ability to start a game in just your space suit (with starting equipment turned on), find some stone to drill, and from there, survive.

Replies (6)

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Is there any plans for something like this? Can anyone think of another way to minimize what's needed to start survival?

Here's one scenario; ejected from a spaceship. Locate a few drops in hopes of finding a drill and a welder. These are already fairly common drops and 5 or so drops may be enough to find them. Find a large mass of stone to drill. After that, you'd have all you need to start your survival.

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I think I prefer starting in a droppod. A "inflatable" survival kit just doesn't fit the game imo. I think the current system works reasonably well and as soon as the update is out there there might be some really cool modded starter ships as well.


One thing that would be cool though is a tool to move blocks around. This way you could start off by just having a survival kit and a battery and pushing them from asteroid to asteroid.

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You could make an inflatable survival kit out of a solar panel and a survival kit with a grinder and a welder. I imagine the components for both could fit in your backpack. You use your suit to fly to the next asteroid, then rebuild those two blocks. The difference with the grind and reuse setup is it's unlikely you'll have the components for those two blocks after being ejected from a ship due to damage.

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The "Survival Kit" really just really needs to be a block that is easily made from Iron, Silicon & Nickel since that is what you get from refining stone.

I hear what your thinking: "But how do we refine stone if we don't have the Survival Kit or something else?"

ANSWER: The suit should have built in functionality to refine stone at a slower pace and make the Survival Kit not cost much.

Also if the player could have a built in miner & welding tool as well (but have it be slower and worse than tools) & allow the suit to refine ice into oxygen (at a slow pace). This would enable you to actually play the game even if you lost everything! And they can finally get rid of starting ships!

Now even if you whole ship explodes in a fiery death and you are forced to respawn with no ship you can survive. How cool would that be being able to survive with just your suit and start a new base!

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Hi Cole, I think we share the same overall vision. Which is, being able to survive with only your suit. The suit having a built-in survival kit is what the linked youtube video mentions. My additional "built from raw stone" thinking was to also minimize the size of development change that would need to be done to the game. Let me explain by showing a guess of what the development changes would be from the current Survival Kit.


  1. Currently to build a survival kit you need:
    1. All of the post-assembler components required for a Survival Kit, which could be gathered from grinding down drop pods. Likely take 3+ hours.
    2. A welder

  2. To convert to "Survival Kit built from raw stone"
    1. Change the Survival Kit's required components from what they are to only raw stone. Assuming you have a drill on you, this should take a player that knows how to use the drill 5 minutes to gather a full backpack of stone.
    2. A welder

  3. Suit having a built in Survival Kit
    1. New game logic for the suit to be able to refine stone
    2. New UI design for the player to activate the suits stone refinery
    3. Depending on the refine stone UI design, new game logic for a refinery to share inventory for both its raw and refined items
    4. New game logic to handle a welder no longer depending on an item
    5. New UI design for how to interact with the itemless welder
    6. New icon for in-suit welder
    7. Balance speed and range stats for in-suit welder
    8. New game logic to handle a drill no longer depending on an item
    9. New UI design for how to interact with the itemless drill
    10. New icon for in-suit drill
    11. Balance speed and range stats for in-suit drill


Option 3 means the players could start with a completely empty inventory and survive. However, The current default when respawning in your suit is that you start with a drill and a welder. Which makes most of those changes seem unnecessary.


TL;DR Since the Survival Kit currently has some difficult to get with just a suit requirements it means there exists a pre-Survival Kit stage of the game. The big question is, should it be possible to get to a pre-Survival kit stage of the game? If so, how long should an average player be stuck in that stage if they find themselves in just their suit?

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Probably you should start this from a different approach: in which game situation does the player need a suit-craftable survival kit? What resources does he have in that situation and what does he need?

Generally when you start you won't need a survival kit because your ship already has one. Even in the unlikely scenario that you crash-land your starting pod and loose it, you can simply respawn, because if you have nothing you can't loose anything. There is actually only one scenario where you would need a survival kit: if you crash-landed somewhere and want to get back to your base but lack the tools to build something to get there. I.E.: you have a big space base and tried to land on the moon, but everything went haywire and most of your ship got destroyed. One option would be to suicide and respawn at your base, another one would be a suit-craftable survival kit.

