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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2452 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been jumping between Vintage Story and Space Engineers as different extremes of the voxel sandbox decade-long-development approach. Neither are really complete, yet, but they're an interesting contrast.

Vintage Story is slowly-paced and (often hilariously) small-scale, with clear inspiration from modded Minecraft survival-focused setups like TerraFirmaCraft or early SevTech. You can easily spend the better part of an in-game week working your way so you can break stone at all, and a day past that to unlock the mystery of sawing logs into planks. Getting even small mounts of iron or steel are mass resource investments. In turn, though, there's something incredibly satisfying about finishing a clay pot, or quenching some newly-forged tools, and even 'simple' things like beekeeping or finding salt are very rewarding. The implementation, at a very deep level, of microblock chiseling and varied mechanics gives a ton of opportunities that are seldom available in other block games; food management is surprisingly deep and has a lot of room to be made deeper and broader (and VS has a decent modding community: ExpandedFoods and A Culinary Artillery alone do a good job). And a lot of the weather and worldgen and even crop behaviors give lessons about Germs, Guns, and Steel-style arguments that were hard to grok as completely without.

(On the other hand, the combat suuuuucks and there's some jank the custom engine's still trying to shake out, mostly due to stuff like texture atlases or memory management.)

Space Engineers goes pretty hard the other direction. At the extreme end-game, you can absolutely grind through a (somewhat small) planet, but even the early-game is spent focused more on considerations like power supply or whether you want a wheeled rover or a small mining shuttle. There's some progression, but it's things like building a uranium reactor or a faster-than-light drive, and most of your construction materials are available with very little effort. As a result, while you can do some impressive stuff at small scales, much of my attention gravitates to larger scales

(On the other hand, the build controls and especially block selection options make me want to smack their UI dev over the head.)

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