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I'd like to start by saying that I'm incredibly impressed with this game so far, and as far as I'm concerned, if the developer decided to stop working on the game right now, I'd still feel that I'd received my money's worth. I love the direction the game is going and the developer's vision (as far as it's been revealed so far). That being said, there are some places where a few minor changes would make the game better for the player without (IMHO) changing the tone or pace of the game any significant amount.

1) There needs to be a way to see where your character is currently located. It's possible to use the trade-net to see which star system you're in, but there is nothing anywhere which shows which planet and/or station you're at without going into space. This can be disorienting, particularly if you've started playing again after being away from the game for a while, or if you're loading an older game, and going into space just to see where you're standing seems a bit excessive.

2) There is currently no way to see which stations you have purchased storage space at. And even if you know which stations allow you to store items, you can't see what items are there without actually going there. It would be nice if there was at least a way to see which stations allow you to store goods. Even if there were no way to see what's there, at least that would give you a starting point to look for something if you've lost track of it (or if your account is mysteriously short, and you realize you must have accidentally left something somewhere after a trade-net purchase). There IS a list in the universe map which shows which which star systems you have beacons at, but it is unreliable. It doesn't seem to show systems that don't have a beacon (although you CAN buy storage space in these systems) and it doesn't always show that you have cargo space available at a system even if there IS a beacon there. And even for the systems that it shows, and tells you there is cargo space available there, it doesn't tell you which station(s) it's at. And if you have items in storage resulting from a trade-net purchase that hasn't been completely collected, then there is stuff in storage despite the fact that you didn't PURCHASE storage there. It's unlikely this is showed in the list at all.

3) Many of the lists were coded as tables, when it would be more effective if they were treated as stacks. Examples are cargo hold inventory, station inventory, drone lists, objective lists, and possibly others. The problem with tables is that when you delete something, it leaves an empty entry, and the next time you add something to the list, it goes into the first available slot. This inevitably leads to fragmentation where information that should be grouped together is now all over the place. Not only is this inconvenient, but it can also lead to very frustrating situations. For example, if you have a small cargo hold and are dumping ore below a certain threshold value, new ore that's added pops in all over the list. This results in the list scrolling randomly (sometimes up, sometimes down) when you're trying to delete items, and THAT inevitably leads to you accidentally - and permanently - jettisoning extremely valuable ore when the list scrolls under your cursor JUST when you shift-click. Using a stack would keep all new items at the bottom so information would remain organized. Probes on your list would be grouped together at the star system you placed them rather than having to hunt and find them in the list. If a stack isn't possible, then compacting the table whenever an entry is removed would serve the same purpose.

4) When buying/selling on the trade-net or moving items to or from storage, there is a place where you can type a number to indicate a specific value. It would be handy if this spot received focus automatically, so you didn't have to click on it to enter a number.

5) It would be nice if there was a way to tone down the inter-house warfare in various systems. With large numbers of ships having combat, it can drag the FPS down horribly. Being able to tone-down the combat (or at least make it so that the actual combat visualizations were culled beyond visual range) would make things easier on the CPU and GPU for some systems.

6) There is currently a way to set the frequency of incursions, although it doesn't actually do much to change how often they happen to me. Even set to "never", I frequently get incursions in my game - most often when I have dealings on the trade-net, but sometimes completely unrelated. I'm not referring to attacks by hostiles because I've drifted too close... I'm referring specifically to the orange bracketed enemies that will chase you indefinitely and have no purpose other than to harass the player endlessly. I'm not sure if this is the result of a bug or if the developer's definition of "never" is just very different from my own - but it would be good if this could be addressed.

7) This may qualify more as a bug than a Quality of Life request - but NPC ships seem able to approach planets much more closely than the player's ship can. This sometimes leads to battles where the player simply cannot get close enough to a combat to participate.

8) on a similar note, placement of transport portals should be a minimum distance from a planet, as on multiple occasions, I've translocated to a star system and inadvertantly appeared INSIDE a planet.

9) Drones which are not currently unloading ore at a station should be available for recall at ANY time that the player is in the star sytem in which they're located. This includes when they're on the way to sell ore (but haven't arrived at the destination yet) or after they've sold ore and are proceeding back to the mining site.

