I’ve spent about a week away from Boundless to get some fresh ideas, try new games.
How often do you go try new games that can somewhat relate to Boundless, and would you want to talk about them?
I stumbled on a game I bought 3 years ago which just had a major update. It’s called Scrap Mechanic.
Works with very small blocks (like roughly ¼ of a Boundless block, like what we get with a precise square chisel), but it’s all physics-based.
The point of the game is mostly to make crazy contraptions. You need to farm and eat/drink to survive (pretty much like Subnautica).
As soon as you plant too many vegetables/fruits, you are warned that robots will attack you during the night, so you gotta go wreck them with your sledgehammer…
…or you invent crazy machines to automate all of that, like machines that crush your foes, machines that automatically harvest, re-seed and water your plants… then you make insane vehicules.
The game supports logic gates (with all the AND/OR/XOR/NOR/NAND/XNOR that inventive people love), timers and a lot of machines like thrusters, bearings, pistons, suspensions, wheels, gas or electric motors. The player has a tool to connect things together. Connect the driver seat to the motor, and the motor to the back wheels of your car, then the driver seat to the horizontal bearings of the front wheels, there you go, working vehicule!
My friend and I first started with the basic wooden care made with scraps, horrible vehicules that were hell to drive. You gotta take things like weight and stability into consideration.
Now, we basically have a compact home/tank to go and explore, complete with retractable drills and sawblade to mine and cut trees, containers to gather all the ressources, as well a pump to dispense vegetables on the back and a potato-canon to dispense justice, plus various options like deployable feets for stability. Also beds to respawn. And the most important feature : the horn. Honk honk!
The game also has dungeons called Warehouses. They’re not 100% finished in terms of reward-to-investment ratio, but they’re really cool to visit. I got a “WoW Classic Blackrock Depth” vibe while going there. I’d say it’s because the Warehouses are filled with enemies that two-shot you (and you can one-shot them if you perform a head-shot). To me, that felt awesome compared to Boundless because I had a great feedback during combats.
In Boundless, during hunts, for almost all my deaths, I get terrible feedback on what killed me, how, where, etc, or even when I make damaged.
In Scrap, I was always feeling my deaths were fair, that they were my bad. So even if the reward at the end of the warehouse felt terrible compared to a T6 meteor in Boundless (in relation to the effort-to-investment), I still look forward to doing more once the devs patch a few things up.
Boundless Meteors, I need to do them, and I really am not looking forward to the moment where I’ll have to dedicate a few hours of my time to that activity.
What actually made me write this thread was that I jumped in Creative Mod and found myself with access to a fairly big list of assets used to make the game’s warehouses. After about one or two hours of work figuring out combinations of assets, I made a storage room with a switch to turn the lights on/off. And dayum, that alone might make me spend more time in Scrap Mechanic than in Boundless for a while.
Basically, what I’m sayin’ is…
