Bay 12 Games Forum

EDIT: My latest attempt at doing something was a method to manufacture and launch torpedoes. The torpedo design itself is fairly decent, basically a large hydrogen thruster(and tank), a connector(for the fuel), a battery, a warhead, a sensor, and some plates to protect the warhead. Annoyingly, it takes a while to fuel, somewhere around 5 seconds for 1%. I don't know if I can speed it up using more oxygen generators or more connectors, or both.

The prototype for the fuel connector(from the launch platform) works, but the welder assembly needs a lot of work. I haven't learned to script yet, so I can't use a programmable block to set up a one-button system for that, but I figure with pistons and timer blocks it might be doable.

So far, I've yet to hit anything with the test launches(which are hard to set up, see above), but manually detonating the warheads is... underwhelming. The front blows away, but the armor surround the rest of the warhead just blows outwards. I may have inadvertently set up a shaped-charge armor penetrator but I'm not sure how much damage it'd really do. The test ship is one that's a box of heavy armor plates with guns and thrusters; I faceplanted one right into a planet at top speed and even the glass windows on the front weren't even broken.

Right now, the sensor just checks for a neutral or enemy ship in a short distance directly in front of it, and if it finds one, it detonates the warhead. I may want to change that to setting the timer on it instead to give time for ramming into the target's hull.

Warheads are just not very good for torpedoes (even though that's probably the main reason they exist). Small warheads have too small of a damage radius and large warheads require a large block grid which is just way too bulky/expensive.

You also need to armor it because a single stray bullet will detonate it otherwise, but the armor also absorbs a good portion of the blast making it less effective. You also need a sensor to detonate it at just the right time - detonate it too far away and even more of the blast is wasted, set the sensor range too close and delays/lags will make it not explode before it rams the enemy - which is actually a bad thing.

You can't just ram the torpedo into the enemy to detonate it for two reasons. First because ramming damage is really random and unreliable, sometimes it will hit and explode correctly... but probably 80%+ of the time the warhead is destroyed without detonating. Second, because a warhead explosion WILL NOT set off another warhead - it simply destroys the block with no extra boom, so a sensor must set them all to detonate at the exact same time unless you only have a single warhead.

Finally, the main reason warheads are a waste is that just building super cheap blast doors and slamming them into the enemy does massive amounts of damage and iron is basically free. Why bother with an expensive, difficult to build powered torpedo setup when you can use inertia to fling a slab of iron at the enemy and do basically the same amount of damage? For example a 3x3x5 (iirc) small ship grid of blast doors (225 steel plates total) attached to a merge block (forget the cost, it's cheap) and nothing else flung at max speed punched straight through the heavy armor top of arventagis, took out the large reactor... and then kept going and punched straight out the other side.

TL;DR - warheads bad, make lots of blast doors and either fling them at the enemy with inerta or drop them on the enemy like bombs.

I kind of want jet engines and fuel cells. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen (and air filters set to suck would work just fine) to produce electricity. Jet engines combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce thrust, and require proportionately very little hydrogen per unit thrust, but they can't produce electricity and only work in atmosphere.

Existing atmospheric thrusters are apparently electric turbines, which explains the motor components.

The problem with fuel cells is we can only get hydrogen from ice right now, presumably through electrolysis. That would mean it would cost the same amount of energy to generate the hydrogen as you got from recombining it with oxygen (actually you'd get less back due to inefficiencies). So either they cheat and just magically make it generate more power, then discard the water that would be produced by the reaction so we can't reuse it (and why not? They've already thrown realism completely out of the window) or it ends up just being a battery with a different name.

New update out: Includes more tiers for handheld tools. And, more importantly, performance improvements. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think I've had a couple additional FPS added on when playing on Terran planets this update, but then again I was playing with low view distance. Your results may vary.

Edit: Also, everyone may want to tone down tool speed if you plan to use the most advanced new tools... Grinding and welding a light armored block in literally a game-tick is a bit extreme.

I gained a few FPS too - maybe 2 - 4 depending on the circumstances. Not a lot, but every little bit helps I guess.

As for the tool upgrades it all feels really... meh to me. Sure it's nice to go a lot faster, but I find that the majority of time spent building something by hand is running around and collecting the correct parts anyway. I also already do all medium to large scale welding/grinding projects with a utility ship and that's still even faster than a mk.4 tool under any reasonable circumstances.

On top of that, it's hardly any progression at all since the tools are so incredibly cheap. T2 is pretty much skippable since T3 is available right from the start of the game if you disassemble an oxygen bottle or something for silver. T4 can be gotten early on if you loot the pirate base, and if not you need tons of platinum to build ion thrusters anyway so it's basically free once you get into space (or the moon).

I feel like they are doing it the wrong way. If they wanted progression, it should not have been hand tools but better ship tools (or more modules for existing tools) since using a ship instead of hand tools is already the natural progression.

Edit: Or maybe even some kind of "research" option that costs 100x as much as building a hand tool, but permanently upgrades all hand tools for your faction or something. So you research grinder Mk.2 and your grinder just works faster forever, and if someone new joins the faction his grinder works faster too, etc.

I'm curious how everyone else is dealing with planetary mining. I've spent more time than I like to admit over the last couple of days thinking about it and I can't figure out anything that really seems to work well.

