Then they would more or less act like how a Furnace acts like now, only it is limited to cooking food only, and maybe only basic foods.
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If this reply was to me, then why would you assume that I was trying to move functionality from one tool to another tool? Are we not sophisticated enough that we can’t cook meat in a furnace and on a campfire? Why would it need to be one or the other.
I just said it would be nice to be able to cook something over a campfire in a temporary method. There should be nothing wrong with doing that.
The link to a beacon needs to be removed. The asset of a campfire needs to stay and if they want to improve it then allow us to cook some stuff in there as an option to having to do it in other places.
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That works for me and let’s players still use it for decorative purposes just like they do with the furnace components.
If I was assuming you meant that I would not have asked a question but just restated your comment. Since I was not sure what you and @Trundamere might mean I asked.
I can agree with that. And that the beacon should be required to be made before a campfire.
Had a new player build a base behind mine. He couldn’t see it because of the trees are so thick there, said he didn’t know that he was that close to others. He had a campfire and was making a crafting table, said he was making tools. I didn’t think to tell him to make a beacon, as I had been ready to get off.
Next day, go back to check on him and his base has regened, campfire is gone and only his crafting table is left but one row of wood around what had been his walls. He had mentioned he was getting off to take his son to the fair, so I’m guessing he didn’t make a beacon and didn’t realize that when the campfire ran out the base would just regen.
Been in the game, but not at my base, so have no idea if he showed up or not, if he quit and just let it go, but said he was enjoying the game so far.
It is confusing to new players, it needs to be changed.
On the campfire as a fire, I think it would be good to be made after a beacon is placed and before you make a furnace to cook food. You start out and don’t know a thing about what to eat. If you have a campfire and it shows putting the yams and berries in it to cook, maybe some of the plain meat, regular type it would help them. They can put in foliage, or a couple sticks for fuel, that would help new players as they start out. They can destroy if after they build a furnace or keep it for looks; it could only cook simple food.
edited to correct spelling
I spent a lot of time today helping someone that had deleted BL then just re-installed it. He said he wanted to play it with his son, but found everything too complicated.
He couldn’t understand the whole beacon/plot system. He had trouble locating his menus.Had trouble understanding how to get/make a place. Couldn’t understand why he couldn’t do anything (I had to explain the he had to go into his menu, in the exchange, buy plots, make fuel, place a beacon…yada yada…). Even after I help a lot of these people, they give up and say it’s too complicated. This one said everything was overwhelming.
I keep running into noobs that don’t get past the campfire/plot/beacon thing. It’s like lemmings falling off a cliff and only one or two here and there make it across to the other side.
This game has a large learning curve…which is awesome once you get into it, but you have to get to that point where you get hooked. If people can’t just spawn, start placing blocks, digging up dirt, etc…then it needs to be explained and/or they need a safe/simple place to learn.
This is why I think noobs could use an incubator: Central Spawn Location for Everyone & Community Event Center
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hot take here
but this game really is the building version of eve online sure it’s simple on the surface but look at how many spreadsheet style guides for even the most basic things like best planet and elevation to mine/gather something and forgeing and farming almost require there own college course to master
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Until they give players the skill to take over other peoples builds via PvP and force, which will cause 95% of the player base to quit faster then a traffic light can change from yellow to red, I really can’t agree with comparing it to EVE online.
The spreadsheets here are honestly very simple, they are just a flat database to store and show information in a easy to read format,
Many users of various games I am playing have started storing basic data in Spreadsheets now days
Spreadsheets in EVE online on the other hand often have alot of functions that i don’t even understand how to use, where a user can type something into the spreadsheet and get a result out of it. The spreadsheet may or may not even go out and look at the API nodes of EVE and other websites to assist with getting the correct data.
But forging is a bit on the complex side and further made complex by the RNG nature giving inconsistent results.
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I said a year ago that the campfire system was a bad idea and overly complicated. It needs to go. Honestly, I would just make beacons free. Have them take up a permanent spot in your inventory and be done with it.
The menus, as you said, also need to be pruned. Far too many things are hidden under hard to find tabs. It’s a maze.
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The Knowledge needs a search. Things that you would think would be together aren’t.
