Survival Progression - Thoughts and Suggestions

[EX512]

In this post I will outline some of my gripes with the games' progression system in survival mode as it currently stands, as well as offer my opinion on how it could be adjusted. By the end of it, I'd love to chat and we can talk about the game's current standing, or even theorycraft about the future. In any case, let me know your thoughts.


Disclaimer: I have not "completed" a survival game as of yet, but I have spent enough time with it to understand what little there is left to experience as the later stages of the game are quite predictable.


The games progression follows a several identifiable stages:

Spacecraft Stage: The players very first steps in the game. Essentially consists of looting your first structure to power the crash sites' construction bot.

Scrap Stage: The player uses the spacecraft construction bot to build their first vehicle out of scrap material. The player might explore for a bit before discovering the mechanic station. Then uses their vehicle to gather materials for a new construction bot in order to build a better vehicle.

Early Station Stage: The player now has a full construction bot at their disposal, allowing them to see the new parts available to them and the materials required. To build a reliable vehicle, players need resources from every biome currently in the game, they will use their scrap vehicle to search for wax, cotton, oil, glue, and ember.

Late Station Stage: The player has by now discovered every biome, and has looted the majority of surrounding structures. More advanced parts can be afforded, such as the drill and vacuum pump, giving the player access to packing stations and trade, likely prompting them to begin more serious farming operations, as well as lessening the grind for some resources.

Farming Stage 1: This stage can technically coincide with any earlier stage, but the benefits of farming are purely for survival purposes until the development of the vacuum pump. The player likely has a simple fence around their small farming plot of tier 1 plants, those being tomatoes, carrots, and beetroots.

Farming Stage 2: The player expands their farm to be more economic, placing it near water if it wasn't to begin with. Still farming tier 1 crops, but now with enough volume to begin using the packing station and trading with the farmer. This only really happens after the Late Station Stage.

Farming Stage 3: The player has traded for tier 2 crops, bananas, oranges, and blueberries. Their farm has likely expanded, with greater defenses in place to account for the more dangerous foes brought in by the valuable crops.

Warehouses: The player has accumulated enough tier 2 crops to encounter farmbots, and can finally buy a spud gun. The player can use the keys dropped by farmbots to loot warehouses for tier 3 pineapple and broccoli.

Farming Stage 4: The player plants their tier 3 plant seeds and defends them vigorously, mostly the same as the last several farming stages, but a little trickier, and with more tater-slinging.

Weaponry: Yay! You did it! You have enough tier 3 crop to trade for a shiny new set of weapons. Unfortunately, there are no more challenges to conquer, guess you can just farm more and kill stuff better than before...


The Big Problem:
Currently, there is little incentive to really progress in this game beyond Early/Late Station Stage. By the time the game is meant to really kick into gear with the whole "farm defense" half of survival, you have already spent several hours beating up haybots with your hammer along your travels. But guess what? If you want to finally have a change of pace with a new weapon, you need to do even MORE hammer swinging. As the player reaches about Farming Stage 2, their mission is no longer to discover more stuff and improve what they have, but rather keep fighting the same fight once every 20 minutes until they can finally get their hands on the spud gun. The way I see it, this middle-farming period would be much more fun if the player had access to the spud gun, or some other weapon, before the end of Farming Stage 2. This would greatly reduce the grind just for a single new discovery, and would reward the player for their efforts earlier, rather than making them wait through the same dull sequence for hours.
The spud gun is just the most obvious part of this problem though, the problem that, as I see it, is a lack of interesting developments after the discoveries made in the Early Station Stage. The spud gun, spud shotgun, and spudling gun are the only things made available to the player by farming, all of which are primarily beneficial to promote even more farming, which, by the time you get the spudling gun or spud shotgun, no longer has any real benefit to you.
How would I change this? Well for starters, the drill (probably not the saw), should be locked behind trading. Why? The drill gives players access to a brand new material type, and allows them to farm metal very efficiently. The abilities granted by the drill are not a necessity for the player until late Farming Stage 2 or early Farming Stage 3. Concrete is already a very advanced material to create, requiring a great deal of water and chemicals. As it stands this makes it very impractical to make, as it's on par with metal in its stats. Ironically, metal is gathered by the very same tool needed to gather stone for concrete, and doesn't require any of the hassle. If concrete were extremely durable by default, it would become worthy of investment in the late game, and the ability to make it would actually be a good reward for farming tier 2 crops. In addition to changing the stage that drills become available, there need to be more rewards for farming that don't just directly feed back into farming. For example tier 2 crops could grant access to certain structures, like an oil rig, which would make collecting oil much easier. Later, such as with tier 3 crops, the player could even trade for a part that can pump oil directly out of the ground in the presence of an oil field. Maybe the player could trade for beehives that passively regenerate their honeycombs, or maybe a sort of AI block that will attempt to turn itself toward enemies or a specified resource (TOTK construct head anyone?). Anything that actually makes life easier, and feels like a worthy investment of the players' time.