Assuming the worst-case scenario you stand somewhere without any resources available, except for whatever stone and ore is around you. So the survival kit must be built out of common, unprocessed materials, it has to power itself, and must be able to process and produce the basic components to build a starter base.

So let's say the survival kit requires the 3 most common materials to build: stone for the construction, iron ore for the machine, and ice to power it using an internal small hydrogen generator. You place it as a 1x1 small grid using 200 stone, fill up with 100 iron ore and 500 ice to complete it. Then you add ice to power the internal hydrogen generator, which produces just enough power to keep the internal assembler running at a very inefficient rate (to not make it an alternative to the advanced machines), let's say 1 KW at half the efficiency of a real hydrogen generator. It does not provide a respawn feature as respawning is very reason why you built it, but it will refill a players resource bars at half the usual speed (as long as ice is provided). Then you insert stone or iron ore which then get's processed as usual just slightly slower, until you can use it to craft the components to build a basic assembler, basic refinery, and power generation.

That way you had a respawn alternative that is not going to replace any existing blocks, as it is too slow and too inefficient compared to any other block.

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That's some really good insight. Thanks Menos Wansis!


The fact you can simply respawn in a new respawn ship is a really good point. Server settings could be changed to make that less desirable. Maybe the respawn cooldown on the ships is hours instead of minutes. Maybe the server is set for no respawn ships at all, you can only respawn in your suit. Or maybe the server has everything you own be destroyed when you die. Having the ability to survive from just a welder and a drill as a part of the core vanilla gameplay encourages more options in both server settings and mods.


I'm down for your idea that the Survival Kit requires the 3 most common materials in raw form to build and operate. It's more complicated than just stone but it does bring some good logic into a standalone Survival Kit.


Thinking about the Survival Kit being a part of the suit. That could be a bad idea for servers that have players starting in a starting zone where they don't want them to damage anything. On those servers players don't spawn with the default welders and drills, they have an empty inventory. That is done to help prevent players from destroying the starting zone. The ability to protect things in that way should be kept.

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Setting the respawn timers is already possible, but it comes with the problem that if someone screws up - which can always happen - he is essentially temporarily banned from the server until the respawn ship becomes available again. With the new respawn ships respawning is however generally no longer an issue, as the amount of resources you can grind from it is very low compared to the previous ones. Servers that still want an even less valuable respawn ship can always mod it, which in this case is a very easy thing to do.

The idea of using 3 different materials is simply so that the player has some challenge and hassle to get this thing setup. If it would require only stone, you could simply drill next to your feet and have it setup 10 seconds later without even having to move, which just feels too easy for me.

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The server admin changing the respawn ships available is always an option. It's not super easy tho. You did have to create a mod to change the respawn ships. Maybe that has changed after the beta version?


It may be better to have the least amount of challenge and hassle as possible for that first survival step. That step should be more about accessible basics than having a challenge. Though there is also a point where it's so easy you don't learn anything from it. I'd be happy with either just stone or the 3 common raw resources you mentioned.

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Making the mod is pretty easy, as all you have to do is to simply create the respawn ship in creative mode, save it, and put it together with a text file that basically says "This is the new respawn ship." There are several resources on the net that explain the steps even for those with almost know modding knowledge.

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I have wanted something like this for a while and have made several suggestions to this effect. The easiest option here(#1, followed by more immersive options) is:

1. Lazy Dev Survival : Re-work container drops with skit components and more "basic" tools. Then, remove the self disabling batteries feature from drop containers, so that a small grid emergency Kit could be built and powered temporarily. This works for both Space and Planets, but requires drops be always enabled (and thereby makes SE Internet required (no offline mode because of how skins work with steam.) It could also be problematic for servers.

