Make or find yourself a cart to drag around (g or G to drag it). It it doesn’t have wheels it’ll be quite loud. Sound = attraction = death in most cases.
Don’t bother with cars for a long while, even one that actually runs. They take a lot to maintain and cause a lot of noise (see above). You’re better off starting with a bike for midrange transportation (or if using mods a foldable bike).
When you start building or find a nice base area, make a crafting nook and drop all your items nearby to it. When crafting you can pull ingredients from 1-2 tiles adjacent.
Linux PC. Almost entirely on a desktop, though I’ve got a few games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Caves of Qud) that I’ll play on a laptop.
Very limited use of Android, if I’m away from a computer, for the mobility.
I’ve owned a few consoles, but the experience has consistently disappointed me.
Loading times are worse (well, maybe this has improved, but historically was a pain)
I can’t as trivially flip over to a wiki in a web browser. I smack a button, I’m on another workspace on my PC.
For some reason, a lot of “deep” games that one spends a lot of time learning, like strategy and milsims, don’t have much of a presence on consoles. I like a lot of entrants in those genres.
Games cost more than the PC. I mean, sure, the console vendor loses money on the hardware, has to make their money back on the games, but that especially makes consoles a bad buy if you’re going to get a lot of games.
The PC has more potential to be upgraded (though I’ll concede that consoles have generally improved here).
I’m not constrained by what the game developer wanted me to do; I can drop in with a memory editor and cheat in a game, can add mods to the game, have control over save state, etc.
The drawbacks of a PC are things that don’t really bother me:
You’ve got setup and configuration, which I’m gonna do anyway.
You’re more-likely to hit driver or hardware compatibility issues than on a console.
As for mobile…
I would be potentially willing to pay a lot more for mobile games than I do, but the entire commercial game infrastructure on Android is tied to getting a Google account, and I refuse to do that; I don’t want Google logging and data-mining what I do. So I almost-exclusively use open-source software on Android. And most good mobile games have made it to the PC.
Honestly, I was kind of unexpectedly disappointed with Android gaming (and this is even based on what I see in the Google Play Store).
Okay, the touchscreen isn’t a fantastic input medium for a lot of game genres, but I thought that stuff like multiple-choice choose-your-own-adventure games and gamebook-type games would see a huge renaissance, but some of the main games in that line have been…not that great; Choice of Games has a lot of titles, and some of the writing is good, but the gameplay mechanics are kinda disappointing.
Turn-based strategy games seemed like a good fit for the touchscreen, but as with the console, deep strategy games also haven’t been hugely in evidence. As best I can tell, there’s a strong focus on games that you can drop into for a few minutes while waiting in a line or something and then drop out of…which is fine, but really constrains the experience. I guess deckbuilders are okay, but the PC does fine there too.
A lot of Android games aren’t super-considerate of the battery. Some games that I like on the PC, like real time sim games (Oxygen Not Included or Dwarf Fortress) require constant load and just wouldn’t be a great match for a phone running on battery, even if they were present.
I’m not really into games that leverage location, which is one thing that a phone can do that other platforms can’t. I could maybe believe that there could be games that could leverage multi-touch support to do things that PCs can’t and really get a lot of good out of it, but I haven’t seen that.
The screen has major limitations in that few Android devices have a large screen (so they can’t expect to control a large portion of your visual arc) and on a touchscreen, your hands are going to be obscuring part of the screen, making things even more difficult for the developer.
Touchscreens have gotten better, but they just don’t have reliable, rapid response to input the way that the mouse-and-keyboard (which a PC is guaranteed to have) or a gamepad (which a console is guaranteed to have) have.
Android phones can take external peripherals, but it’s hard for a game to expect that they be present, especially since not everyone wants to haul a lot of hardware around with their phone. So you can get game controllers, earphones, a keyboard, or even an external projector, but it’s hard for a game to expect that you have them available.
I was a console player, now I am on PC. And I harvest the power of emulation alongside playing modern games.
Long Version
I’m an 80s guy and was fortunate enough to experience the 90s in its full glory; from Snes Jrpgs to the transitioning to 3D to the first consoles with internet connection. Nowadays I am a PC player and play ton of games through emulation. And the little cute Steam Deck on my side is the extra fun.
I played this year Breath of the Wild from the Switch, but through emulation on my PC in 60 fps, higher resolution and with my Xbox gamepad. Got all or almost all shrines in the game with over 130 hours playtime (Edit: Played it this year on Yuzu BTW. They started suing while I was playing.)! And besides that, I play old Romhacks and mods of old console games for the SNES, in example translations, bug fixes or just new stages (like DLCs from the community!). Or play games to beat highscores and times from your friends or other players in the community. There is so much to explore through emulation.