Butter, want to make butter, okay, that is a food item. Look in where you can see all the foods at. No butter, what, how am I supposed to make butter then? It’s food, it’s in the recipe to make butter to use to make starberry pie, why can’t I find it? Where is it at?
Because it isn’t in the food, I put down in a notebook all the recipes that I make what is used, what machines, all the info I need because half the time I can’t find the info I need in the Knowledge because there is NO Search option. We need that. New players desperately need that.
What to help the new players as @majorvex told about? Make a tutorial cartoonish video that they can watch at the beginning. A silly waste time game I play called 4 Elements, it has a nice little cartoonish story that lets you know what is going on. Why can’t one be made that shows a new player what to do, the cartoon character uses the totem to pick a spot on the planet, lands, take the totem and hits the tree to get wood, some rocks for stone hits the branches to get foliage collects whatever is needed to make a beacon.
Or it can show the steps to getting to the planets and show clicking on J (and what would be the console version) for journal and it would have pictures of what to do for the first few steps.
Food needs to be given, they still don’t understand that when they hit the leaves that the berries that fall are for them to eat, or that the sword plant has yams that they can eat raw. Write out, don’t use arrows, on what to do. Watched a video of a guy playing and he didn’t know what the arrows were for and was wondering how am I supposed to build a crafting table.
I will use myself as a perfect example, you all can laugh at me. I bought Farm Together. Can’t play it, why? It says to plow or till or whatever needs to be done to the soil to be able to plant. But I can’t figure out how to do it. So, haven’t tried to play it again, going I’ll just play Boundless. My son told me what to do in BL, I would have figure it out, but it would have taken me longer, it was confusing to me.
A beacon in the inventory, 20 pieces of cooked yams so they can have something to eat and not starve to death while they try to figure out what to do. Watched another video, guy couldn’t figure out what to eat, he found a dead critter in the water and ate the raw meat. Died. They don’t know what to do.
They complain on Steam, on Facebook, to their friends, on whatever they chat on and tell of how the game is too hard to play, there is no help to get you started.
And make a new Trailer that isn’t seen as bait and switch, because some see it that way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t, it matters if the buying customer does and tells others it is.
This game has so much potential.
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While I’d agree they they’re a pain to perfect and people just go find ‘the solutions’ out-of-game, I’d argue that this is mostly because the information just isn’t (I’m assuming deliberately) available in-game. It takes trial and error with a bit of patience for the initial few, and once someone’s worked it out it would be a waste of anyone else time to anything other than look it up.
It’s an interesting idea, although I’d hate it if it turned into another RNG snooze-fest or another set-and-forget because it takes hours upon hours to complete.
What I’d really like to see is an actual skill / thought based activity that you can’t just learn and be done (Until the next patch that changes it). For all its flaws, Puzzle Pirates was engaging to actually play because you were actually playing and thinking the whole time. If they could add that kind of mini-game element somewhere into Boundless, I believe it would be a marked improvement.
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Yep! This is why I send everybody to your wonderful videos… the how to get started video is a HUGE help I believe - I’ll link it in here below for folks who may encounter newcomers. 
There is that learning curve that they have to get by before they become addicted as many of us are… if we can catch them and offer support, get them here, I think we have a way better shot of them staying, but there are some tweaks that can be made. Agree on the campfires, that is a complicating layer that can be scrapped maybe? Perhaps one way to do it would be to give the first beacon free in the Sanctum along with a tutorial message, and keep popping it up when they arrive, as a reminder to settle down and how. Still make them make their fuel when they plop it down, but it would be a lot more straightforward if the first one were free, they can figure out making another one later once settled in a bit more.
Vex’s great video for newcomers, all! -
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I totally agree with you in this part. Now day basically everything become easier to understand or use for user.
For example smart phone, website, and most famous mmorpg. I am not saying we should make game easier to play, but should be easier to understand. This why most game have a lot of similarity on their UI design, system (dungeon, raid), and play style. I am not saying that we should stop being creative, but we should be creative to design anything people can understand especially in any king of thing relate to marketing.
Like my job, I am graphic designer, I design the thing people can understand, and something will benefit my company or client. If i just be way too creative to over design a project, it will damage to both my company and my client. Because it will make them hard to sell their product. Its same thing for the current Boundless situation. Both forge and farming system is way too hard to majority of user to understand in market, it should be remain same gathering time but easier to setup and understand. Any design require a lot of explain on how you are going to use it, it is a bad design. Its time for devs to design that Boundless should be an art project or a successful game to sell on market.
