Feedback: Travel takes too long

[TheChemist]

I'm enjoying the game but I've recently hit a point where I'm likely going to stop playing until it's improved. Travelling from place to place, especially as the game progresses, takes a really long time. I'm only just at Azeos and it's already becoming a slog. Getting all the way out to their zone only to realize I forgot something and need to go all the way back and then all the way out again is a painful moment.

To my knowledge, currently, the only ways to speed up travel are the recall idol and the mine carts. The idol only teleports you to the core, is consumable, and requires rare, valuable resources to craft and so cannot be considered as a reliable means of reducing travel time. The rail system requires a massive investment of time and resources and even then is still pretty slow. I've been using cheat engine to fill my inventory with rails and it's still been a slog to set up. I can't imagine how I would feel if I would have had to manually mine all the resources it requires.

In Terraria, they get around this by combining two things, only one of which is useful for Core Keeper. The first is that their version of the recall idol is not a consumable. This means that the player can return home at any time. The second is the so-called Hellevator[terraria-archive.fandom.com] which is just a single mined out tunnel that goes straight down. This allows the player to just fall down the whole to quickly get to where they need to be. Obviously this won't work for Core Keeper due to the flat nature of the world.

Terraria also has several other methods of improving travel. It also has mine carts which are similarly painful to setup as in Core Keeper and similarly slow. They have teleporters which are also painful to setup but are excellent once installed. And, of course, they just have a bunch of items that improve mobility; items that amplify your move speed, items that let you fly, hooks that pull you to a point.

Core Keeper desperately needs solutions to this problem and it needs them sooner rather than later. The bigger the world grows, the worse this is going to get. I see that teleporters are coming in the Sunken Sea update, so hopefully those work in a way that makes it easy to setup and use. It would be a shame if they required just as much work and resources as the rail system (for instance, if I have to place Electrical Wire on 600 tiles on my way to Azeos, it's going to miss the mark).

My own suggestion that I feel would fit into the world building would be waypoints that can be activated similarly to how the boss statues next to the core are activated. By places an item in them, you activate a point that can be teleported to/from. Perhaps the way to activate them is to use the same item(s) as are used to activate the boss stones, giving players a reason to resummon defeated bosses.

Anyway, I love the game. Hopefully we can get some QOL improvements around this soon. Looking forward to the future updates.

[Sparrowhawk]

Teleporters will be coming in the June update: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1621690?emclan=103582791470232396&emgid=3185744478433987795

There's a Discord where you can also submit feedback as well. Seems pretty active in there.

[TheChemist]

Yeah, I talked about the update in my post.