I was thinking of organizing a Test Universe Meteor Hunt, but was unsure if anyone would show up. 
I asked around and received moderate interest at best, plus every time I’m on the testing server I feel like I’m the only one there (or maybe another one or two people in the entire test universe at the same time.)
If people are interested, I’m happy to put something together, though! 
I think if the tutorial is over that the “monster ignore” gets turned off.
I did ask about providing a prebuilt world, but as I understood it, doing so would add about 2Gb to the download size for just 1 world. It may be the lesser of 2 evils to do it that way though.
Taking a little longer to download the game with one prebuild world ready to go would probably be perceived in a better light and be a much better trade off than loading the game up, expecting to be able to play right away, and then having to wait a further 25mins to an hour before you can do anything locally.
What type of cpu, ram and disk do you have ? I think is the important question
The fact grapples go though people who are not your friends shows that collision can be turned off for certain projectiles… not sure what the point in having collision on my slingbow is in a non pvp game?
The process of generating a world does take some time. Depending on the performance of your machine and the complexity+size of the world this will take anything from 5 minutes (per world) up. And yes, if you have an older machine it can take an hour+.
We could package a prebuilt universe with the installer. Estimated additional size would be about 2GB.
So it’s a balance:
IMO it’s preferable that everyone has a unique universe. But obviously any time spent generating a world will lose some players.
How about a “click to download” for those 2gb worlds? Make it optional
Time estimates might be helpful too. Factor a few primes quickly and use that data to guesstimate how long it’ll take?
So you either generate your own or download ready-made ones? Good idea I think.
In my opinion, if I meet recommended, or even minimum, requirements, I shouldn’t have to wait more than a couple minutes to get into the game after the download completes.
I think a compromise would be good. 2 gigs is probably a lot for the majority of users still, but it beats 3 hours of worldgen. For me, a 2 gig download would take a couple minutes, but the worldgen probably took 3 hours.
Maybe including the premade world as an optional free DLC and have a warning somewhere near the top of the game description advising that anyone not on a hardcore gaming rig download it?
I would definitely make sure that the pre-made world is a backup option for people who would refund on worldgen. I would not actually have quit over that, but I did a lot of research and knew I wanted to play the game before I bought it. Most people are less set on a game when they buy it. I’m usually less set on a game when I buy it.
Just make more content for PS4. It’s nearly impossible to get a refund.
So i dont understand that, im using a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, which compared to the i5-10400F has roughly the same per thread performance, the only real difference is the amd chip has double the cores/threads…
I would have expected comparable performance especially not upwards of an hour when i had something like 5 minutes for a normal size world. Heck i dont think most consumers to have more than 4 cores
Here’s a thought…
Why not get steam workshop working…
let players submit pregenerated worlds to the workshop and let steam deal with storage… People that want to avoid the whole generate a world can just skip the mess.
plus you can have players rate the worlds which lets people decide if its worth bothering with.
Steam refund policy is less than 2 hours of game play in 2 weeks, after that no more refunds. I would be really upset if i spent half of that time in game generating a world.
Edit: @Rydralain here is a thought, was your virus scan maybe going crazy on new file creation? I know some av engines are set to scan files on creation or change. Im using standard windows defender.
I definitely had this thought as well, and I think that having a worlds workshop would be great. You could even let people submit worlds with builds so you can share your builds. This would, of course, lead to cheating, but whatever. With the worldbuilder tool, this would be really interesting to see what people submit!
To counter that, though, I think it’s easier to say “hey, go get this free DLC” than to say “Go find a world on the workshop” when people have issues with long world generation time. It also has less of a chance ending up with people downloading a troll lava world someone made.
It’s good to hear that you had a better experience than me. I’ll have to try doing it without other programs running. I never have issues playing games with these programs open, and they mostly eat RAM not CPU, but it’s worth a try to get a more pure time benchmark I guess.
I’ll also take a look at system resources while it’s running to see if it’s just not using all of these resources.
Not that I’m aware of. I didn’t get any “we didn’t find any issues” popup at any time after that, so I don’t think so.
“Too complicated” for the average player imo. It should come with a prebuilt world form the first installer. Then it could have a place to download different pre built universes if the pkayer want to experience something different.
Another compromise that occurs to me would be to have a single small world premade and downloaded and then generate the other two+ worlds in the background while they play on the first world. Since it will take a normal player more than an hour to get to the point that they will be world hopping, I don’t think this delay would be a big deal.
This way, the starter world could be a more carefully curated onboarding experience - you could make sure the included world is set up well for new players to have a smooth experience - and then the “unique universe” idea can be on the other worlds that get generated.
Coming back to this thread after a long absence (I stopped playing the game back in October I think). Two things:
I desperately want to return to Boundless because I love so much about the game but with the hours I’ve put in, the game is boring af and there’s nothing to do anymore.
You did release in testing a prebuilt world people could download on the Forum… maybe like mentioned above consider building a few and having a more official download location that is mentioned somehow so people could download and install it…
I wish we had the infrastructure for something like a world repository where people could upload/download share worlds especially as the world builder matures and we get the ability to really customize things… of course that would be costly due to bandwidth. oh well so much for that idea. lol.
That is literally what steam workshop is for…
ARK is a good example of a game where the server can be downloaded using SteamCMD along with mods, which include things like new maps.
See here is the list of maps a person can download for that game. ARK: Survival Evolved they have to install that using steam which downloads the files, players curate the content on steam with ratings, they can report issues and comment on the files.
I understand people here “hate steam” because everything should just work on a playstation but the fact is you need a pc to host a server. steam will host the content and the bandwidth so why not use what is available?
Thanks for the constructive comments here - they’re useful.
We will definitely try to find a mechanism that allows players to quick start. Suggesting integration with Steam Works is a good idea. (Although my initial query will be if there is a size limit as the worlds can be pretty big.)
But as @Gorillastomp points out it needs to be seamlessly easy.
I do wonder if hiding the world in the initial download is somehow less offensive then letting players start the game and then hitting them with an hour generation or an hour download. (Obviously machine and connection dependent.) Both would eat into their refund period.
Would it need to be the entire universe that is downloaded or just the first planet?
Generally speaking, you could be playing quite a while before you need to venture to another planet, so whilst you play on the first would, the other 2 could be generating in the background as normal and then just appear when they’re ready.
At least that way, only the initial world would be the same for everyone (if they choose that option) and the others could still generate randomly.
That’s a great point, since that would cut the download size down, my world which I’ve done a tiny bit of playing on is about 1GB,
I just wonder whether playing whilst a world is generating in the background might be really laggy for anyone with a less powerful PC - admittedly I haven’t checked how demanding the generator is 
