Exo Altering Shrines

Suggestions
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I’ve been thinking about these color discussions, and I wonder if a solution could be to allow players to deliberately summon specific color combinations at a high price. This would have to either be a public shrine anyone can contribute to or something only larger guilds could accomplish. I’m thinking something like up to 80% of exo planets could be generated from these shrines so that there would still be a supply of truly random exos.

Mechanics

The Shrine
Somewhere, either developer or guild placed, I don’t know, a series of donation plinths could be placed. Up to 6 plinths can be placed, and are connected to a central plinth nearby via ritual stones similar to spark lines.
Once placed, the owner of the plinth can align it to a specific block type (stone, wood, sand, gleam, etc).

Outer Plinth Donations
Each of the outer plinths will accept donations of any block or goo from anyone who has permission to access it. The plinth will use an algorithm to determine the average color of blocks in the plinth to determine it’s color. The plinth itself will be colored and the donations are destroyed.
Once at least 100,000 blocks have been donated to the plinth, it becomes charged and will be accepted by the central plinth. Additional donations can be added to influence the color.

The Central Plinth
The central plinth requires additional donations of refined lucents (I don’t know enough about lucents to have a suggestion on how many would be needed). Once enough lucent materials are donated, this plinth becomes charged.

Activation & Summoning
Once both the central plinth and at least one outer plinth become charged, the charged shrines begin to pulse, and a 72 hour timer starts. Donations are still accepted at all plinths during the timer. Once the 72 hour timer ends, the outer shrines are turned to ash and the central plinth is converted into an Exo Cairn, which is a stack of stones textured as the materials that have been chosen.
Behind the scenes, at this time, the new Exo Cairn is placed in a queue of other cairns. First come, first served. When a new exo is generated, if the exo is a candidate for being an Altered Exo, then it will choose the next Exo Cairn in the queue. This new Altered Exo will have it’s material colors replaced by the chosen colors, similar to how colors can be swapped on Soveriegns.

Why This Mechanic?
This mechanic allows the community to come together to not only influence the game actively, but also provides large long-term goals for advanced players. Allowing these shrines to be placed by guilds (and allowing only one at a time) will reduce competition between groups, so one group can deliberately summon black while another summons white. Each player can then donate what is needed to the shrines they care about.
These shrines, and the Altered Exos they create, could become the center of endgame activity while still ensuring there are high costs to acquiring these colors.

Hopefully some more experienced people here have comments on this idea. I suspect similar suggestions have come up in the past, but I couldn’t find them, and either way I think it’s worth discussing right now.

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Everyone working together to summon an Exo with certain resources - a massive community-driven thing. :thinking:

I don’t know how doable it is, but it would be a very Boundless mechanic & I like it. :+1:

I do wish there was a central dev planet that everyone could access. A great place for in-game voting booths, announcements, a great place for noobs to seek help or find a vet player/mentor, devs could kick off events here, random rotating showcase portals to builds/planets/contests…also a great place for these summoning plinths.

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Fracking brilliant! BeSt solution anyone has offered imo!

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ALL OF THIS

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On the topic of a dev world, the devs could also ask select community members to build tutorial spaces there and use that as a replacement for the current “uh, make a portal and follow the bland tutorial” approach. It would also help drop new players into the community rather than into the wilderness.

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I totally like this idea. Getting people to work together. :ok_hand: well thought out. :beers:
Make it so.
image

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Interesting and well thought out idea - definitely like that it’s community focused.

Wouldn’t you need a lot of one colour block to be able to summon that colour though? I might be missing something but it seems a little self defeating to me.

It also doesn’t really solve the colour scarcity issue for casual players - just pushes it further into the hardcore player arena.

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yup, I’ve been saying that for a while :slight_smile:
pre-built places and scripted events instead of text. the first 1-2 hours of the game need to be much more interesting and show-offy

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This might be the best solution for the :boundless: Colour Rarity problem .
I like it :+1: :+1:

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So, that’s a really good point. I’m not sure how existing color mixing works, but I’m thinking the donations would use some algorithm to steer the color. Maybe if goo based colors were worth more than regular blocks?
Also, part of the idea is that you could use stone donations to influence a wood plinth. This way, if a color is found for one material and not another, rhe community could summon an exo with the other material.