10) On the subject of drones... their manual/automatic status is on a per-drone basis and must be set after they're launched. it would be nice if you could set the drone LAUNCHER to automatic/manual so that once you've decided to launch manual drones in a star system, all drones would be correctly set without having to change them individually. Naturally, you would want to keep the option to change a drone's setting after it's launched; this would just establish which setting would be the "launch default".

11) The visuals on ground sites are by default rotated 45 degrees. The stations being represented are designed mostly on the cardinal compass points (north, south, east, and west), and the screen scrolling only works on a horizontal or vertical basis (you cannot scroll diagonally). So since the design of the station makes you move due north, south, east, or west to get where your going and the screen will only scroll left, right up, or down, you CANNOT get where you need to go unless you either fight the scrolling mechanism or reset the viewing angle back to zero. Fortunately there is a way to easily do this. Unfortunately, the game overrides it and constantly resets it back whenever you reload or change cells. While I respect that the developer feels that the maps look nice when presented at a 45 degree angle, it is frustrating to constantly have to reset it back to the way that *I* prefer to see the maps. It would be nice if this were an option that could be disabled - but better if the visual orientation were stored as a persistent variable and stored with the save so that any time I enter a map, it is oriented the same as it was when I left the last one, and stays the same unless I choose to change it.

12) I know the ability to sell ammunition has been discussed elsewhere, but I'd like to touch on it a bit here as well. If the ammo with a normal value of 9 could be sold for 1 or 2 and the ammo valued at 18 could be sold for only 3 or 4, it wouldn't affect game balance by any significant amount. I can easily find a damaged margarita shaker (???) that sells for as much as an entire pile of ammunition, but that isn't considered to be economy-breaking. What it WOULD do is allow the player to get rid of excess ammunition which would reduce the number of containers left lying around in combat zones. It's not uncommon for enemies to rush up to attack, and when they die, their drops sometimes overlap. When a drop contains ammo the player cannot carry, it can prevent the player from activating another nearby drop. Allowing the player to get rid of excess ammo would alleviate this. Other possible solutions are allowing the player to discard a drop which contains only uncarryable ammo (via a second button beside the "take all" button), allowing the player to discard ammo at the inventory screen so they can resume collecting ammo from enemy drops (either permanently discarding it or allowing the player to create a new ammo drop at a safe location), or simply relying less on ammunition in loot tables so that ammo is less prevalent and junk which can be dismantled for crafting takes its place. The promised "ammo crafting" will eventually solve the problem except where the player simply is full on ALL ammo types, so even when this feature is added, there will still be a need for another solution... unless dismantled ammo components are stored in infinite storage like other crafting components, which would be ideal.

Worst case scenario - allow the player to sell ammo at a reduced price until ammo crafting makes it into a release, and then remove ammo sales again at that time.
Post edited March 31, 2020 by Toccatta
13) Skill progression - it's currently possible to see how far the player has progressed in mastery of each skill (100%), but NOT how far the skill has progressed towards the next level - except for crafting and salvaging, which display it with a nice bar chart, and the space skills, which give text info. If my character is skill-limited and can neither progress in level nor gain any additional exp from combat, it is important to be able to gain any remaining skill points necessary to make level as soon as possible, since all exp the character earns is wasted (It's my experience that neither excess exp nor excess skill points carry over to the next level). I could get that skill sooner and waste less exp if I could see which weapon skill was closest to gaining a skill point, then change to THAT weapon for my next few attacks.

14) In a similar vein, it's also impossible to see progression towards blueprints without acquiring and salvaging an item of that same type and quality. When salvaging an item, one sometimes gets bonus exp towards the next level of item, and I know from personal experience that it's possible to get a blueprint without ever salvaging an item of that quality level, simply from the bonus exp gained from lesser quality items. One DOES have to salvage rather a lot to do it that way, though. However, if I've been crafting and salvaging a legendary ship component for 4 hours trying to get the epic blueprint and I'm 95% of the way done, I'd be stupid to give up there. On the other hand, if I'm only 5% of the way there after 4 hours, then I'd be stupid to continue. Without being able to see where I am (and considering that I've never seen an epic ship component for sale to use the OTHER method), I have no way to know. Would you consider populating the entire crafting tree with the unknown blueprints greyed-out rather than adding fully accessible entries only after they're learned? You could then show progress towards completion on mouse-over for any greyed-out blueprint.

