Any way to lower the difficulty in the newer versions?

[casperorillian]

In the older versions of the game it was possible to edit a file to change stuff like hunger rate and oxygen needs and the like, is this still a thing? I had a look through a couple of files looking for the same things with the newer versions but I was unable to find anything. Has that been removed? Is there no way to make things a bit easier now?

[Malkuth]

You can select your difficulty before you start a new map, Also maps are split up between normal starts and hardcore, meaning what you start with for items.

So Yes, just you don't have any individual control now. Playing on easy and normal start will those things will be reduced and much more time to get things done.

[God, owner of the Universe]

1) During play, you can press F3 for the console (you can also press ESC first for menu, so it's paused), and enter
difficulty Creative
difficulty Easy
difficulty Normal
difficulty Stationeer
Take your pick :)

Those are not hard-coded: These names are defined in an xml file in the installation tree, but you should never alter those. Instead:

2) Check the very beginning of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jo6hb5JUM

where I show an image that explains how you can create your own difficulties in the legitimate official way, without any extra programs or such. Which is how I made myself a few variations of the existing ones, e.g. hard but with much lower water/food consumption. Or even hard with much higher lung damage, but creative mode flag enabled. Can all be done.

[Rocket]

Im releasing a beta update shortly to allow modders to overwrite these core ones

[casperorillian]

Originally posted by Rocket:

Im releasing a beta update shortly to allow modders to overwrite these core ones

Oh awsome thank you. I would prefer just being able to select these things from an in game menu but Ill take what I can get. I love the "chemistry" and programming of this game just not so much the survival stuff.

[God, owner of the Universe]

Originally posted by casperorillian:

I would prefer just being able to select these things from an in game menu

Of course they could make a menu (though Unity's user interface tools seem to be irksome), but for what exactly? All aspects of the difficulty, of course, which is like 10 parameters.

What if there will be an 11th parameter in the XML? Then they'd have to update the GUI, too. Possibly with a slider or dropdown list or other type of element, if the data type isn't just a number. And what data ranges to define? The outer limits allowed here would be kinda "official", so they'd have to be safe. But that may be too narrow for some users - and what is too wide/narrow a range can change over time (Early Access changes).

And there's lots of other modifiable aspects of the game, also via XML changes. Which of those should be available via graphical user interface? If one is changed or removed, the GUI needs to also be changed accordingly. If the reasonable data range or available list entries change, that also needs to be done.

Stationeers was developed with modding in mind from the start, so the described problem extends across a huge landscape. That's almost impossible to do.

And it becomes de-facto impossible if you consider that Stationeers is constantly being cross-financed by other projects (primarily ICARUS), so the dev team has to really REALLY pick their fights (focus on the most productive task).

That's why conveniences not part of the main path of Stationeers evolution, *at least* until the elusive V1.0, can not be expected to be done. By whom? With what money? To what extent? It's not reasonable.

I'm not ripping you, I'm just laying it out, because it can't be stated too often.

From the outside, it looks as if the game gets slow and steady development, but the outside does not see the incredible focus necessary to pull this off - and how outlandish it even is to develop a game that only a too small niche of people invest money in.