If you have a good PC and the patience, then I recommend you to get into emulation a little bit. Maybe not as hardcore as I do, but for your favorite consoles and games. You can play games that you missed back in the day in example, or just waste 20 minutes testing old games and then go back to modern games. It’s such a fun experience.
I used to do emulation but stopped for a while. now it seems more difficult, but a family member just gave me quite a few old games (and I’m planning to ask for some others, like Banjo Kazooie and Pokemon SoulSilver hahaha) so I’m looking forward to getting back into that! I also miss the pokemon fangames that weren’t actually for emulators, have some good memories of those.
I love modding things and appreciate the modding community for games a lot. most recently modded game I played was Stardew Valley, but it made me miss the steam workshop and auto updating mods :c
I still haven’t touched Breath of the Wild but I own it for the switch.
90% of my steamdeck usage is ps2 emulation. Old games get so much battery life and they always have pause and no forced online making them ideal for steamdeck
Star ruler as an disappointment is fair, but have you tried the totally different and now open sourced StarRuler2?
It’s a much better game, much tighter with a definite progress path for colonies shipping things to each other (later used by slipstream which is more pure management and might not fit your list)
It’s free, it’s worth a try I promise it’s very different to SR
I can’t agree with your recommendations of Starbound and Starsector. I spent a lot of time with these games trying to figure out why I wasn’t having a good time, and I think in both cases it boils down to the fact their development didn’t fulfill the expectations that the early versions created.
Starbound has beautiful graphics and music and a charming atmosphere, but the gameplay is incredibly dull, the combat is awkward and clunky, your movement abilities are pathetic, etc., etc. For some reason the devs decided to implement a story, and it’s literally the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. And even though this is a building game like Minecraft or Terraria, you can’t build your ship or any of the boss arenas, all bosses are fought in special levels that are protected from your mining/building tool with a magic forcefield. It’s like the devs didn’t even know what kind of game they were making.
Starsector has the opposite problem, the dev knows exactly how he wants his game to play and implements mechanics specifically to prohibit other playstyles. You want to spend all your skill points on buffs for your piloted ship and play this like a space shooter? Too bad, your single ship will run out of combat readiness and explode. You want to sit back and just command your fleet without getting directly engaged? Too bad, every command you issue consumes a command point, and once you run out, you can’t give any more orders. Unfortunately the playstyle the dev enforces results in the player’s role diminishing as the game progresses and their fleet grows, until eventually the game mostly plays itself. The game is overengineered, bloated, and the development drags on. I’ve lost count of how many skill system reworks there have been in the last decade. The dev is just fiddling at this point, and a lot of the systems he’s been trying to balance for years could just be removed entirely without anything of value being lost (ECM, capture points & command points, combat readiness, etc.).
Starbound is I think very much reliant on you wanting to play it as a sandbox. It definitely has a lot of shortcomings. It sounds like you didn’t play it with mods, or at least with Frackin’ Universe, because FU solves most of the QoL pain points from the vanilla game (like movement being slow). The boss arenas actually used to allow you to build in them, but it completely ruined the difficulty; you could go into any boss room, build a box around yourself, and just whittle them down imperviously. While that might be someone’s preference, I don’t fault the devs for not wanting that, and that’s pretty standard for games to remove ‘cheesing’ exploits for bosses.
Starsector is really interesting to me, because I don’t feel that way about it at all.
I almost never end up running out of command points, if only because I only need to re-task ships if something is going wrong. Usually if I’m running low on them, it’s because I’m trying to kill off incoming DPS by focusing fire on one ship at a time, and at that point I should probably be retreating anyways. I can’t speak to the skill tree changes in detail, because honestly I mostly rely on them for the larger fleet bonuses, or tech unlocks (e.g. AI). They never struck me as being impactful enough to make my ship into a ‘hero unit’, so I never tried to see if they could.
The combat is definitely (imho) about fleet composition rather than fleet control.
But really, combat is only one small part of the game to me. Exploration, missions, building up colonies, looting ruins, etc etc. That’s what I really love about Starsector, and what sets it apart to me.
I’d say that if preventing boss cheese requires turning off the most basic core gameplay mechanic that the game is built around, then the entire design of the boss fight needs to be thrown out and rethought. Boss fights should make use of basic gameplay mechanics, not conflict with them. It’s not like this would’ve been rocket science for the Starbound devs. Terraria does it right, building suitable boss arenas is a major part of that game (the golem being the only exception, and even then only the first time you fight it). They could’ve just copied that like they copied so many other things. The lead dev of Starbound was one half of the original two-man team that created Terraria before founding his own company, so I’m really not sure how he managed to screw this up. He of all people should’ve known better.
