With vehicles that cannot be destroyed and spawned to any planet, environmental concerns disappear and all planets become easy resource gathering places.

Meanwhile Survival has been made too hard where if you get shot down your planet crashes on a different planet than you. Don't know how you deal with that!

So I am not inclined to play Normal OR Survival after the Pathfinder update.

AFAIK, the "exocraft" are only available on the planet with your current Base. Since most star systems do have a planet with a base which can be claimed, yes there is an opportunity to use the vehicles on multiple planets but at the cost of rebuilding your base (at least a minimal one) on each planet. Too much trouble for me, at least.

I agree that the exocraft need to be rebalanced. It's rather ridiculous that the rover can drive through a boulder, or a field of iron columns, and turn everything in its path into dust (but can't knock down a little tree?). Not to mention falling 50 meters to the bottom of a canyon and then righting itself and roaring away without any damage. Work in progress, I hope.

They need to rebalance that silly Detritum, as well. It seems as if half (or more) of the rocks which used to be iron are now Detritum. I guess it must have some use, now, but really...

Oh, also -- when you drive over a "whip weed" plant in the rover you will still get "stung." What's up with that?

You get stung when you drive over a whiplash plant because it's your "life" that gets damaged as you get hit! This is patently ridiculous! Obviously the vehicles should have damage indicators and strengths, with the buggy quite weak and easy to be destroyed (with you being thrown out of the craft with only half health) and with you having to walk back to base to build another one, the hovercraft should be a little stronger and the carrier should be very strong!

In other words, there should be a price to pay for driving the vehicle ridiculously, and while the whiplash shouldn't do anything, I think non violent creatures, being scared for their young, should attack the vehicle.

..... I just occured to me as I was typing that even if your vehicle was destroyed, you can build a spacecraft tie, build a chip and call your craft to you!

It means you never hardly have to be outside of a cockpit now, in nice 19c temperatures!

I have contacted Hello support about all this, by the way.

I suppose that if the exploration difficulty level will now be build around the assumption that the player is in an exocraft then we'll have to go along with it. Sort of does put it back to Mario-level, though.

Not to mention interacting with the sentinels. I tickled one with the mining laser and then sat back and watched the show as it ramped up to level 3. No worries. They did knock the vehicle health down a little whilst I sat there but it regenerated by itself (no need to recharge the shield manually) and the vehicle mining laser could have destroyed all of them, easily, without any hazard to the player. Blech.

The level 4 walker did put in an appearance but its first bolt caused the game to lock up entirely. I suspect that the speed and weapon range of the exocraft is more than sufficient to bring it down, though.

Added: Yep. Got it up to level 5 and it was still pretty much a cakewalk with just the laser. Haven't even installed the exocraft cannon, yet. ::sigh::

Somethings going to have to be done surely? Yet the building of vehicle pads on other planets came in the 1.22 patch NOT the 1.2 patch! This makes me worried for future updates.

So thats what I'm imagining is happening at there studio, also i wont go to patch 1.22 because mining laser costs more to run then it can mine now, unless im bugged :(

I thought it - you said it - and you're dead right!

I don't know because I haven't played the new patch 1.22 yet, but I've read that with the new vehicles they have introduced 2 very nasty game features:

- you won't get refunded anymore on things you build and then delete (globally)
- Activate vehicles on other planets will be expensive (resonator + 2 ressources)

Can you confirm this? The first one is really terrible if it's not a bug.

XenonS

It appears that, at the moment (patch 1.22) resources do get recovered if you're crafting on your home planet. That means base building can continue on as before: tearing down a wall or removing a door to see if it looks better somewhere else will not invoke a loss of resources.

Crafting on off-base planets for tech (e.g., save points) or exocraft pads is possible but the resources are not recovered if the objects are deleted.

After thinking about this for a while (I need to Get A Life ;-) I'm kind of on the fence about this. By requiring that the crafting of exocraft pads be a permanent investment, it's less likely that one will throw up a pad frivolously. Which, IMHO, is a good thing given the capabilities of the exocraft.

On the other hand, the resources needed to craft an exocraft pad are not insanely difficult to collect. If I did the arithmetic right, a single pad will require:

o 300 Heridium
o 100 Antrium
o 100 Carbon
o 200 Plutonium
o 40 Zinc
o 40 Platinum
o 200 Iron
o 100 Chrysonite

variously crafted into intermediate items as needed, of course.

Nothing too exotic and not outrageous but also not a trivial investment.

This!
I can live with all the rest, I will only have to abandon a lot of Beacons that I placed all over... So they removed the Resonator from Experimental or changed at the last moment. Good!

Thanks for the feedback, have a nice exploring or riding with your new vehicle!
XenonS

I'm probably a good month away from installing the Pathfinder update, but unless someone has done it before me, i fully expect i will try to make a mod to add damage levels to the exocraft (and/or reduce their ability to damage other things).

It seems obviously crazy that this is not a default thing, but then 50% of the time with NMS the shipped designed features seem half-baked. With a small team i guess things just slip through the game design rigour-machine?

modders have enabled portals and they work perfectly as shown in the videos... the core code was part of foundations i think.

they found scraps of backpack type things and this exocraft pad idea will work great if you find a portal world and need to explore it ALA Stargate style ^_^

All pads make a permanent waypoint make it right outside the portal XD

You are right. You don't get resources back if you build outside the base area, But as I understand it, you just have to build a base on another planet and a vehicle will spawn on it.

I wouldn't bother deleting the pad when I left, because I may decide to come back, and I would want a vehicle so I don't worry about the environment!
I would install that mod in a heartbeat. I see no logic that fuel goes down as you "damage" the vehicle!! How illogical is that?

Are the exocraft pads like, say, windows where you can build any number up to the available resources (modulo the "complexity" factor) or are they like storage cubes where you can only have a single "Cube 0"?

I *think* there's only one pad of each type allowed so leaving one several warps behind may be A Bad Thing.

If I understand well deleting the pad will make its needed ressources vanish (except on your homebase). I will try out what happens if I change the Building Limit in the settings file, maybe ressources are refunded and I won't need any mod for that. These Voltaic Cells need a lot of Antrium and it takes long to collect huge quantities, so I'd rather like to keep them when deleting stuff. But I'm lucky right now: I'm on a Earth-like jungle planet with Vortex Cubes + Albumen Perls + some small lakes that I didn't explore yet, but with very aggressive fauna...I seriously think to change my base to this planet, especially with Rigogen in the water...Let's see...

XenonS