Frustrations from a new person's perspective

Suggestions
1

I’m semi-new, having had this game a while, been away, and am coming back after several changes have been made to it.

Overall, the game seems like it might be rather fun. It has a lot of interesting mechanics to it, looks wonderful, and remains in active development. I might be able to get my sister and her folks to play it.

But, I die. A lot. Precipitous drops tend to kill me moreso than anything else. I don’t quite have the feel of the grappling hook or sling hook, although I’m working on it. That’s on me. I need to become more familiar with this mechanic (especially now that it’s so easy to die from falling).

Problem is, when you die, you lose everything. I mean, EVERYTHING. You go back to a torch. You don’t have anything in your inventory, and all tools you created are gone.

Creating new tools isn’t so hard, no? Except in many worlds, you can’t find the wood required to come up with even the most basic of tools without having to travel a good distance to find it (if even then). So, you lost everything in your inventory, including any blocks you had (like… wood, for a good example), and you have to go hunting around a barren landscape to find it.

Well, you can just teleport to another world, right?

Sure, yeah, you can teleport around until you find some place that has wood, harvest some wood, then create a sling hook/grappling hook, and hopefully retrieve what you lost. Only to die again, because you haven’t quite got the swing of the hooks. sigh

Seriously… this is what I’m going through right now. For me, this isn’t exactly fun. I realize I filed this under ‘Suggestions’, yet I’m not actually going to post a suggestion… because I feel developers often have a good sense of the right way to address a problem, moreso than a player might. But, they need to know about problems. This is a problem, for me, for continued play with this game.

Give me a chance to fail, repeatedly, at working with the sling hook so I can learn it, without penalizing me so harshly by wasting my time hunting down difficult-to-find resources to try and fail again to get what I lost.

8 Likes
2

You should have tried it when there was not even a torch :slight_smile:

But yeah it is a good point, maybe cut down on damage in general until we actually got a death toll system in place?

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That is the deathtoll system as far as im aware, to drop everything you have.

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4

Hi, I absolutely agree to this. I think exploring is very dangerous in Boundless.
Crafting heal blocks is helpful.
Be careful and cautious in your way of progression and movement.
Kamikaze crash is also helpful sometimes (crash at a your regular respawn point before you have completely run out of energy - this helps while building a project).

I really think it is a thing to address the developers, we need storage items. And potions or a heal spell.
As it is now it IS frustrating to lose all of your goods. I think (or at least i HOPE) it is not on behalf of the developers to make this game overly trial and error.

While typing this, I just got an idea: How about digging a room into a rockformation, add a door, and drop some of your most valuable items in there. As far as I know, that must be possible. What I don’t know is, do they vanish after a while? At least this could be a method of getting around without the need for storage boxes like in Minecraft.

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They talked about that later on you won’t loose everything though, and here you do loose abselutely everything.

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It might be unintentional but it’s still a death toll^^

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okay here is a question are you good with directions?.. cause when you die- don’t click respawn at x and x… press Esc- and click set home or whatever it is then respawn you will spawn the same place you died

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gawd also ive realised people are going to hate the game i want to develop

cause he death toll has already been set- you lose everything but 3 Items or 2 Items and Money-

Basically you get 3 Death slots you can choose what you keep on death so you can pick your best weapon, best armour piece and money, or best armour pieces

The other game idea i have, the game only costs a solid £1 or $1 but you only get two lifes, if you die game over. The system deletes your data, friends lists etc. The goal of this game is to stop people thinking “oh its just a game meh ill just keep running into the boss till he dies” it will force players to be more tactical and value their in game lifes. sort of like real life, if you die you don’t just respawn and get to try again, your dead end of.

9

Agreed. Exploring is quite dangerous. I recently went through the same. I spent about 3 hours to get back the basics, and that was with respawning at my base, where I have most items cached (already have a store of placed wood, timber, sand, broken stone, etc.

However, I wasn’t really trying too hard to get up and running for my build as fast as possible. It had been a while so I was enjoying reacquainting myself with the crafting progression requirements.

I also “volunteered” to get into the fix in the first place, because I know how disastrous it could be to explore if not careful, but was tired of my build at the moment, so… what could it hurt? nothing really - a few hours more playing.

I am familiar with the grapple, and typically carry two to get me out of fixes like I got in… I also now carry around a healing block to recharge if needed. None the less, this time I got myself pickled…

I was exploring a huge cavern system, in daylight, and could see quite well. I grappled to what looked like a spot over a ledge but it wasn’t, and I wasn’t carrying a second grapple. I was too high to lower myself down, I couldn’t go back, and even at full extension the fall would likely kill me.

