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[Leyic]

Here's a mod that replaces meteor showers, ice showers, and acid rain with normal rain. Not exactly what you're looking for, but it does get rid of the meteors.

Edit: And here's Starbound Easy Mode, which causes meteors to not damage blocks, among several other things.

[SalmonGod]

You can equip both a 2-handed weapon and a shield.  You just can't use them at the same time.  Still useful, because it's just one key to instantly switch.

[Cthulhu]

Grind is never a good thing.  I finally figured out what I needed to do to progress, spent a long time farming pixels and material to build the second boss, then it killed me and despawned.  Now I have to do it all over again.  That's not fun and interesting challenge, that's grind.  It doesn't take skill to click on rocks and monsters for a few hours. It doesn't make the game more challenging, it makes it take longer to play, which I've noticed some people mistake for challenge.

[Sappho]

BigD, you really wouldn't believe how little some people have time for stuff like video games. I know people who barely manage to scrape 10 hours together in a month. They simply don't have time for that amount of grinding, that's why they're called casual gamers. You may not be asking the impossible here, but what you are asking is for those people to spend a month not having fun. And the fun they have afterwards is simply not worth the relatively huge investment.

Sappho is talking about sandbox building. I know how much time you can sink into that. SOOOOO much time just to build a simple two story house if you want it to actually look good and not like two cardboard boxes stacked on each other. Casual gamers actually end up sinking a lot of time into their chosen games. They're not spending a month not having fun. They're spending ten hours in a particular game not having fun.

Yes, you *can* sink many hours into sandbox building. You can also do it for an hour a week, depending on how much time you have. As opposed to the current system, where you *MUST* sink at least 10 hours (if you're a good player) into leveling and grinding before you can even start the sandbox part.

We all understand, yes, that you think the way it is now is just fine and there's no reason that people who don't play the way you do should get to enjoy the game. But there's still absolutely no reason why my suggestion should *not* be implemented. It would not do you any harm. Your game would remain exactly the way it is. Meanwhile, I would actually be able to properly enjoy the game without the frustration I currently face.

I'm so confused, here. Why on earth do you find it necessary to turn this into an "I'm right, you're wrong" situation? There's no need to keep telling me that you disagree with my suggestion, even though it would have no effect on you whatsoever. Message received, loud and clear. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep right on making the suggestions that I feel are worthwhile. There is no conflict between what you want and what I want.

Grind is never a good thing.  I finally figured out what I needed to do to progress, spent a long time farming pixels and material to build the second boss, then it killed me and despawned.  Now I have to do it all over again.  That's not fun and interesting challenge, that's grind.  It doesn't take skill to click on rocks and monsters for a few hours. It doesn't make the game more challenging, it makes it take longer to play, which I've noticed some people mistake for challenge.

Exactly. Thank you.

[Neonivek]

I agree with the getting-mats-for-bosses stuff. It's generally boring.

I am honestly under the impression that other then the first boss (which is a tutorial) a lot of the bosses will be replaced with actual bosses rather then build a boss.

[Sappho]

Any tips on exploring asteroid fields? I start suffocating and freezing immediately when I beam down, and I have the highest craftable tier 2 armor (pretty decent warmth) - is there anything I can make which would be warm enough to keep me alive? And are there any items that make it so I don't suffocate?

EDIT: Apparently my gear isn't even warm enough to survive on a snow planet. Sigh... I guess I'll start hunting animals for skins.

[Twi]

Leather armor will be warm enough. And althouhg you can't craft the Survival System that would enable you to breathe (back armor), I think there are one or two random drops that provide that effect. Lemme look them up...

Also, shush, BigD. It's just a matter of changing values, adding starting items, etc, and you could easily have Easy Mode at no cost to yourself. :v

[Cthulhu]

Do the cosmetic slots transfer warmth or something?  I use scout armor and haven't had any problems with warmth, even way underground on cold planets.  I have the ski patrol armor on my cosmetic slots

[Leyic]

So that swapping out the eyes in the Neko Race Mod with the original Human eyes that was discussed a little while back? I went ahead and made it into a proper mod. Get it here (also on Nexus under the same name if you'd prefer that).

[BigD145]

Leather armor will be warm enough. And althouhg you can't craft the Survival System that would enable you to breathe (back armor), I think there are one or two random drops that provide that effect. Lemme look them up...

Yeah it's the survival system. It requires durasteel. I swap between the back lantern and survival based on what I need. Just carry one in the visual slot.

[Sappho]

Well, no one on the Starbound forum is helping me, so I decided to try to figure out how to mod the game myself to get rid of the meteors. So far I've spent 30 minutes trying to get the damn files unpacked, following the tutorial online. They have a program on there that will supposedly do it for you by dragging and dropping the relevant files, but I tried it about 20 times and it didn't work. It did nothing. Now I'm doing it manually. I only had to type 3 super long paths into the DOS prompt 4 times to get it right. Now it's been working to unpack all the files for about 5 minutes. Still going.