The Little Problems:
Component Kits are vastly disproportionate in supply and demand. The only "reliable" way to get them is by rare happenstance when you kill a haybot. They should either be a more common drop, or should be tradeable with tier 1 crops.
Why fly? There's pretty much no reason to build anything that can fly, not to mention the game really doesn't have many options to build flying craft in the first place. Valuables atop high cliffs or on inaccessible rooftops would make a flying machine a great asset for a late game player. With the proper implementation it could even make an excellent prerequisite to gathering certain late-game items.
'Taters and Bombs, what else? The weapons given to fight in the game are pretty limited right now, especially considering that most of the game is spent with either just the hammer, or just the spud gun. Spud Guns are cool, but not functionally very different from one another. Explosives are too expensive, and too unpredictable to be a very good option for offense or defense, and you can only beat things up with a hammer so long. New weapons spread throughout as rewards for farming are really quite necessary. More accessible and reliable explosive-lobbing weapons, such as a mounted gun specifically made to fire explosives, would make them far more usable, a mid-game melee weapon, or upgrade to the hammer, would make getting up close and personal a lot more fun later on, and more handheld ranged weapons in general would do wonders for variety.
Build a wall. That's essentially the extent of base defense, bigger waves, bigger walls. The main damage-dealing force at any point will always be the player, unless they want to grind for a WALL of sawblades, which is admittedly not a very fun way to win. Glue traps/guns, spikes, partially or fully AI controlled base functions (that construct head clone I suggested earlier), energy shields, electrical conduction damage, distractions, robots hacked to become friendly, short-circuit-causing water blasts, or any other unique way of defending your crops could inject some much needed creativity into base defense.
Cotton seeds are crazy expensive for no reason, cotton has very little practical function, and already spawns in droves naturally. Make it more useful, or make it less expensive, no one will ever buy cotton when they can get a hundred in ten minutes just to make a carpet out of it.
Risk/Reward only applies to farming and structures, why not exploration? Ember is a fairly valuable substance found in a pretty intimidating biome. That is until you realize that there's actually nothing really dangerous there. Give some reason for it to be a risk, because high-tier metal is currently only as hard to get as basic metal and large quantities of water.
Its about the journey. The ability to get to any point on the map is purely a function of the amount of time you're willing to spend to get there. The map is full of wide open fields with widely-spaced boulders and forests in between, hardly a challenge for anyone with a decent car. Mud, snow, rocky terrain, dense forests, sand (quicksand?), mountainous areas, marshes, and other, more frequent obstacles would make the act of traversing the map more interesting.

I am fully aware that much of what I've said here will likely not apply once the latest chapter arrives, but I think its important to recognize what some of the games current flaws are so that the next update isn't stacking more floors onto a flimsy foundation. The first couple hours of survival mode are pretty darn great, and I'd really like to see the rest of the experience receive the same high-quality treatment with plenty of new discoveries and content around each corner.

