Add concrete to make the early game easier instead of oversimplifying everything
Just a little idea to prevent the game from being oversimplified, while still making the early game easier.
The problem with the early game in SE is that a huge amount of materials is needed just to build a little starter base.
A good portion of the materials is iron, which is only used to build a basic structure with armor blocks. Iron has to be processed by machines to get the needed steel plates.
So, what Keen has done is:
- Simplified how resources are obtained (materials from environmental voxels)
- Simplified the production chain (no ingots and backpack building)
What if these exact issues could be countered by adding concrete blocks?
- Concrete could be a cheap building block that can be obtained by mining stone and crafting it via backpack building.
- This would massively reduce the amount of required iron.
- The most remaining blocks aren't that expensive, so that the total amount of required resources is much lower.
- Without that high demand for resources, it's not necessary to have materials from environmental voxels everywhere. It could be replaced with a more realistic and believable approach.
- It's also not necessary to simplify the production chain that much because it loses a bit of its relevance in the early game (fewer items to produce). Add some slow, small but cheap machines for the early game but leave ingots in.
- Backpack building should be limited to building concrete blocks and producing certain items from ingots (not smelting ores!), to keep it more or less believable and having a dedicated smelting/refining step in the game (this would be similar to Minecraft and Factorio, btw).
This wouldn't turn SE into a hyper realistic game, but it would be a fair compromise between believability and playability.
The idea of adding concrete is far from new and has countless votes on this site, but adding it now makes more sense than ever.
Nice side effects:
- There would be a noticeable difference between building a base (concrete blocks) and a ship (armor blocks).
- If concrete could not be crafted from asteroids, there would also be a difference in difficulty level between space and planetary gameplay.
I like this feedback
Concrete blocks need a clear disadvantage compared to armor blocks to prevent fleets of concrete ships. I'm not sure if simply making them heavy and less robust is enough.
Maybe they should be restricted to static grids entirely?
Concrete blocks need a clear disadvantage compared to armor blocks to prevent fleets of concrete ships. I'm not sure if simply making them heavy and less robust is enough.
Maybe they should be restricted to static grids entirely?
I can imagine backpack building as having a small 3D printer attached to your suit.
That is a technology I can believe in and relate to. I loved SE1 for this very reason. It was abstracted in many ways, but it still remained grounded in reality and generally complied with the laws of physics. I also liked how mining worked in the game. In many other games you just point a laser beam and magically extract materials, while here we had proper drills that actually excavated voxels.
In SE2 we still have drills, but somehow they are now capable of extracting pure elements straight from the ground, basically acting as refineries too. So you are effectively already using “ingots” inside your backpack 3D printer - they just call them ores for some reason. If they were actual ores, we would need to refine them first, and there would be mass and volume reduction during processing. Instead, all drills - handheld and block versions - are perfectly capable of purifying whatever materials they mine while automatically voiding all the remaining waste.
And honestly, this is a huge step back in how the technology is portrayed and it breaks immersion quite badly. So yeah, bring back a proper refining step and limit backpack building to use ingots produced by refineries or smelters.
Now, going back to the concrete idea - there are actually countless possibilities here, and one does not exclude another.
To begin with, we should be able to “build” with voxels in survival. The prerequisite for that is of course being able to collect materials as they are, and this ties nicely into having a proper refining step. Instead of one generic stone or the three generic “environmental voxels” (which are basically just the same “stone” from SE1 with the same issues), all voxel materials could be collected directly and contain traces of different elements, if any.
This would allow players to place them back into the world immediately using some kind of dedicated tool, or even existing tools like grinders for shaping and “cutting” terrain. That alone would massively improve base building. Things like leveling terrain, building walls, landing pads, ramps, roads, tunnels, and so on — all without requiring production blocks for a true accessibility.
We already have different voxel hardness values in the game, so stone, gravel, sand, and similar materials could naturally serve different purposes. Most importantly, you would finally be able to repair voxels damage properly while saving huge amounts of PCU for things that you would otherwise "spend" block on.
The engine already fully supports this, as we can clearly see in creative mode. It is honestly beyond my comprehension why this is not an actual gameplay feature already. It feels like having a car but still pulling it with horses :)
Beyond simply extracting and placing voxels, players could even create entirely new voxel materials that do not naturally generate. For example, proper concrete.
Concrete could be made by combining specific rock-like voxels (such as calcite) with water. For that you might need a production block, or you could even pour water directly onto calcite material to convert it into concrete while consuming water in the process. That would actually feel immersive :)
Of course this would not be early-game technology. It would be intended for building large, durable structures. On top of that, we could still have rigid stone and concrete blocks of various shapes. Something similar to the XL blocks recently added to SE1 would work really well here, allowing players to quickly construct large bases out of relatively few blocks and cheap materials instead of mining half a planet worth of iron.
So yeah, bring back a proper refining step so we can collect all kinds of raw materials. There is nothing complicated about putting raw material into a refinery block and getting usable ingots out of it for your backpack printer. And if do not like word “ingots”, replace it with “filaments” or something similar and use those as the input material for onboard 3D printers and production in general.
Make the technology believable and it will also be intuitive so the new players will understand it naturally, instead of oversimplifying that was never even that complex.
And allow us to use voxels as actual building materials to simplify base construction. Why should I need to mine several iron deposits just to build a floor for my starter base? Or mine through "environmental voxels" for half an hour?
If voxels cannot be perfectly straight in every orientation, fine - let me at least build a 15x15 meter slab out of stone-like material. It would be extremely heavy and still much more brittle than steel blocks, but it would drastically speed up boring construction work and actually make things SIMPLER overall.
