Expired Homes Should store items

could be solved by introducing randomly appearing prefab dungeons and structures.
say, a 3x3x3 plot modular dungeon appears underground in an area that is further away from any player owned structure, stays there for a week, then quietly regenerates back. or an ‘abandoned base’ with a machine or two. you can plot it if you want and have a nice starter house.

expired player beacons quickly fade into a container (all inventories and more expensive placed blocks)
it would make moving base more convenient as well

One type of solution might be to have some sort of… Emergency Matter Compressor machine. If the beacon expires, if the machine is present, it stores all the blocks and items in a way that is retrievable by the player later. Perhaps there is a cost to retrieval. It has energy storage like spark generators, and it will only store as many blocks and items as it has energy to store. Maybe the blocks closest to it have highest priority. Any remaining blocks stay in the world for regeneration. It would be best if it stored the build as some sort of prefab, because it’s not just the resources that are the loss, it’s way they are assembled into a build.

This shifts the effort of preserving your beacon to the time when you are playing, instead of the time when you are not playing. That distinction is critical.

1 Like

100% agree with OP builds should not stay forever but players should not be punished for having a life outside of a video game

i have talk about this a few times on the steam forums…no game shod have a design that garp’s you by the throat and forces you to play in order to not get “reset”

the regin system works but just needs some tweaking ok delete the build but let players keep what they worked hard to get.

2 Likes

In my personal opinion, starting over every once in a while is a tremendous opportunity. You are freed from the burden of what you have already established, and the creativity flows freely once again.

On the side, if you came back to the game and all of your plots are expired, you still have the same character level you left with. It should be fairly easy to start over.

6 Likes

Could be a nice challenge, even. And to have all those plot free and available =)

If they make such a change to store all your stuff if your beacon expires, how will you go about retrieving it? When you return how do you access these items? I know players that have probably hundreds of thousands of blocks in their builds and in storage. This could be a lot of items to try and access when you return. Since sanctum is local and not on the servers, that is not a likely option.

If they make such a change and work out how to access what is stored, then what is the value in gleam club?

you can middle ground it the build its self is gone forever but the machines and stuff in the storage blocks become retrievable that way there is still value in gleam club for the bigger builds but you at least don’t have to start back form nothing

1 Like

I think the build needs to go away or eventually the universe becomes crowded with abandoned structures and you run out of space or can never do anything about a build belonging to someone that is no longer playing being in the way of active players trying to expand. If you look at some of the current planets some have at least 40% of the land plotted and that is with a small player base.

I think this is where it gets messy. you might have all your valuable materials in storage and I might actually have used them in my build. So you get your valuable stuff but I do not? And you are still talking about a lot of stuff. I probably have 400 storage blocks with various things in them and I do not have a lot of storage compared to other players. I think the real issue is how do you retrieve the items. How does Boundless give me access to over 400 storage blocks without using sanctum?

You don’t start back from nothing as it is. You have your level, coins, items you had on you. I also know a few people that just started playing again(no builds or anything left) and hit the ground running. With how low prices on everything is now it’s pretty easy to start back
up. 100c(total) per machine, about 13080 to get 12 adv coils on a machine lil less if you look around a lil more if you don’t go to people like @Vansten @catfud or @QuimbyBoundless.

Plus how helpful the community can be. They pretty much look for a chance to give stuff away to returning players. And there’s people who hold on to builds to give away to new/returning people like @Conkuur. I used to give builds away but I no longer have any to give away.

4 Likes

This is actually a problem that I have with gleam club. It leads to all these abandoned structures. Even worse – it leads to proliferation of half-regenerated abandoned builds that are preserved indefinitely because some gleam member claimed them. I don’t think gleam club should fuel beacons. I think fueling beacons should require more effort, and instead have a way to recover your lost items after your plots regenerate.

depending on what you had on you when you quit it may or may not help levels and coin dont really mean anything cuz levels dont lower the grind that much and the economy could easly swing to where a single hammer is 9K a pop right now eveything is low but that can easily change along with this

not trashing the community but its easly to be nice and give stuff away when tis the odd 2 or 3 people now if the game ever des explode that could change when its 50-100 people at a given time

for the same reason why the economy is a total mess right now you cant design something 100% around a unstable element cuz all it takes is a shift for that design to go south

yea my bad i did not phrase that well i meant all the mats used for the building can be lost(des not get stored) but the stuff inside could be saved

lets be honest tho how many builds just disappear without anyone even noticing unless you make some kind of mod that lets you pull beacon fuel info without even needing line of sight on the beacon its easy to see a build and not realize how much time is even left on it and to walk away and come back later to it mostly gone

the easly fix would be to change sanctum so its not ran client side that way the storage blocks can be there without worry of people spawning stuff in

This is not an easy fix. The sanctum is there also to get away from connection issues and to port some where you don’t have issues. You put the sanctum on the server it’s not going to be a safe zone anymore. Plus they’d have to put a limit on the amount of people in the sanctum as well. Even if we don’t see each other in there.