Let me know, do you agree with some of what I've said? Do you disagree? Do you hate my guts and think I'm a traitor and a heretic for criticizing your favorite game? I'd love to know where people stand on some of the things I've outlined.

[Marissa]

First remark: You say you "have not "completed" a survival game..... There is no end to this game. No end boss... no end game...nothing.

I played this game over 1700 hours, mostly in my own world.... and every time I enter the game I have something to do and I am still triggered by it.

[Arkay]

I agreed with you up until you started talking about expanding the handheld weaponry and upgrades to the hammer, etc.
No, this is the total opposite direction to where the game should be heading.
The game needs less emphasis on on-foot combat and way more emphasis on vehicular/contraption combat. More mounted weapons. That outperform handheld weaponry.
On-foot combat has its place and should be a fall back strategy, but the core of the game is about engineering solutions to problems.

[EX512]

Originally posted by Countess Arkay:

I agreed with you up until you started talking about expanding the handheld weaponry and upgrades to the hammer, etc.
No, this is the total opposite direction to where the game should be heading.
The game needs less emphasis on on-foot combat and way more emphasis on vehicular/contraption combat. More mounted weapons. That outperform handheld weaponry.
On-foot combat has its place and should be a fall back strategy, but the core of the game is about engineering solutions to problems.

I hadn't really considered that, but you're probably right. Designing machines for different tasks is one of the strongsuits of the game, and it's kind of unfortunate that the only vehicle you ever really need to build is a car. I do however think that the player is pretty underpowered when in places they must be dismounted, such as structures and warehouses, and that something to make those dismounted moments more interesting later on (grenades, armor, weapons, ect.) is much needed. The first 10 hours of the game are entirely fought with the hammer, and I see that as boring gameplay, and a bit of a missed opportunity. But yes, mounted combat should be a much bigger focus of the game.

[EX512]

Originally posted by Marissa:

First remark: You say you "have not "completed" a survival game..... There is no end to this game. No end boss... no end game...nothing.

I played this game over 1700 hours, mostly in my own world.... and every time I enter the game I have something to do and I am still triggered by it.

I was moreso saying that I had not personally experienced the entirety of survival modes content, but yeah, there really isn't much midgame, endgame, or really an "end".

[Elphame_Gold]

Originally posted by EX512:

Originally posted by Countess Arkay:

I agreed with you up until you started talking about expanding the handheld weaponry and upgrades to the hammer, etc.
No, this is the total opposite direction to where the game should be heading.
The game needs less emphasis on on-foot combat and way more emphasis on vehicular/contraption combat. More mounted weapons. That outperform handheld weaponry.
On-foot combat has its place and should be a fall back strategy, but the core of the game is about engineering solutions to problems.

I hadn't really considered that, but you're probably right. Designing machines for different tasks is one of the strongsuits of the game, and it's kind of unfortunate that the only vehicle you ever really need to build is a car. I do however think that the player is pretty underpowered when in places they must be dismounted, such as structures and warehouses, and that something to make those dismounted moments more interesting later on (grenades, armor, weapons, ect.) is much needed. The first 10 hours of the game are entirely fought with the hammer, and I see that as boring gameplay, and a bit of a missed opportunity. But yes, mounted combat should be a much bigger focus of the game.

I agree with all of this, from both sides. On foot combat definitely has its place in the game. I agree that there should be an emphasis on building combat machines, but limiting your combat abilities to machine and purposefully throttling your hand to hand combat is just an example of a personal preference. I believe that both options should be made more viable, so that whichever preference you prefer, you can pursue.

Lets be honest, mountable weaponry atm is rather lackluster. Or should i say, the ability to control them. The weapons themselves are great, but its an act of congress to get them to be functional. If i had my way, i'd roll around in a tank all day, blasting away bots in the fields lol. Fant has a unit facer that i believe should definitely be added to vanilla in some capacity.