Well, it reduces it, but doesn’t solve it. Newer players would still need to rely on the market, but market prices should go down for more in-demand colors.
If you need white and get together with the community to summon 3 white exos in a row, white prices should drop close to home mat prices.

Edit:
An interesting meta to this would be to deliberately summon an exo Altered to have, say, white sand first. Maybe it takes a bunch of goo to influence your sand plinth, but you get it done.
Sand is quick and easy to harvest a lot of, so now you can get everyone to harvest as much as they can, stockpiling for another world summon. If you get a dozen players cooperating, it only takes about 1 SS per person to fill a single plinth, which I’m pretty sure is a modest price assuming there aren’t many griefers polluting the plinth(the biggest flaw in this idea).
Next, you take all of that sand and summon the whitest planet you’ve ever seen. With a max of 6 plinths, you could do white sand, white gleam, 2 white stone types, and 2 white trees, more than making up for the initial goo cost.

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This is great :ok_hand::ok_hand:

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It’s an interesting idea and maybe with some development it could be good, but for me it would currently be a ‘no thanks’.

  • A casual or non community-focused individual has no good way to access this. If the ‘community’ doesn’t get together to spawn a planet with the colours you want, you’re still out of luck. You can’t mine the material, and the shops still won’t have it in stock (and that’s ignoring the fact that I think ‘Just buy it’ is a horrible answer, especially for casual players).
  • This seems way to open to griefing. “Oh, people are trying for white? let me just add this easily farmable shadow mustard in high quantities and laugh as we spawn a planet with a range of pale yellows instead”.
  • With only one shrine, this becomes a competition between any group who wants to spawn a colour, with even more opportunity for griefing, even if not intentionally.
  • Even if an individual were able control the output of this mechanic on their own and produce a resource of a colour they wanted, they’ve have put in all of that effort on their own. However, the result it would be available for everyone to farm, which doesn’t particularly seem fair either.

Personally, if a system based on this idea did go ahead, I’d rather see it as an entirely separate planet type and not just another Exo. On a survival/sovereign world, you (on your own or with a group/community) build a shrine (so you have control over who can access the plinths for it) and fill it’s plinths up with whatever colour you’re looking to spawn. Then, when it’s ready, only people who contributed would be able to warp to this planet to reap the benefits of the work put in.

That would feel like a much tidier solution to me.

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That is indeed a terrible response people use regarding the color rarity problem in this game. How the heck do people expect others to ‘Just buy it’ when it does not exist in the first place?

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I really like the idea of this being tied to sovereign worlds, though I worry about there being a paywall for color options. I don’t think putting it on a normal survival is a particularly good idea though.
Ignoring that issue…

The donation plinths could be linked to the soveriegn world control beacon, unlocking that color for the next billing cycle’s available colors.

I think that allowing these plinths to be created by guilds, and giving them the same permissions as currently exist for machines, griefing can be avoided. Some guilds might open up to let anyone join and update like the existing public minters, and others could just have their closed group be able to donate. Add a log of who donated what so you have some accountability.

If it’s guild owned and not dev owned, I would recommend a limit of 1 shrine per guild.

As someone who usually plays primarily as solo in every game, I feel this.
I don’t think this is a good solution for solo players, or people who refuse to use markets, that’s true. I don’t mind the answer “just buy it” when it comes to stuff I want but don’t enjoy earning. My only problem right now is the price. The ultra-rare goods are too expensive and effectively can’t be earned deliberately in any way, and I don’t like that. Maybe goo is another answer to this, I’m not sure.

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Goo could be an answer to the color rarity problem if it can be applied to any block instead of only some stone and wood blocks. Even then, Goo is currently unsustainable in any way, making it not an ideal form of color changing.

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Maybe I was a little unclear. I meant that the shrine could be placed anywhere, but when activated it would still spawn a separate resource-planet that you travel to to gather materials. The goal was just trying to find a way that different people could work towards their own goals, and that only those people that put the effort into spawning it would be able to reap the rewards, not that you could change the colour of existing planets.

My bad!

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