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[Akura]

Ran into a quest-breaking bug - NPCs cannot pathfind in water very well. I managed to subvert it by using a vehicle with a passenger seat to get the follower into the underwater marker, but for the final part she stops following you, and the marker is back on the shore.

[Folly]

Necrobump.

Planet Explorers is expected to leave early alpha in just 5 days!
I've been watching this game for a few years, but held off playing during early access. I'm planning to start it up for the first time when it goes live. Looking forward to it!

[Girlinhat]

What've they achieved that marks it ready for leaving early access?

[Akura]

Almost everything?

They're saying it's pretty much asset complete. Story mode is done, and I think all that's left is bug fixes, optimizations, and tweaking Adventure mode quests. While I haven't really looked at every latest version, it's a fairly complete game as it is.

[Folly]

What've they achieved that marks it ready for leaving early access?

Here's an excerpt from one of their recent patch notes:

And here we are, at beta 0.9, the game’s basically asset complete. We will now be aiming to get this game out in final form on November 7th. We wish we had more time in Early Access, but we’ve been in here a long time, and people are getting impatient (players, investors, development staff, you name it). Of course, final doesn’t mean the end of updates, far from it! That’ll be saved for another news post on our post-final plans. But right now, for the next couple of weeks it’ll be tweaks, bug fixes, polish, and more tweaks.

In general, we have gotten crash bugs down to a minimum (we’ve only received 5 new ones since the last build, and they were fixed). If you’re crashing to desktop, we will need you to submit your output log to us to figure out why it happened.

Other noteworthy points from patches in recent months include a main storyline for single-player mode, numerous side-quests,  tutorial for new players, reworked GUI for creating voxel stuff, and tons of bug fixes.

[Akura]

And I happened to notice a new patch just now, about bug fixes and Adventure mode tweaking. Top of the list is "Fixed 13 crash bugs".

[BigD145]

What've they achieved that marks it ready for leaving early access?

Here's an excerpt from one of their recent patch notes:

And here we are, at beta 0.9, the game’s basically asset complete. We will now be aiming to get this game out in final form on November 7th. We wish we had more time in Early Access, but we’ve been in here a long time, and people are getting impatient (players, investors, development staff, you name it). Of course, final doesn’t mean the end of updates, far from it! That’ll be saved for another news post on our post-final plans. But right now, for the next couple of weeks it’ll be tweaks, bug fixes, polish, and more tweaks.

In general, we have gotten crash bugs down to a minimum (we’ve only received 5 new ones since the last build, and they were fixed). If you’re crashing to desktop, we will need you to submit your output log to us to figure out why it happened.

Other noteworthy points from patches in recent months include a main storyline for single-player mode, numerous side-quests,  tutorial for new players, reworked GUI for creating voxel stuff, and tons of bug fixes.

1.0 that's not really 1.0. The game looks like it's come along but damn the shortcuts to release.

[Vendayn]

I hope the game turns out like they want it. I haven't played it in a while, been waiting for it to be out of beta. Mostly because every update (when I played) made you have to start over. When I played, it was a lot of fun though and I liked it quite a lot. I'm happy that I bought into it early, and look forward to seeing it get to 1.0.

Hopefully they aren't rushing it though, it kinda sounds like they might be.

[Akura]

They're rushing the final release, yeah. Their claim is that "everyone, developers, investors, and players alike, are getting impatient". The last one is crap though, as very few players seem to be impatient; they want a game that's done, not now.

I think they fixed the issue where you had to start over after an update, but I haven't confirmed that myself.


All in all it's pretty solid already. Balance-wise, one thing I dislike is that custom-made guns have crap durability, and so have to be built with a ton of voxels to have any long-term staying power(which means equipping your trigger-happy colonists is right out). But at the same time, this makes them unwieldy-looking, increases the cost to make them, and vastly increases the damage to possibly higher than may want. That last one may not sound like a downside, but you might just want to have a weapon balanced for durability over damage. Also, repairing custom weapons is insane; even a single point of durability loss requires a replacement barrel and grip.

[Girlinhat]

I also realized that the 'best gun' was basically a grip far back, a barrel far forward, and then just an entire block of metal.  Just one huge cube.  The sheer mass adds the damage.

[Folly]

1.0 has been pushed to Steam!

[Ygdrad]

I'm currently trying it out. The performance isn't great, but it seems stable and I am not running into bugs so far. The disappearance of a dedicated dodge button in favor of double-tapping a direction surprised me and I find it to be a stupid change. When I first launched the game, everything looked messed up and grainy and the names over characters were nearly impossible to read, this was antialiasing's fault. I'm not sure how you screw up basic AA in this day and age, but they managed it. Disabled it and overrode it with nvidia control panel's own AA and everything is fine now.

Clumsy combat dodging controls and weird camera zooming aside, game's pretty fun though.

[Akura]

The disappearance of a dedicated dodge button in favor of double-tapping a direction surprised me and I find it to be a stupid change.

Didn't even know that there used to be a dodge button, so I'm fine with double-tap.

[Folly]

I've been spending about 2x more time in the creator than the game itself, and still haven't managed to suss out the exact parameters which define damage on a sword. My best work so far is a pure iron sword with stone hilt, ideal for mass-production to arm my allies, that comes in at just over 200 attack while still looking like a normal sword rather than a giant sheet of metal on a hilt.
A few complaints though, I haven't found anything that affects attack power on bows, there's no way to craft 2h swords or daggers, and most annoying, no way to shave away at voxels without using that feathering technique.

[Girlinhat]

Swords are based roughly on the size of the forward edge and the amount of surface area.  There was a build some time ago that was basically a series of russian nesting dolls, each paper thin and perforated with holes.  It got some type of crazy 3,000 damage or something insane.

Actually, found it:
http://s274.photobucket.com/user/evilauthor74/media/PlanetExplorerIncompleteGoldSword_zps2bc6a33c.png.html

It's stupid, but by the rules this is how it worked!  I think it was changed since then...