I could have gotten out of it, by burrowing into the cliff, crafting a second hook, or building a ledge from inventory blocks, but thought "hey, I haven’t got much to loose lets see if I can survive the drop… Nope.

Turns out, I underestimated what it would take to get back what I lost and spent quite a bit of time, running around avoiding spitters (inside my beacon) while gathering what I need to get my tools back. So I agree with you, if I’d been trying to learn the mechanics, it could have been frustrating, and the learning curve right now is pretty harsh.

Being able to store items like tools and the non-reclaimable blocks like sandstone, polished sandstone, healing blocks, etc. will remove much of the tedium of dying, I DO agree with “loosing all inventory on death” (even respawning with a torch was odd, though nice), but having to start from scratch every time because you cannot draw from storage does make for less fun and more tedium.

10

What your saying is true,exploring is very dangerous. Especially when the damage system is so dramatic.
But if your problem is really just re-making the wooden tools,then just take a block of wood go into infant mode and place a bunch of blocks in a area near your “HQ”. Then when you die,just take the amount of blocks needed,and replace them again.
That’s the only solution I can thing of,because even though the damage is a bit “harsh” for now. I think when armor and other things can in to help that,so it probably won’t be changed.

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That’s an interesting idea, and perhaps one that might do for now (save home, respawn at home, gather the goods).

But consider someone new to the game, just learning the mechanics. Death becomes ‘lose your home.’ And if you don’t have a good sense of direction or something, you’ve more-or-less lost your home permanently. And since you cannot yet craft your own beacon (even if you did manage to gather all the tiles without dying), you can’t even use that as a guide to help you find your home.

On the other hand, maybe a new person doesn’t exactly have an established home, and might consider putting that off until they get a firm hold of the mechanics.

I sincerely don’t know the best solution. There’s no part of all of this that I hate, but the combination of all of these things makes for a miserable gameplay for someone just trying to get into it.

Honestly, if I could reliably get to some trees, then return (safely) to where I died, I’d probably be okay… I’d still have the penalty of losing everything, and I’d still have to build at least a slingshot or something, but I wouldn’t have to spend quite a lot of time at it. As someone just kind of getting started, I can’t even find a place to reliably hoard blocks (no ability to place a beacon)… so even if I wanted to do a little gathering in advance of experimenting, I’m kind of stuck hoping nobody would take my stuff. And I’m not even sure you can put tools in some kind of chest or something, so there’s no hope of building extras of that.

I mention these with the hopes that it helps the developer see inside the mind of someone just getting into this, to help ensure they can ensure the game can attract new players. Right now, it feels hopeless to gain any foothold in the game.

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When glass was broken and you couldn’t place torches on walls ;’)

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Yea, to start it would be good to get some direction, though perhaps that is the point of fan videos. A good website with the “What to do in your first day” survival summary would be a good thing. There are already recipe sites. But a strategy page may be helpful.
0) “,” to go to infinite mode; "tab’ for inventory, “esc” for main menu, WASD for move, “space” jump

  1. punch a tree, “tab”, shift-click on wood, make timber, same for a set of sticks: wood+sticks, a wooden hammer.
  2. use hammer on stone, gather some broken stone; use it to craft stone.
  3. make 3 sticks, craft a stone hammer, axe, shovel (faster than wood)
  4. now craft a sling bow, grapple and use the rest of the wood for sticks, combine with stone for arrows for your sling bow.
  5. ESC, select “set home location”.(until you have a base use this often before taking risks).
  6. you need gleam to craft your healing stone. Before you hunt for it, establish a base and place the basic blocks you will need if you die (and lose your inventory). Timber, broken stone, wood, sand, clay, from them you can easily recraft tools, and other blocks when you re-spawn. Just gather what you need from your store, go infinite, replace them, craft your tools, then try to collect what you dropped…

Of course as features are added, chests or another means of storage will take over… and infinite will go away,

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14

It’s not the death tole that we need, It’s chests so that we can have backup tools and such after we die.

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Thanks for sharing your first thoughts, clearly there’s a good amount of balancing we need to do here (it’s easy to forgot what new players see when you’re so deep into development!). Good discussion in this thread too.

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16

I’m very happy if I helped, ben.

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17

Very much this. Creating a repository for basic and more rare blocks is one of the most helpful things I’ve ever done. Especially placing a healing block in it so I can tp home and heal up if I ever get in a tricky spot.

Also, @fleebness, I would suggest going to some world that has floating islands over water (no idea what these are as I’m currently at work), equipping two grappling hooks, and going to town training. If you fall it’s all good since you’re over water.