GasBandit
Staff member
Alright, so here's the thing about Starbase-
First off: Pat - it's one unified universe, all players, no private nothing, as I suspected. No private instances, no private servers, everybody is all around, all the time.
So what's nice to say about it?
Well, the auction house does work extremely well. I was able to sell ore I mined and buy other things I need (including ship parts that I would not have been able to research myself for hours and hours).
It's pretty and colorful.
Ship management is actually pretty good. Instead of having a big floating ship graveyard, you can fly your ship to a station's parking area zone, and then "despawn" it into a sort of ship inventory. You have to respawn it at the same station, though, so you can't ship ships, so to speak. And if you park your ship too close to the noob station, it will despawn itself in 10 minutes, making sure the actual useful parts of the station stay clutter free.
It has a ROBUST backend, with its own in-game programming language. And everything is pretty much infinitely customizable if you're willing to take the time. So if you find yourself one of those people that LOVES "Dwarf Fortress" levels of depth in everything you do AND you are the kind of person who loves tedium and overzealous detail-oriented "gameplay," then this will be heaven for you.
Starbase gave me a taste of how Terrik must have felt when I tried to get him to play Empyrion. It's just... too much. Even for me.
That said, here, have some screenshots.
First off: Pat - it's one unified universe, all players, no private nothing, as I suspected. No private instances, no private servers, everybody is all around, all the time.
- It's alpha. as. fuck.
- I crash constantly. "workarounds" for the crash are suggested as: Turning off steam overlay (for ALL games, no thanks), turning off steam network ip usage (again, no thanks), and running as administrator. Definitely not ready for prime time, anywhere close to it.
- Physics glitches and bugs abound. I've had to delete perfectly good stacks of ore in my inventory because they became bugged and could not be moved under any circumstances.
- The lag. Dear god, the lag. And not just latency, there's a huge loading chug every couple seconds whenever more than one player is within 20km of each other. It's excruciating.
- It's arcane and opaque as fuck. Even compared to Space Engineers
- Outside of "EZBuild" mode - which is of extremely limited utility - the amount of little fiddly shit you have to do to build ANYTHING is astonishing. It's mindblowing to think anybody would want to have to put up with this. It's a step in the entirely wrong direction. To put something on a ship, you have to frame it out with actual beams attached by flanges that are bolted together (with you using a bolt gun to literally rivet every single bolt one at a time) just like you would have to do in real life. It's like the designers are explicitly trying to drive away the casual crowd.
- I scrimped and saved to buy a mining laser for my first ship on the auction house. After an hour of fruitless attempts to bolt it on, I finally looked through a VERY less than helpful wiki to discover that just having the laser isn't enough, you have to combine it with a "utility tool body" and a "utility tool capacitor" and THEN you can mount it on a hardpoint (which itself has to be mounted on your ship in a very special way so that not only is it bolted securely to the structure but you have access to the back so you can wire cables to it for power. Then you have to wire buttons and levers into your cockpit to control its power and range. It's just a billion tiny little things you have to do, and it feels like it is getting in its own way.
- It's slow as fuck.
- Remember space engineers before jump drives? Where your max speed was 100m/s and it took a half hour to get anywhere, during which you might as well AFK? Welp, that's this game.
- Research and crafting are super slow and super grindy. It takes over a minute to build a single item, and you have to build items to generate research points to spend on research. So, a lot of players end up building a lot of stuff they don't need and throwing them on the auction house, just to grind research points. Which I guess is good for the economy, somewhat.
- You have almost no personal inventory other than space for tools. To move anything of actual volume (ore, ship parts) you have to "tether" yourself to a cargo port on a ship, or transfer the cargo from your ship to your "station storage." But a crafting bench can't use ship storage, only station storage. So there's pretty much no crafting on ships. So enjoy the 30 minute commute between the asteroids and the starting station, dozens of times, when you get started
- You can't do ANYTHING when you start, except mine. Then you can use the starting station's crafting table to build things so you can start researching things to build more things. It will be dozens of hours before you can build a station of your own, but it doesn't much matter because at this point they don't serve much purpose other than storage and crafting.
- Even the tutorial takes forever. And you have to do that tutorial to be given your first ship. And unlike Space Engineers or Empyrion, it is 100% impossible for you to build a ship or a base unless you already have a ship. So, if you lose that, have fun doing the tutorial again to get another noobie ship - it took me about an hour to do the tutorial.
So what's nice to say about it?
Well, the auction house does work extremely well. I was able to sell ore I mined and buy other things I need (including ship parts that I would not have been able to research myself for hours and hours).
It's pretty and colorful.
Ship management is actually pretty good. Instead of having a big floating ship graveyard, you can fly your ship to a station's parking area zone, and then "despawn" it into a sort of ship inventory. You have to respawn it at the same station, though, so you can't ship ships, so to speak. And if you park your ship too close to the noob station, it will despawn itself in 10 minutes, making sure the actual useful parts of the station stay clutter free.
It has a ROBUST backend, with its own in-game programming language. And everything is pretty much infinitely customizable if you're willing to take the time. So if you find yourself one of those people that LOVES "Dwarf Fortress" levels of depth in everything you do AND you are the kind of person who loves tedium and overzealous detail-oriented "gameplay," then this will be heaven for you.
Starbase gave me a taste of how Terrik must have felt when I tried to get him to play Empyrion. It's just... too much. Even for me.
That said, here, have some screenshots.
The tutorial teaches you how to demolish ships with a buzzsaw - something you will not be doing for a good long time in the actual game, because there's a 30km safe zone around the start that prevents you from salvaging any structures other than your own
The tutorial also teaches you the wrong way to mine. It has you left click with a pickaxe, which breaks up voxels, and then the station hoovers them up. What you REALLY do in the wild is RIGHT click to hit it with the hammer end instead of the pick end, to actually collect ore into your (tethered ship's) inventory.
The tutorial rewards you with a basic ship called a "laborer module." Glamorous.
I do like how the game allows for cockpits with useful functional readouts and buttons built into the model instead of on a HUD. That's one thing this game definitely has over SE or E:GS.
Despite the difficulties, I did manage to add more cargo space into my laborer module, so I could spend a few minutes more mining before having to fly the 20 minutes back to the station to craft and sell, to do it all again.
The area around the starting stations is littered with the detritus of hundreds of noobs who tried and gave up, like me. Their laborer modules will drift here forever, I guess.
The tutorial also teaches you the wrong way to mine. It has you left click with a pickaxe, which breaks up voxels, and then the station hoovers them up. What you REALLY do in the wild is RIGHT click to hit it with the hammer end instead of the pick end, to actually collect ore into your (tethered ship's) inventory.
The tutorial rewards you with a basic ship called a "laborer module." Glamorous.
I do like how the game allows for cockpits with useful functional readouts and buttons built into the model instead of on a HUD. That's one thing this game definitely has over SE or E:GS.
Despite the difficulties, I did manage to add more cargo space into my laborer module, so I could spend a few minutes more mining before having to fly the 20 minutes back to the station to craft and sell, to do it all again.
The area around the starting stations is littered with the detritus of hundreds of noobs who tried and gave up, like me. Their laborer modules will drift here forever, I guess.
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