In regards to flying, I fully believe that it has its place in the game, and would love to see it expanded further. It makes scouting for structures far easier, and allows you to get a birds eye view of your surroundings. Now, that being said, I think it should be a late game option, as being able to fly early game takes away some of the challenges that i believe make the experience more enjoyable. being able to quickly assemble a flyer shortly after starting would make it easy to find things that arent meant to be super easy, such as oil and chem ponds. then again, thats a pretty subjective view on things i suppose.

For drill progression, I love your idea. The game starts off with you trying to get on your feet, and start to acquire basic stuff. Theres not much need to farm early on. You are so busy hustling through buildings and looting and killing bots, that you always seem to have enough food handy. With your idea, it would add a reason to do more farming, and be a nice little progression thing to have.

I agree about the points you made on biomes. The burnt biome in particular. The look terrifying but.... fail to deliver on any dangers. I know its pretty cookie cutter of an idea, but i think each biome should have unique mobs. Maybe not exclusively, but a I'd imagine a molten robot with some sort of relevant attack type would be interesting.... melee that sets you on fire for a few seconds maybe? heat aura? fire path as it moves? each biome could use a bit of creativity in regards to enemies, as well as inherent dangers too, such as the mud and snow that you mentioned.

[Arkay]

Originally posted by EX512:

Lets be honest, mountable weaponry atm is rather lackluster. Or should i say, the ability to control them.

Which, if I may make one quick remark - is why we're getting the turret seat in Ch.2.

The relatively recent addition of being able to use Left/Right Click while driving for connected buttons 1 and 2, plus the devblog reveals of chilli crops, turret seats, fire mechanics and a new swarm enemy; Cablebots, all heavily point to a flamethrower weapon and vehicular combat being more of a focus in the next big update.
Hopefully among a roster of new weapons. But some sort of anti-swarm fire weapon, I would put money on.

[Hris]

I agree on what you are saying.

I feel like i am playing a unfinished game, Just an idea of stuff that can interact. I see cool modding community and challenges but the Survival is just unfinished. This feels like a Demo, not a finished product. There is much to be desired. I will focus Survival as this is the fist main thing most new players like myself should encounter as they start to learn the game.

1. More meaningful progression system and quests need to be added. After you get the spud gun it feels like there is nothing more to be done, like why would you go to 4 store warehouse for example when there is nothing there except more bots and wedge parts?
2. Add wedges.
3. Different weps and tools that can make the game more interactive and fun. Once you get spud gun, it feels like the shop is just useless. Dunno about you guys but i can just create the other stuff instead of farming crops for it.
4. Building should be improved when interacting with two or more parts that need to be combined (for example one is on lift but the other is free and floppy on bearings, and you cant possibly catch the proper angle so you can get the attachement point.
5. Fix the quite Audio, many have suffered from this, only way to fix it is from editing the files.
6. The biome looks nice in this game. But after going around, 2-3-4 days. It is all the same. It do not matter if you are on this part of the map or on other part of the map. It is just the same and repeating. Maybe change the bioms to be larger in order to feel like you really go into a zone, not just a tiny area, like the burnt wood forest. If feels as big as a closet.
7. Make Warehouses rewarding, make a boss, unique items that can be looted and found only there. Make it so after completing certain level of warehouse (like 3 store, 4 or 5 stores house) that you get or unlock a specific useful interactive tool or object that you can use, for automation, or mechanical part, you name it.
8, Where are the engines for water and water propotion?


Maybe it is only me by the way i feel the game, but after getting to the point of getting a Saw, a Drill (that are possible with a bit of farming Heybots) making some good vehicles to move around and farm wood and metal with them, and after getting a spud gun, there is little motivation to create a permanent base to be honest. I mean, what for? The warehouses has absolute no meaning to them and have any sense of completion. You fight, you try to get to the top. Finally you manage to deal with all the enemies and at the top what do you get? NOTHING.... absolute anti climatic. No reward, no boss, nothing. Well only a good view of the surroundings.

Best hopes for the update.
Surely it need to fresh up the game, change stuff and connect the beginning to... some ending or something like that. (that reminds me, the game look like this beautiful drawing of a horse that end up like a kid sketch :D )