15) I like that the fabricant and kchor NPCs have bonuses that differentiate them from human NPCs. However, there is one thing that I find really bothersome. When scanning planets and ships with my fabricant electronics NPC, is it really necessary to inform me that he's using his innate skill when scanning the planet or ship each and every time he does it?

I get that they're better with electronics... really!

I'm not a puppy that's just pooped on the carpet. There's no need to rub my nose in it. Maybe you could mention it every once in a while, or maybe when their innate ability allows them to succeed where they would have failed without that bonus, or maybe the first time they actually perform that particular enhanced action, or maybe just don't mention it at all.

But seeing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

Okay. Maybe now you see what I'm talking about.

16) A warning when inventory is full (or approaching full) when crafting items that go into the player's inventory would be nice. I know that as of v0.485, it was possible to continue crafting even when the inventory was full, and any item created was simply lost. If this has been fixed in the new update, please ignore. Otherwise, this is something of an "oops". I don't know about crafting ship's equipment, because I don't know if there is any practical limit to the size of the inventory (other than cargo capacity, obviously, but does that mean I can store 180,000 unique ship components in the hold of a behemoth?) That info would also be handy. Other list-based inventory, like the stash and station cargo bays, are limited to 200. Does that apply to the ship hold as well?
Post edited April 01, 2020 by Toccatta
Excellent feedback. Thank you for taking the time to write this up. Some of these are on my list for QoL updates in the future. I'll look into the other suggestions, some may be easy for the next content update. Others may need to wait until I get past some of the content that needs to go in the game.
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StellarTactics: Excellent feedback. Thank you for taking the time to write this up. Some of these are on my list for QoL updates in the future. I'll look into the other suggestions, some may be easy for the next content update. Others may need to wait until I get past some of the content that needs to go in the game.
Could you provide an answer to that last item on the list? Is the capacity of the cargo hold of a ship limited only by total quantity of items, by total number of unique entries, or both i.e. if I have a ship with 500 cargo capacity I can only carry 500 raw iron which weigh 1 each (but which only takes ONE entry); could I also carry 500 mining turrets which weigh 1 each (but which take up 500 entries)?
Cargo space is by volume rather than weight. I consider ore and trade items "stackable" items, where other item types stored in the cargo hold are each considered unique. E.G. a turret of a certain type has associated stats, ship type, damage, etc.

Yes, you could have 180,000 unique ship components in a Behemoth or 180,000 units of ore/trade goods.

I'm aware of the issue with #16 - it's on my list to look into for the next content patch. I believe there is a check in place for storage before crafting an item - though it sounds like something is bugged.

Regarding 12 - while I'm here ;) - You will be able to salvage ammo into component parts eventually and craft ammo from the components. You won't need a crafting bench to do this, you will be able to salvage and craft ammo anywhere at any time (when not in combat).
Temporary solution for #11: you can scroll diagonally by using the keyboard. Not with the mouse, though.

Are there any plans to have storage space for personal items - like a larger version of the Stash - but located on a station? I mention this in relation to my earlier thread, talking about weapon levels and scaling. For instance, I've been holding onto various weapons of lower levels, so my characters can progress into them as skill increases when they branch off into a new weapon type that they didn't start out with. That's eating up a lot of the stash, though. More convenient than putting it on a station: maybe there could be an item cache on the ship - larger than the Stash - that doesn't take up cargo space, and that transfers automatically when the player changes to a different ship.

A hot-key to open and close the Drone List would be nice. V for 'View Drone List'? Something like that.

For the System Search function in the Log, it seems to work only if one types the full name. Would be nice if the player could type the first 2-3 letters and get a narrowed list of systems from that. Given the names of some of these systems, it can be tough to remember an exact spelling.

I'm hoping that inventory sorting is planned for a future update. It's nice to have the ability to narrow down inventory by selecting the icons on the left, but it would also be handy to be able to sort by, for instance, weapon type. That way I could quickly compare all the shotguns or 1-hand weapons without skipping around the entire inventory. Where this mostly comes in to play for me is when choosing weapon augmentations. "Hmm, the one I say earlier was better. Now where did it go?" Though maybe the solution is to temporarily move them from the Stash to the group inventory...

I like that the ship components show colored chevrons just to the left of the name, making it easy to quickly eliminate the wheat from the chaff. This would also benefit, though, from further sorting. For instance, when looking at ship components in the cargo, automatically place at the top of the list those items that can be mounted to the current ship, while incompatible items go below that.