And guess what? We would not even need to refine things like gravel anymore. We could simply collect it directly. Combine it with iron grids and suddenly you can create gabions - metal cages filled with gravel - something that already exists in real life as cheap and ecological construction material.
Combine calcite stone, sand, and water and create highly durable concrete that cannot be damaged by collisions with grids, yet is still vulnerable to weapons and explosions. Perfect for defensive bases and protection against kinetic impacts.
Bases were always inferior to movable grids in SE. Concrete could finally give them a real sense to exist. You should not need to spend enormous amounts of PCU and valuable metals just to build a decent-sized base.
I want to build many bases, especially on planets. I want to use rovers and have them function as a real alternative to “helicopters” and rockets. But for that, we need infrastructure. We need roads, ramps, bridges, tunnels, terrain leveling — and we need the tools to create all of that in survival mode.
Not just drills. Why is it still so difficult to shape voxels the way we want? We need more terrain manipulation tools in survival too.
There is so much unused potential here, yet we barely hear a single word from the developers about whether they are even looking into these systems.
I can imagine backpack building as having a small 3D printer attached to your suit.
That is a technology I can believe in and relate to. I loved SE1 for this very reason. It was abstracted in many ways, but it still remained grounded in reality and generally complied with the laws of physics. I also liked how mining worked in the game. In many other games you just point a laser beam and magically extract materials, while here we had proper drills that actually excavated voxels.
In SE2 we still have drills, but somehow they are now capable of extracting pure elements straight from the ground, basically acting as refineries too. So you are effectively already using “ingots” inside your backpack 3D printer - they just call them ores for some reason. If they were actual ores, we would need to refine them first, and there would be mass and volume reduction during processing. Instead, all drills - handheld and block versions - are perfectly capable of purifying whatever materials they mine while automatically voiding all the remaining waste.
And honestly, this is a huge step back in how the technology is portrayed and it breaks immersion quite badly. So yeah, bring back a proper refining step and limit backpack building to use ingots produced by refineries or smelters.
Now, going back to the concrete idea - there are actually countless possibilities here, and one does not exclude another.
To begin with, we should be able to “build” with voxels in survival. The prerequisite for that is of course being able to collect materials as they are, and this ties nicely into having a proper refining step. Instead of one generic stone or the three generic “environmental voxels” (which are basically just the same “stone” from SE1 with the same issues), all voxel materials could be collected directly and contain traces of different elements, if any.
This would allow players to place them back into the world immediately using some kind of dedicated tool, or even existing tools like grinders for shaping and “cutting” terrain. That alone would massively improve base building. Things like leveling terrain, building walls, landing pads, ramps, roads, tunnels, and so on — all without requiring production blocks for a true accessibility.
We already have different voxel hardness values in the game, so stone, gravel, sand, and similar materials could naturally serve different purposes. Most importantly, you would finally be able to repair voxels damage properly while saving huge amounts of PCU for things that you would otherwise "spend" block on.
The engine already fully supports this, as we can clearly see in creative mode. It is honestly beyond my comprehension why this is not an actual gameplay feature already. It feels like having a car but still pulling it with horses :)
Beyond simply extracting and placing voxels, players could even create entirely new voxel materials that do not naturally generate. For example, proper concrete.
Concrete could be made by combining specific rock-like voxels (such as calcite) with water. For that you might need a production block, or you could even pour water directly onto calcite material to convert it into concrete while consuming water in the process. That would actually feel immersive :)
Of course this would not be early-game technology. It would be intended for building large, durable structures. On top of that, we could still have rigid stone and concrete blocks of various shapes. Something similar to the XL blocks recently added to SE1 would work really well here, allowing players to quickly construct large bases out of relatively few blocks and cheap materials instead of mining half a planet worth of iron.
So yeah, bring back a proper refining step so we can collect all kinds of raw materials. There is nothing complicated about putting raw material into a refinery block and getting usable ingots out of it for your backpack printer. And if do not like word “ingots”, replace it with “filaments” or something similar and use those as the input material for onboard 3D printers and production in general.
Make the technology believable and it will also be intuitive so the new players will understand it naturally, instead of oversimplifying that was never even that complex.
And allow us to use voxels as actual building materials to simplify base construction. Why should I need to mine several iron deposits just to build a floor for my starter base? Or mine through "environmental voxels" for half an hour?
If voxels cannot be perfectly straight in every orientation, fine - let me at least build a 15x15 meter slab out of stone-like material. It would be extremely heavy and still much more brittle than steel blocks, but it would drastically speed up boring construction work and actually make things SIMPLER overall.
And guess what? We would not even need to refine things like gravel anymore. We could simply collect it directly. Combine it with iron grids and suddenly you can create gabions - metal cages filled with gravel - something that already exists in real life as cheap and ecological construction material.
Combine calcite stone, sand, and water and create highly durable concrete that cannot be damaged by collisions with grids, yet is still vulnerable to weapons and explosions. Perfect for defensive bases and protection against kinetic impacts.
Bases were always inferior to movable grids in SE. Concrete could finally give them a real sense to exist. You should not need to spend enormous amounts of PCU and valuable metals just to build a decent-sized base.
I want to build many bases, especially on planets. I want to use rovers and have them function as a real alternative to “helicopters” and rockets. But for that, we need infrastructure. We need roads, ramps, bridges, tunnels, terrain leveling — and we need the tools to create all of that in survival mode.
Not just drills. Why is it still so difficult to shape voxels the way we want? We need more terrain manipulation tools in survival too.
There is so much unused potential here, yet we barely hear a single word from the developers about whether they are even looking into these systems.
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