Even though I play the game and get the news from this forum I have looked to see if there is any outside news. They didn’t do any kind of press release for Sovereign / Creative Worlds, the Birthday event or Halloween. In fact, it’s hard to find any recent information about the game beyond this site. Most of the gaming press will just publish a release if they get it so it isn’t really a matter of somehow convincing people to do the story. Someone tried to tell me the sovereign update would pull people back to the game and I pointed out there was little chance people who have left would know about it. Few people who leave a game actively haunt the forums. Yeah, a few do but it is a small number. So - why are they so afraid of publicity?
Didn’t think I’d ever be contributing on this topic but here I am. Not turned off playing but if it ever happens, the reason would be:
Weak communication
To keep it short and sweet, weak communication regarding game development can be an obstacle or a reason for frustration.
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Hearing rumors about potential new machines would stop anyone (me included) from renovating their house - building expansion goes out the window until update.
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Even building stuff without hearing about rumors to only be surprised later is frustrating. I emptied an 11x11 basement from water in my old house only to be surprised we got water removal boons a few months after it. I would’ve waited for it.
I even tagged James asking about things I think a couple of times and got absolutely no reply. I understand you can’t always give info about things but it seems to me this is always the case.
Who’s to be blamed? Idk. Perhaps the community brought this upon themselves. Answering the question of what is a potential turn off for me though, that is the answer - without pointing fingers.
I’m not quitting over this, but I’m bummed out about the timing of the Halloween event. I know there was a whole thread about it, but holiday events are often my favorite parts of games. More importantly, holidays are usually what brings me back into a game after a break, but 3 days of seasonally appropriate Halloween event isn’t going to do that.
The Halloween event started so late that, while I had time to deck myself out in a costume, and I’ve gotten to do some orb farming, I haven’t been to a hunt to show off my costume, and now IRL Halloween is over and I’m like… Do I take off the costume? Is it weird to be in costume after Halloween?
Also, I haven’t had time to farm bats and spiders, let alone decorate anything. I’m going to - the bats are absolutely amazing and are going to be everywhere. I can build gothic stuff year-round, sounds awesome, but it’s weird to be thinking about a spooky build as I start ramping up for Thanksgiving and Christmas IRL.
i’ll give you my stuff (i literally have one of each, as i’m not fussed about any of it 
)
Thank you for the generous offer, I really appreciate it, but I’m alright. I enjoy the process as much as I enjoy the end result. Thank you.
I had life get in the way and forgot about fueling and came back and had nothing… so i thought it wasnt worth putting 3 months back in to the game to get back to where I was.
I wish there was a way to have a persistent world that i could come back to regardless of time away.
grind wasnt so bad once i found out how to find things… but even then the cost to play the game with portal hopping and building new tools was too hard. I wish i could repair tools for a smaller cost and not have to re roll a tool each time.
game was to hard when solo and way to hard in a group. with how fast people ran off i couldnt keep up.
tutorial only taught me about the controls of how to get around and i had to do intense wiki work just to find out info.
loved the game play and creative aspects but coming back after 3 months just sucked and i didnt want to grind that all out again…
I havent been back to the game because I lost 400 hours of work.
when I can host my own server or have place I can not have go away I will come back to this game and play it like crazy because I know it will be something i can show off later.
There’s a reclaim feature and you can get all your items back.
Regards,
Yup, used this reclaim feature today actually. Was making brick and ran out of ash. So I reclaimed my whole beacon and farmed the ash from that! Worked great! 
Edit: this was a joke in case people didn’t get it.
just came back to the game and there is nothing. nothing to reclaim. i dont even think it was a feature at the time… well i have nothing still. so i guess im still turned off about this game and that it was all deleted 
time to wait for private servers before i tell my friends about this game
Must have been a long time ago since you played the game 
… Beacon Reclaim works fine for me though.
Maybe build something simple, and try it out 
Technically private servers already exist. You can have a planet all to yourself. Invite whomever you want to be there with you. You control it.
What more could you ask for?