2 Likes

There isn’t any reason it should be the sanctum. It can be an asset retrieval server accessible from the sanctum. Or whatever. Doesn’t really matter.

It’s called gleam club

So lets take away the one way that players currently have to take a break from the game and not be required to log back in? I think this just makes the problem worse and probably further reduces players that are willing to play or even come back to the game.

Are abandoned structures the problem or a symptom of the problem. If the game was keeping the players engaged then would them be abandoned? How do you know from looking at a structure if it is abandoned or not anyway? I know I have never seen one player that has a build across the lake from my main build and next to an area I have plotted for farming. Does that mean they are not playing anymore or they play different hours than I play? Just because a build does not change from the exterior is not an indicator of if a player is active or not.

1 Like

And here’s the problem with this. “Well if you just ask the community…” you shouldn’t have to rely on the playerbase in order to fix things in a game. This is why the population is dwindling. I don’t want to have to resort to being a charity case, the game should have a built in function to make sure player retention and player re-acquisition is a natural and easy process that doesn’t affect the players mentally. No one wants to have to ask other players for donations just to play again, most games don’t get rid of all your stuff without giving you the ability to reclaim them unless they are a hardcore survival (which is not the vibe this game is going for ). This is one of the reasons the population is dropping without recovering for each update, because the people who try coming back find they have no reason to return to the unholy grind that is Boundless. This is the whole reason for this suggestion, this game is going to die if they don’t change things around soon and start thinking about the longevity of the game, that is if it is even possible to bounce back at this point. I personally believe it’s a sinking ship at this point because I don’t believe they are going to do anything about the population. I can argue till my face turns blue and the only responses I will ever get are from other players because they know this is a moot point at this time…the people are already gone. Their stuff is already gone.

6 Likes

The problem when you get to my age is time goes by so quickly. I had no idea it was a month since I’d logged in. I haven’t been playing Boundless for a few months. I’ve kept logging in to keep beacons up on my four builds with the intention of demolishing and moving to a new location. It just seems so laborious with shelves full of material!

Anyway this time it seems I waited too long and all four of my builds are gone. And with it mountains of mats I’ve spent hours collecting. So that’s me done. Game deleted. I would have come back at some point once I got the urge to organise moving everything. But not now I’ve lost everything!

5 Likes

Ok lets look at this. So lets say there is a place called “Storage Planet” that exists on the servers. If your Beacon expires then you get a location added for a storage space on the storage planet. You access this location only through Sanctum. Your permissions are set so you can retrieve items but not add items and not make any changes to the environment (like adding storage or removing walls to get to other players storage). Every player that has ever been on Boundless and had a beacon expire will need a space on this planet. Only 100 players at a time can access the Storage Planet at a time like the other worlds. I would still think there needs to be a maximum time that items will be stored. Lets say 1 year? I would also surmise that it would be best to have some limit to the amount of items that can be stored. What is reasonable to allow players to come back without creating the need for more storage planets than live planets? Maybe what can fit into a two plot space? Something like 240 storage blocks to allow for walls, floors and ceiling? If they saved blocks by most to least prestigious, would this give players enough reason to return?

There are probably already a list on the server of whats in the beacon/plots, save that list (maybe not the natural blocks) when beacon expire.
When returning, you get to see the list and can pick stuff to get it back to your inventory, until the list is empty.
Can have it as a menu tab.

or if you are in IT cuz i spend 80% of my time behind a computer (at school,work or for fun) i have had months just go by without even realizing it

you could do a “save me button” like how in borderlands you click a star to mark a item so you dont accidentally sale it you could mark items with a max limit that woud allow people to make sure the sutff that for them that is “if i lose this i quit” is safe and you would not have the problem of storage vaults to game the system

for the 2ed part im going to talk purely theoretical

to see storage worlds would only need to do just that store things i would think you could have double or triple the normal cap has you don’t need mobs,world regen or meteors(the big bulky resource hogs) just storage blocks and some way for the player to access them.