Flying miners are very easy to build and operate, both "scoop" miners that swoop in to get ore, and up and down tunnelers. The problem is that atmos thrusters can't really carry very much ore (even after the 20% boost) so you need to add lots of them, which require lots of power, which adds mass, and it all spirals out of control very easily. You end up consuming huge amounts of power, and lots of time making small trips.

I have not tried hydrogen thruster miners, it feels like despite the huge abundance of ice to make fuel hydrogen tanks are just too big for how long they last for it to be really practical.

I've never been able to get driving miners to work very well. Pistons aren't long enough, and stacking them adds a horrible amount of wobble even with tool shake off. I tried making ones with rotor arms (both side and forward) but drills are so heavy they throw the balance off and make it a nightmare to drive. I have had some success but overall it seems more trouble than it's worth, especially since wheel vehicles are apparently very buggy and randomly fall through the ground and/or have the wheels vanish (have not had either problem yet myself, though)

Ultimately I feel like the best solution to planetary mining is "don't, just scrap everything to build a space rocket and mine asteroids". and if you absolutely need to mine a certain ore, just take the hand drill to it. Which makes me kind of sad since space is better than planets in every other way too and if the best thing to do at the start of the game is go straight to space and ignore planets forever.... why did they spend a year building them?

Edit:

So, having finally managed to acquire the game, here I ask if the server is still a thing.

As far as I know, there's no B12 server. Multiplayer is still kind of a train-wreck so I'd stick to singleplayer or to small 2 - 3 person localhosted games until they get around to fixing the netcode.

Patch day has come, and it's a very tiny one with a few bug fixes + the game automatically aligns new grids with gravity for you (saving you the trouble of pressing b) I guess it was too much to expect any sort of significant performance increases anytime soon, but I'm a little sad anyway. Maybe next week.

There's also a free weekend starting today if anyone wants to try the game out, or has friends who might want to try it out.

Tweaked my settings some more and adjusted some stuff in my video card options, plus setting flora off in the world generation options and I managed to get it to run at ~15 fps at 1920x1080 (with every other graphical option disabled or set to the lowest) which is.... still not that great, but at least I could play around with planets a little bit.

Easy start earth starts you off under attack, as in there's an enemy drone already incoming when you load in. I kind of wish they gave you a little more time to check the base out or something before the attacks started (yeah I know you can disable drones in the options), but I guess it's not too bad since the base turrets managed to kill it before it could do too much damage, and you also start with a halfway decent fighter ship.

It's surprisingly fun fighting off drones and trying to salvage bits and pieces, or drop whole wrecks into your grinder pit. Shooting the drones and watching them crash and explode is pretty funny, and flying around in gravity is just different enough to keep it interesting.

Ultimately it feels a little too hectic for a single player though, because the drones just come in too fast and you have to spend all your time blowing them up so there's no time to try and find magnesium to make more ammo or build a better attack ship to actually blow the enemy base up (attacking it with the starting fighter was a dismal failure). I imagine it would be really, really fun with 2 - 3 players though since you could take turns flying the fighter, salvaging wrecks, repairing the base, and building new ships.

Other than the FPS issues I'm actually rather impressed so far, it's like a whole new game and I haven't even tried to build a rocket to get into space yet.

Well, I finally get a chance to try planet update out and.... planets require dx11. Not a good sign, but my card technically does support dx11 so I'll try it...

I load the game up, it takes ~8 minutes to load. I finally load, and I'm getting less than 1 fps. How low? I'm not sure, but it was something like 1 minute per frame, I damn near force closed it before the second frame rendered. Apparently I started in a ship that was in space, but all I saw was a view of the planet out the window, and by the time the game rendered the next frame the ship had hit the planet and was completely destroyed other than two random armor blocks sitting in a crater (I only survived because it was in creative mode).

Once on the planet, the fps was better.... but it was basically hovering between 1 - 2 fps. I dumped all the graphics settings to minimum, then dropped my resolution way down and got 8 - 10 fps  and graphics so bad it looked like I was playing an 8-bit nintendo game.

I was siting at a solid 60 UPS the whole time, which kind of gives me some hope that my computer can handle them and I just need a new video card, but I can't justify buying a new video card since every other game I own runs perfectly fine on the one I have.

I admit I was not expecting them to run perfect on my computer, but this is just...it's so bad. After all the hype and waiting, I can't even really play them at all.

How long does it generally take to join a server? I waited about five minutes and nothing happened.

Depends on how many mods the server has, and how much "stuff" is in the world. Typically it should only take a minute or two for unmodded servers, and those servers you see with hundreds of mods can take 10+ minutes to download them all (yes, every single time you join)

I've been assuming, but don't know for sure, that planets are going to require a new game. Don't suppose they ever said anything about it?

Yeah, they said somewhere that planets will require a new world generation.

Saw this game in action.

HOLY COW was it sooo boring.

If I ever get this game I am never EVER going to try it solo. It just takes too long to do even the most basic of actions.

You can make it go faster, most people seem to do at least 3x cargo (so you can carry more), 2x welding speed, faster refining speed, etc. All 1x everything is kind of a drag after a while.

So today's update is...... buffed SWAT van? really?

Did anyone actually like the swat van in the first place? It was the worst thing they added to the game (imo, even worse than microtransaction safes/drills). Just a big dumb unkillable (well, you can kill it, but I've never seen anyone bother even once) turret added to all the newbie maps to make them harder for some reason.

And now it's even stronger. How is this a reward? A reward would have been removing them from the game.