As for Starsector, I remember there was a back-and-forth between the players and the dev with respect to the solo playstyle. Some players liked to take a small, fast ship and just solo entire fleets by kiting them around, so the dev implemented combat readiness to put a stop to that, effectively putting a time limit on battles. Players responded by using larger ships with longer combat readiness and making them fast by stacking both speed-boosting hullmods (Unstable Injector and whatever the other one’s called), so the dev made those hullmods mutually exclusive. Every time players found a way to play the game in a way the dev didn’t like, he made changes to make such playstyles impossible, going so far as to implement entirely new systems and mechanics that serve no other purpose than to prevent playstyles he doens’t like. It’s become clear over the years that he simply doesn’t want players to be effective in the game in either combat or command capacity. He wants the game to be a tedious slog where you lose a chunk of your fleet in every battle without there being a damn thing you can do about it.
The fact that combat is only a small part of the game and is all about fleet composition rather than fleet control is kinda the problem, that’s what I’m talking about when I say the game didn’t fulfill the expectations that its early versions created. Starfarer (as it was known back then before some copyright dispute) started out as just a list of battle scenarios, with no overworld map at all. It was all about ship and fleet control, fleet composition didn’t play a role at all because you couldn’t adjust it, you had to win each battle with whatever fleet the scenario gave you. Combat is what the game started with, it’s the core that everything else was built around. Unfortunately subsequent development saw basically no improvements to combat. Just about the only change I’d classify as an improvement was the command rework; in early versions you couldn’t even tell your ships where to move. Instead, the dev added more and more padding between battles, diluting the game to the point where combat is now only a small part of it and is mostly decided by fleet composition rather than the player’s piloting and tactics. The game has become the opposite of what it promised ten years ago.
Endless Sky has sucked up large chunks of time from me over the years! Definitely recommend it if anyone hasn’t tried it yet. I’ve worked on several mods for it over the years, and that’s lots of fun as well.
Sort of surprised Elite Dangerous never made your list. It seems like it would be right up your alley! I've invested thousands of hours in Elite Dangerous and several thousands hours across the entire Elite franchise.
I've had lots of fun with more recent space games, but to this day Star Citizen's Squadron 42 is the closest I've seen any game come to Elite's level of flight control and maneuvering. I would say it's currently held down by how they try to manage additional content and flushing out existing content. Endgame content isn't as exhilarating as I'd hoped, but there's still plenty to do in the game to keep you busy for hundreds if not thousands of hours.
Elite certainly isn't without it's faults and I'd be pleased to see more contenders in this space (ha!), but I also recognize that space sandbox games are very difficult to get right.
I will probably add E:D to the list, but under protest. ;P
I kickstarted it, and I just honestly didn’t find it that much fun. Once Frontier started doing lots of “balance” changes that nerfed money accrual, I really bounced off. I’m not someone who plays any single game exclusively, but it felt like it was going to take 60+ hours just to move up each ship level, and I wasn’t gonna wait 6+ months realtime, or however long it would’ve taken, to buy an Anaconda (and not be able to afford insurance, and lose it anyways).
There has always been ways to make stupid money in the game.
My favorite has been to cozy up to a local faction so I can get assassination assignments that pay the big bucks, and void opal mining was still super lucrative last I checked.
Bounty hunting is a bit slow, but taking on a a mercenary contract with a faction to fight for them in conflict zones pays well IIRC.
The real grind is engineering your ships and weapons, though that was also improved significantly by making it so re-rolling your mods can only make them better, never worse.
I also enjoy playing engineer, but I would play as a more aggro engineer with the upgrade for the sentry where it can’t be improved but builds faster and the shotgun where every time the sentry dies you get mini crits.
Najwyższa przyjemność w moim życiu to mówienie “a nie mówiłem?”, ale muszę trochę zmienić prognozę na to, że reddit nie zamieni się w wypok, a Facebook. Dokręcą śrubę z algorytmiczną prezentacją treści, monetyzacją, a za jakiś czas ludzie będą tam siedzieć dla niszowych grupek, bo te większe nie będą nadawać się do użytku.
Elden Ring! I think they really refined the formula, made it a bit more user friendly (I started with Dark Souls and it wasn’t easy to know what to do), and is generally fun to play. Also the open world format means you can just go somewhere else if you’re stuck, not just have to bang your head against the same boss over and over. Then you just come back when you’re stronger.
Sekiro is not a bad option too, it’s a bit more like a regular game than the others. You can pause! Imagine.
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