In what way is this simple? Why do they have everything packed into one file? There are all those folders in "assets" and they are all empty, useless, pointless. I know that before this recent update, it was possible to just look through those folders for the file you wanted to change, add a few things in notepad, and save it, and that would be it. Now you have to unpack ALL THE FILES just to make one tiny modification, then you have to pack ALL of them back up (which will presumably take just as long and require just as much finicky typing into DOS) before the game will see your changes.

WHY??? What was wrong with the way it was? If they want the game to be easy to mod, why the hell did they just make it so much more difficult to mod???

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, no one on the Starbound forum is helping me, so I decided to try to figure out how to mod the game myself to get rid of the meteors. So far I've spent 30 minutes trying to get the damn files unpacked, following the tutorial online. They have a program on there that will supposedly do it for you by dragging and dropping the relevant files, but I tried it about 20 times and it didn't work. It did nothing. Now I'm doing it manually. I only had to type 3 super long paths into the DOS prompt 4 times to get it right. Now it's been working to unpack all the files for about 5 minutes. Still going.

In what way is this simple? Why do they have everything packed into one file? There are all those folders in "assets" and they are all empty, useless, pointless. I know that before this recent update, it was possible to just look through those folders for the file you wanted to change, add a few things in notepad, and save it, and that would be it. Now you have to unpack ALL THE FILES just to make one tiny modification, then you have to pack ALL of them back up (which will presumably take just as long and require just as much finicky typing into DOS) before the game will see your changes.

WHY??? What was wrong with the way it was? If they want the game to be easy to mod, why the hell did they just make it so much more difficult to mod???

You clearly need to brush up on .bat file syntax.

Also, no idea. Maybe there's a diff system or some other kind of mod management suite upcoming?

[Sappho]

Well, I made the edits I *think* need to be made in order for my "mod" to work. Now the asset packer is running. I have to wait until it packs back up every single one of those files before I can even test to see if my changes worked. And even then, I won't know for sure if they worked for hours, because it can take hours for the first meteor shower to happen. And if they DIDN'T work, I have to go through all this again, in which case I will definitely just wait for someone else to do it, because I'm spending my Sunday morning doing this instead of having fun.

Now the files have finished packing. It has taken me close to an hour to try to change a few lines of code, which would have taken 5 minutes without the packing and unpacking nonsense. And, as I said, it would take another hour to try to make any further changes, in case it doesn't work. I suppose I will take my frustration over to the Starbound forum and see if I can find some answers as to why on earth they made it so complicated.

[azurelao]

Well, I made the edits I *think* need to be made in order for my "mod" to work. Now the asset packer is running. I have to wait until it packs back up every single one of those files before I can even test to see if my changes worked. And even then, I won't know for sure if they worked for hours, because it can take hours for the first meteor shower to happen. And if they DIDN'T work, I have to go through all this again, in which case I will definitely just wait for someone else to do it, because I'm spending my Sunday morning doing this instead of having fun.

Now the files have finished packing. It has taken me close to an hour to try to change a few lines of code, which would have taken 5 minutes without the packing and unpacking nonsense. And, as I said, it would take another hour to try to make any further changes, in case it doesn't work. I suppose I will take my frustration over to the Starbound forum and see if I can find some answers as to why on earth they made it so complicated.

http://filesmelt.com/dl/Starbound_bat_files.rar

Put these in your Starbound->Win32 folder. Unpack.bat unpacks the file and Pack.bat re-packs everything in the Starbound->Assets folder.
Make SURE you delete the "unpacked" folder before using Unpack.bat, and also delete "packed.pak" before running Pack.bat.

Once all the files are unpacked you can edit them and repack them. If you want to make further modifications all you have to do is delete "packed.pak", make your modifications to the unpacked files, and re-pack those into a new file.

If you're unsure as to what's in those .bat files, just open them in Notepad+ or some other text editor. No viruses, I promise.


As to why they made it this hard? General incompetence would be my guess.

[Frumple]

... harsh, but probably fairly true, or at least a lack of familiarity with data compression or somethin'. ToME's latest incarnation uses a similar system, except the packed up data is a simple compressed file that can be opened by pretty much any compression software (7zip, winrar, whatever) and is more or less entirely painless to mess with. Not sure what's stopping Starbound from doing something similar... s'even using more or less the same sorts of data, looking at it. Y'd half think it a case of attempting to protect code, but that's completely silly in the face of what it's packing up and the whole providing an unpacker thing.

Strange they didn't go ahead and pack up the music too, though. Might as well save some more space, yeah? Hell, it half looks like it's not even compressed, looking at the before and after hard drive footprint... poking the .pak with 7zip dropped cut the file size by a bit more than a third. Not sure if I'd call it general incompetence, but specific incompetence...

... not that I could do any better, so more power to 'em, I guess. It's interesting, but I'm not complaining. To complain is to offer to help fix the problem, ha.