Looking forward to playing around with Crafting. Just starting to get into mining and manual drone pick-up, so I don't yet have much in the way of rare earth metals at this time. Soon, though...
I had an idea for a simple-to-implement solution for one of the problems associated with issue #3.

The game already has the ability to mark a cargo item as being for sale and for removing that mark. Also, since you clearly cannot sell something that you've jettisoned, and you would not wish to jettison something you intend to sell, the two are mutually incompatible. Just make that an official rule.

If you add a check to see if a cargo item has been marked as "for sale" before you jettison it, and give a clear error message if the player attempts to jettison an item so marked, it allows players to safely discard unwanted ores without accidentally dumping their valuable ore when the list unexpectedly scrolls. All the player has to do is alt-click any ore they want to protect, and then they CANNOT accidentally jettison it with shift-click. If they change their mind (say, they decide they want a higher cut-off value), they simply alt-click it again to remove the "for sale" flag and then it can be eliminated.

All the code is already there except for the conditional check and the warning message, and I presume it wouldn't be a major undertaking to add those.
Post edited April 02, 2020 by Toccatta
An update on issue #16. I crafted 55 basic shotguns that require level 9 and confirmed that my inventory was full. Then, I crafted a single shotgun that only required level 1 to check two issues:

1) Would it allow me to keep crafting when the inventory was full as of V0.493? Yes. It did.

2) Would the 56th item be completely lost, or would it overwrite the last item? It was lost. The last item in inventory still required level 9, and the shotgun that required level 1 was neither in inventory nor in the stash.

Don't know if that helps... but there ya go.
You can see which systems you own storage containers in btw. It shows the beaconed/storage and which ships in which sytems. Just make sure any system with one of your ships or storage has a beacon on it so it is easily found.

Getting stuck in planets is a thing and comical but sometimes you can't break combat to fight something else and have to dock to reset things.Mostly just a minor annoyance.

Agree the incursions slider isn't working. I just figured however,(even though it was not stated) after level 10 you lose that option...it is just for early game so you can actually not get overwhelmed but a quick not saying if that is the case would be nice.IMO I think it should be this way...after 10 you can't control incursions,makes it immersive.

Ammo would be cool to sell or dissamble but not important IMO.Can be done later when you get the repair skill mechanic working and the ship boarding.

Agree on the drones,they always default to auto and it would be nice to control that in the refinery screen but once again not really important, just QoL.

Also I think someone went over this with you about refining but the game is not adjusting the cargo space while in normal space but a quick click to the refinery tab and back readjusts the number. One thing I did notice which needs fixed is if you refine a whole load of ore and then immediately fire up your mining lasers, that next asteroid for w/e reason the lasers CD is bugged and they hyper mine lol. (Might be tied to the numbers not adjusting like before?)

Vibro mods displaying damage to other melee wapon if a character is say using a 2-handed and a 1-handed weapon.Unsure if this is just a visual bug or actually treating that damage universally which it shouldn't just the weapon it is attached to.

Bloom is out of control bright but it might just be my monitor and once again not important BUT....can you PLEASE adjust the rocket exploding when jumping between systems, it is OBNOXIOUSLY loud and actually made my ears ring Its like it is up to ten and everything else is at a six volume and to get it bearable you can't hear the other sound effects.

Movement coming out of the ruins where you fight the spider queen desynced (maybe had to do with some people crashing I saw before stated in the patch notes) but I had to click outside the edge of the map to get a container.It ONLY ever happened on that 1 map so it definitely is just that map in my expereince of doing every dungeon at least a dozen times.

Also agree for w/e reason sometimes ships just flood the sytsem and like over 10 other battles are going on in the same system and it heavily lowers the FPS to like 25-30. I think it is a processing thing and not GPU, fan wasn't even blowing on my GPU almost idle. Might just be processing power of my machine. Its an I5 5th 3.2ghz gen nothing spectacular so someone with a current I7 should test this and see how much performance drops.