And as a returning player, you could have asked for help. There’s a lot of people (like myself) who will do what we can to help a returning player.
The halloween event put me off playing as farming inky and lamella have been my main source of income since coming back to the game 2 months ago, and the prices have tanked for each item since.
I’ve barely been able to find any during the event to harvest so i guess i will have to wait for the prices to go back up before i start playing again.
Im used to having about 500k to 1mil a week from inky and lammella harvesting and being poor on the game is not enjoyable as if i get any ideas for a build but cant afford the blocks to do it, it annoys the hell out of me.
Anyway i just wish that when you do events you would limit them to creature drops as you did with the birthday gifts because they are constanly respawning and everyone has a chance to get a decent amount, instead of people who get to plant spots first or have there own planet that they can close off, which also makes the soverign system more pay to win.
You went to the wrong places for gathering as I’ve got 20k orbs from sovereigns and Besevrona…
People even added portals on tree tops where you’d get 1-2k orbs easily and lots of extras.
PS. Did you check the forums during the event?
Regards,
the reclaim feature works. as i can see after testing but i am still sad 
I would say, just build what ever you want to build. 
If you like gothik stuff why not building Dracula castle. It doesnt matter if Christmas is coming. This is what makes each Boundless worlds and towns different and beautiful to see!
Cheers.
The existential dread that updates to the game may not happen as much with new content to build with. Hopefully, we’ll get more when baldurs gate is finished.
Build what I want to build means building halloween stuff during October.
As mentioned by ciprian, many sovereign owners welcomed people to their planets and opened portals to hot spots. Almost always the hot spots were regenned when i went so it was optimal. Before the sovereigns i used to go besevrona to farm underwater plants too. Worked well.
Reclaim feature was added not sooo long ago. Any beacons that expired before the feature was added can’t be reclaimed.
You can rent your own sovereign/creative worlds now.
Beckon has short trees, all sorts of trees, and mad awesome colors. You can farm food, berries have to be wrestled out of the leafs. There are often leafs without any trunks, representing leafy bushy things, and you can build and craft with the leafs or leave the leafs where they are and just grab some blocks of trunk on the downlow. You did start on the right tier, which is good for learning the game without deadly interruptions. If you remove the trunk of a tree the trunk grows back unless you plotted that spot in which case nothing regenerates. You can “grow” trees by creating them from blocks and chisels, and in the not entirely distant future all sorts of behaviors could be configured/coded for this or that sovereign universe, when I played ARK a super ubiquitously-used mod that practically fixes an sticky annoyance can end up considered for inclusion in the base game. That dynamic has me super excited about the modding thing, I can only hope it’s not like ARK where you have to load up a freakishly large devkit to do anything (it made no sense but maybe ARK came from an earlier time… there’s no forced multiple characters, you can do a heck of a lot and having to choose is the point, it keeps us from becoming a monotonous monoculture of identical perfect skill pages. That we can cover everything with alts is really cool imo. You don’t need an alt to make any block and chisel any block; I often switch Epics back and forth so I can load the points into other stuff, it works because the cubits roll in more thatn enough more fasterly to cover the cost of the skill change points.
You’re used to Minecraft, I have the opposite problem, stuff there that doesn’t work like Boundless is a drag because I haven’t put the time into getting used to it. Boundless is unique as far as I can tell, and I like it, the extensibility of it hums for me coz I used to be a glue coder and I loved stuff like that coz it limited my temptation to write my own framework etc etc…
There might be other ways to do stuff to thwart the drag of this or that aspect of the game, thinking about the unpleasant effect being experienced rather than the description of the technology causing the unpleasant experience can go a long way to coming up with new ways to do things. I love Boundless for there always being some new thing I figure out a different way of doing that makes it feel like my actual gaming skills got a boost.
I’ve never encountered a game community as awesome as this one, and they’re really helpful too! Sometimes help is just the right thing at the right moment to avert tedium or frustruation or unfamiliarity.
There are flat spots on Beckon, and the colors are soooo nice