Right now their direction make me feel they want to design the game close to art project and only target on small group people on market (people who have a lot of time to play the game, people like something complicated…etc)
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and for the most part farming is fine with that there are hints and HUD things that tell you if you are doing someting wrong and you atlest get the outcome you are looking for(be it at lower amount) but forgeing i think needs to be included in the overhaul and given a better tutotal.
now i’m not saying make it so people can be forge masters with just the tutorial…you can totally keep the out of game guides for that but a player shod be able to comfortably forge with in game knowledge alone the current system i see so many people say that they just gave up cuz they felt they where just rolling a dice on the outcome or that they wasted too much time and mats trying to figure it out without success.
I definitely agree there should be more information available in game regarding forging, but I don’t think it would solve the idea that some people give up and feel like it’s just rolling dice. Essentially, it is just rolling dice, albeit dice that your can exert some influence on to be more likely to roll the way you want. There’s no guarantees.
There are people (myself included) who just don’t like to do that with their time. Either it would need to be overhauled to the point that it’s no longer random (and I don’t see that being popular with the people who like it as it is, or the Devs), or we need to accept that there is always going to be a subset of people just don’t like it. It’s really no different from people not liking hunting, or mindless grinding.
Despite not liking it as a system, I’m mostly happy to ignore it. Although it is getting a bit old where every update seems to consist of ‘Here’s a cool new feature - accessible only by forged tools’. Why couldn’t we just have used buckets to collect fluids?
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Because Buckets were already part of the crafting hierarchy and had a usage pattern - you could use 100 buckets on a 1 voxel of water and fill all 100 buckets. If this had remained then you would have been able to duplicate fluids by turning 1 voxel of liquid into 100, replacing 1 and gathering another 100. Then the fluids would have been infinite. This would have meant that fluids couldn’t act as resources. Water and lave are basically infinite, but we wanted the oil and resin to be more meaningful.
One change would have been that 1 voxel of liquid fills 1 bucket, but then the action of filling 100 buckets for crafting would have changed from 1 action to 100 actions - and players would have screamed nerf+grind. Additionally, if you have a stack of 100 empty buckets and attempt to pickup a water you then need spare inventory slot to contain the new full bucket.
Given that all blocks are already gathered by hammers / axes / shovels it makes sense that liquids are already gathered this way. Forging the attribute onto the tools is the most basic forge possible.
Additionally: the tools can already be forged - so gathering fluids can take advantage of 3x3 boons, etc.
This is because it’s a flexible way for adding new features into the game without always requiring us to add more tools, which in turn need to be crafting and carried by players.
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Bucket use is the danger of designing a game to be unique after everyone has expectations of what certain items do from previous games.
It’s a matter of new player experience matching expected experience.
Its extra work obviously to create a new waterskin item to be used in crafting foods while moving buckets over to manipulating liquids but might pay off based on simplicity for new players.
Same thing with the campfire. Everyone I know tried to do cook with it. The crucible made zero sense to me and looked more like something I’d use to make cement instead.
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Thanks!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much thought process or detail on the Forums about this, so it’s nice for us to get some insight into you decision making process on this. I can now understand why buckets as they currently exist couldn’t just be used without additional work.
Is that likely to be the way forward for most new effects then (as it has been so far)?
If so, I guess that leaves us in a place with no real way forward. I, as a person who dislikes the forge mechanics very much, will just have to add it to my list of things where I need to just ignore it. You (the devs as a group) will just have to accept that there will be people who very much dislike that growing part of your game and will complain about it on the forums sometimes.
It’s disappointing, but I do understand the logic and the development pressures that would push you towards a single flexible way to add features like that.
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There’s a big different between attempting to get crazy 300+ rank tools and simply putting a single Venerable feature onto a tool.
I think the Venerable category only contains a single boon per tool. So targeting this boon with a Venerable Gum will basically give you the feature you want. You just need the basic forge machine, venerable gum (to target the Venerable boons), boon compound (to get the boons), setting resin (to finish the forge) - and nothing else.
Curious if you’ve ever tried playing with the forge?
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it’s true basic forging is very easy.