What's the game loop like? (Esp end game?)

[Skala]

Can you describe the game play loop, especially "end game" ? Also, I'm taking into consideration the two big modpacks: Frackin Universe and Shellguard Expansion.

[MortVent]

Explore and build

Once you beat the mainline story (fight the big boss) then the secondary big boss (rematch with old foe)

It becomes pretty much explore and build, akin to minecraft. Travel to new worlds, strip them of their resources, rinse and repeat. While doing things like build colonies, etc.

It's a sandbox beyond the first quest to unlock your ship's repairs.

[Skala]

Originally posted by MortVent:

Explore and build

Once you beat the mainline story (fight the big boss) then the secondary big boss (rematch with old foe)

It becomes pretty much explore and build, akin to minecraft. Travel to new worlds, strip them of their resources, rinse and repeat. While doing things like build colonies, etc.

It's a sandbox beyond the first quest to unlock your ship's repairs.

Thanks. I'm a fan of Terraria and was wondering how the games compared. Terraria has lots of bosses to beat and a "hard mode" (the whole world changes with new enemies and bosses at some point), and some random events that could happen along the way (goblin invasion and such)

[MortVent]

Originally posted by Skala:

Originally posted by MortVent:

Explore and build

Once you beat the mainline story (fight the big boss) then the secondary big boss (rematch with old foe)

It becomes pretty much explore and build, akin to minecraft. Travel to new worlds, strip them of their resources, rinse and repeat. While doing things like build colonies, etc.

It's a sandbox beyond the first quest to unlock your ship's repairs.

Thanks. I'm a fan of Terraria and was wondering how the games compared. Terraria has lots of bosses to beat and a "hard mode" (the whole world changes with new enemies and bosses at some point), and some random events that could happen along the way (goblin invasion and such)

Well starbound has nearly unlimited worlds, each with it's own dungeons and environments. But after awhile you will see the same dungeons again, and such.

Right now I'm like 4 tiers in gear but haven't even done more than the repair your ship quest.

[kbrayaquar7]

Terraria is a GAME... it has a plot, progression, and so forth. Starbound ... really isn't a game. It's a TOYBOX. It's filled with a near endless (particularly with mods) amount of decorations, furniture, doors, and blocks to build things with. It's got a story (shallow and almost an afterthought as it is) and a progression... that is quite quickly gotten through. But the Toybox is FULL of things to play with. It's up to YOU to find things to do with all those toys (which, after all, is the whole point of toys... to stimulate the imagination, and allow you to figure out what they do.)

It's a wide open sandbox to play with. How you play with it, is completely YOUR perview.

Edit:
Oh and Endgame? There isn't one. The experience NEVER ends... EVER. Until you decide it's over, it never gets to the end.

[LuVenBen]

1. go talk old lady in chair
2. go planet
3. go look at things because old lady in chair told you to
4. do mission OR realize you didnt look at enough thing
5. repeat at steps 1 OR 2 depending on if you looked at enough things

[Astasia]

There is an "endgame" in vanilla, it's not very rewarding or worthwhile. It's a repeatable dungeon with a random boss called ancient vaults, you need to buy a key for a sizeable chunk of resources and then can do the dungeon one time per key, the main reward is ancient essence which can be used to upgrade a weapon to t6 (you will likely have many t6 weapons by this point, it's mostly just to upgrade an old weaker weapon you enjoy using into something useful), and can use them to build terraformers which just turn a chunk of a planet into a different biome (just the same biomes you can find while exploring).

For the most part though as mentioned Starbound is an exploration and building game, and the building part is almost entirely unrewarding and something you do just because you want to and for RP. The exploration is rewarding up to a point, then you cap out on progression and it becomes mostly searching for cosmetic stuff and interesting scenes. It's very much Minecraft in space, instead of a functionally infinite open world you have functionally infinite planets each with a finite surface area, you run around exploring because you want to and you build bases and outposts because you want to. The story and dungeons/bosses are unrelated to the main gameplay, it's like a different game crammed into this one at the last moment.

Frackin Universe adds more functional endgame content, with higher tier gear and more dungeons and bosses. If you want structured progression and a real "gameplay loop" then that is the mod that adds it, turning a pure sandbox experience into a game inside a much larger sandbox.