Also a very nice suggestion about jump points having a rule of being at least a certain number of units away from planets and limiting the number of battles going on at once to 5-6 might help with these issues.What is going to happen when multpile ship barardings going on aswell ? Unless only the player will be able to do that that but it would be cool if at least AI could attempt to board you.
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Plasmablade1091: You can see which systems you own storage containers in btw. It shows the beaconed/storage and which ships in which sytems. Just make sure any system with one of your ships or storage has a beacon on it so it is easily found.
Yes. If you read point #2, you'll see I already mentioned that AND the reasons why it needs to be improved. As it is, it's somewhat buggy and rather insufficient to the task.
I'd like to bump this post and add a comment or two. These suggestions are golden. I love this game. It is very good, the mix of space and ground makes it so sweet. I love all the things in the game.

QoL suggestions mentioned would make it that much sweeter. Even as a newbie, I've run into these "issues" already.

I'm, in comparison to others, a newbie at the game. I spent allot of time on missions, and fighting in space. I've learned about mining drones and refining ore (so can relate to suggestion 10). I bought some storage on a planet somewhere in the first galaxy. I had assumed I could access it anywhere, but good to know it is localized. I just bought the FTL and beacon; I am exploring. I haven't learned enough to actually set a beacon or the purpose of jump nodes (haha), but it will come to me. (not asking for help with it)

I've just been playing the game.

I don't understand about using different skills to level up faster or that exp from kills stop or slow significantly until you use a different skill. I've just been playing my character. I guess I need to read up on how I should start swapping up tactics so I don't gimp myself and do allot of time intensive stuff with little benefits because I haven't swapped to using a different weapon or skill. I need to change my character development to coincide with how the game is coded.

That reminds me: The trader with level 1 weapons, he didn't have shotguns level 1. After hearing about the exp rules, I thought I'd like to use a shotgun on one of my characters. So now I'm having to wait until I figure out a schematic to make my own level one weapon, or keep checking to see if his inventory changes and I can get a level 1 shotgun.

If he is there, he should at least have a level 1 of each primary weapon class. I have started saving weapons of different levels, because it is becoming apparent that after I reach higher levels, I won't be able to purchase lower level weapons. So if I was level 10 and wanted to start shotgunning things, I'd (hopefully) get a level 1 shotgun and would have to use that crappy shotgun until I leveled it up to my current level of 10+ or get a lucky drop or craft one. So to avoid that, I'm keeping a level 3 shotgun, a level 6 shotgun etc. Seems odd.


Again, I really enjoy playing this game. Thank you for your efforts! Like the OP stated, as it is right now, it is well worth the money.


***BUMP***
I thought I would mention I am reading the feedback. I'm deep into the next content update and will turn back to QoL issues etc after this work is done. I agree with a lot of this, other things are already on my list etc. I generally work as follows: New content->Bug fixing->QoL issues->Player feedback issues->back to more content.

Regarding the level one vendor, you can save in front of him and reload and eventually he will have a shotgun. Same for all vendors. Their inventory is reset every time you re-enter an area. I'll also be looking into a way to buy schematics from faction vendors using tokens.

Thanks again for taking the time to post feedback. I appreciate it!
Post edited April 20, 2020 by StellarTactics
One very minor critique. When loading screens, there are tips that come up at the bottom. I very rarely get to read it all before its gone to another tip (or the loading screen finishes which is fine). Just my opinion, but instead of having multiple tips in a loading screen, can you keep it to one per screen? There are enough small loading screens, that the tips will get seen anyway, but I find it hard to read quickly enough to read them before they are gone to another tip. From the first few words of each, they sound interesting though. :)
Not sure if my QoL requests below have already made it onto your list for this enthralling game but please:-

1) Add a keybind for cycling the selection of squad members when not in combat so that instead of having to press F1, F2, F3, F4 separately like I currently do now, a Next Squaddie button would cycle each squaddie in sequence

2) Add a keybind to automatically reload all squad members' weapons to ease the burden of having to select each squaddie and then having to reload their Primary and Secondary weapons individually after combat

3) Add a Quick Load keybind that loads the last Quick Save

4) Add a "Continue Last Save" option to the Intro Main Menu after starting the game instead of having to click Load Game -> click to select the last save -> click Load Game.

Thank you.
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M_10: 2) Add a keybind to automatically reload all squad members' weapons to ease the burden of having to select each squaddie and then having to reload their Primary and Secondary weapons individually after combat
It isn't a keybind, exactly... but as far as I remember, you can right-click on the reload button after combat to automagically reload the current primary and secondary weapons of all four members.