2. Give Aragath More Work Survival: A way to mitigate so offline is still "offline" in Steam, is a new class of container drops that have a respawn cooldown like feature. From your Suit Terminal , Every x minutes you could call in an orbital rescue drop, which would be somewhere between a container drop (0 to 1 thruster) , and a player drop pod (Skit, Battery, O2/H2 generator, parachute, and cargo box with tools and rarely some cobalt, silver, or gold). Making it a "pod" allows the drops to be stylized like the suit container drops are now. The Drop Distance would be based on the player's current temperature, and availability of (or current suit capacity of) Oxygen. Survivable temperatures and O2 available for suit environment refills = further away drops. Like suicide respawning, they would remove an existing drop pod when claimed.

3. Bear Grylls Survival (or Drink your own Pee Survival 'cause of copyright ) : For it to make any sense at all without being hacky, it would pretty much have to copy ME's pick-ups and start by:

(There are no sticks in space, so suit only take overs of Cargo Ships/ Container Drops would be the only space start available. )

  • Spawning interactable sticks ,stones, clay, and ice chunks on the surface of planets that players could pick up.
  • A Suit Assembler(not affected by world multipliers. that creates very limited range items that wouldn't need high temperatures to produce. Can Produce multiple items at once.
  1. Brick Mold - Sticks x8 - Is used as a component to make Brick components.
  2. Brick(Component) - Stones x4 , Ice Chips x4 BrickMold 1x
  3. Tool Mold - Sticks x8, Fiber x4
  4. Hammer (Welder) - 0.25Kg Iron, 0.25Kg Nickel, Tool Mold x1
  5. Hatchet (Grinder) - 0.5Kg Iron, 0.5Kg Nickel, Tool Mold x1
  6. Pick (Drill) - 0.75Kg Iron, 0.25Kg Nickel, ToolMold x1
  7. Fiber - Stone x1, Sticks x 20 Or Grass Voxel 2Kg = 1 Fiber
  8. FireWood (Fuel) - Sticks x 30, Fiber x2 (Can get from Trees after Hatchet is available )

  • Have primitive throw away blocks with no mount points or conveyor dummies so they couldn't be used once "modern" survival machines are available or added to grids to increase free output.
  • A Stack Furnace: (metal smelter) Bricks x50, Stone x10, Ice Chips x10, sticks x20: fueled by sticks, gives Ingots and Gravel.
  • A Smithy: Bricks x80, Iron Ingots (anvil) Iron x50kg - Turns Ingots into Plates, Tubes, Girders, etc.
    Crafting Flow would look like:
  1. Gather Sticks, Stones, and Ice Chips
  2. Make Fiber, Brick and Tool Molds in Suit Assembler.
  3. Make Bricks In Suit Assembler
  4. Make Stack Furnace
  5. Make Ingots Stack Furnace
  6. Make Smithy
  7. Make Hand Tools
  8. Make Survival Kit

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Thanks Geneticus0, I really like your "Lazy Dev" idea.

Your idea #1 - Lazy Dev

I like the idea of removing the battery self disabling feature from drop containers. Building a survival kit connected to a drop container would be a fun "I'm smart" feeling way to power the kit. If the components of survival kits stay the same, this would also need a chance, maybe 50%, for drop containers to have a medical component. I was on an official server and had a good time sucking the battery off someone else's crashed respawn ship. I vote for this one, plus it only requires 2 changes:

1. Drop containers batteries are no longer automatically disabled

2. 50%-ish chance for green drops to have a single medical component (average 6 drop containers before you can build a survival kit)

Your idea #2 - Give Aragath More Work

This seems like it can be done already, as long as you don't mind suicide. Turn off power to all your med bays and survival kits. Then you can "call in a drop" by picking a new respawn ship and trying to navigate that respawn ship back to where you powered down.

Your idea #3 - Bear Grylls

This one sounds too big to ask of Keen :-o

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Do you seriously think that you can add a stone refiner and assembler (a survival kit) in an astronaut suit, and in this game it will look adequate?

Personally, I am against the mechanics who add the production of metal components directly "on the knee" ... without tools, smelting, etc.

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I found a modded survival kit on the workshop, that removed Medical components. Doesnt mean you can start off in a suit, but if you crash, or your survival kit gets destroyed during a crash, better chance to restart.

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