Can you actually get to all the new planets?

pzannucci

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So I downloaded and went into creative, grabbed a tier 3 rocket and off I went. The only place it would let me go was to the asteroid belt (and I couldn't stand on any asteroids, just slipped through them). So if you can get to the new planets, what is needed. Couldn't find anything on the Wiki.
 

Douglas_Fresh

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There is nothing on the wiki because those other planets are not playable yet. Up until Galacticraft 3 was released you couldn't even see what other planets may be reachable, so they weren't even mentioned. Now, however, since they are visible I may mention that they are there and just not reachable yet so as to prevent any confusion.
 

pzannucci

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Aw, I was all excited. I guess I can wait if I have too. :p Do we know if they are planned to eventually be a feature of Galacticraft 3 or are they way down the road?
 

MoltonMontro

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radfast

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In future there will probably be more than one planet released at a time, otherwise we won't be seeing the outermost planets until 2020 which would be a shame ...

There are unofficial plugins / submods for Galacticraft which add extra planets - browse the Addons area of the forum for more info. Many of these are still in development or have been abandoned - people who have tried it have found it is a surprising amount of work to make a decent planet - but some of them are playable and are pretty good fun. I'm sure other forum members can steer you in the direction of the playable ones.

For now I think these addons are all for 1.6.4 though, so they won't yet interface with the Celestial Selection screen in 1.7 beta.
 
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radfast

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Meanwhile try the Space station, and add some spin thrusters to it.
 

Space Viking

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I think the most important thing is to work out a solid interface for Galacticraft. For example would it involve having clear ways (an API I guess?) of organizing cosmic tiers, what condition it takes to reach them, and eventual hazards/benefits (e.g. atmosphere and temperature). Spacecraft customization is likely to play a role here considering the linear concept of just adding another tier of rocket (along with any sub-types) whenever a new range of celestial bodies are added is pretty much obsolete and should preferably in my opinion be reworked.

Though even then instead of jumping onto implementing new celestial bodies, there should IMHO be more focus on giving the current Galacticraft worlds some love, being namely the Moon and Mars. I think they deserve it :)
 

radfast

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Hey @Space Viking :)

So I tend to agree, and one of my goals in my contributions to GC3 has been to give Mars and space stations some love (maybe too much love in the case of space stations, lol).

I think the Moon is fine how it is, it's one of the very best features in Galacticraft. It looks like the Moon, it has the gravity just right, and there's plenty enough for players to do considering it's probably the first space dimension most players (in survival) will visit. Moon features: controllable lander, low gravity player movement, footprints, flags don't wave, oxygen setup is needed, cheese ore, meteors, Evolved mobs, villages with Alien Villagers, moon dungeon, moon buggy. The Moon has been hardly touched in GC3, only very minor tweaks to the boss. A frequent suggestion is to add more interaction with Alien Villagers. I've also posted about maybe adding some kind of meteor defence in future (which would perhaps auto-gather the meteoric iron). I don't think the Moon needs more. IRL there's probably not that much to do on the Moon!

Mars, though ... In GC2 there's not too much to do on Mars - the cavernous vines are pretty but I guess a lot of players never even stay long enough to see them, Slimelings are cute, but there's not really much reason to stay once you've gathered a quantity of Desh. In GC3 now, there's more reason to stay and mine, as players will be needing plenty of Desh to make a Tier 3 rocket, also that Tier 3 schematic of course. In GC3 we have added these Mars improvements: new Mars sky which I think looks fantastic, sub-surface ice, and the new gas machines will work differently on Mars because Mars atmosphere has different gases. The plan is for players with all 3 gas machines to be able to manufacture rocket fuel on Mars out of nothing more than electricity + water ice. This could pave the way for a large base on Mars (or in Mars orbit?) as a springboard to some of the destinations beyond. Definitely, Mars could do with more love ... but what? How about some surface features - maybe boulders, maybe also a Songspire as a hat tip to one of my favourite books, Altered Carbon. Other ideas?

Asteroids, the adventure here is supposed to be in finding out what's inside, and generally figuring out new ways to get around in this dimension and deal with the lack of light. It's intentional that they all look much the same from the outside. I think a few more things are planned for this dimension.

I totally agree with you that the tiered model of spaceships won't last forever (otherwise we'd end up with 9 tiers or something crazy by the time we have all the planets). It's really up to micdoodle8 where we go with that after GC3, though I have some ideas of course.

The API is supposed to allow player-created planets.
* In GC3, micdoodle8 made it a whole lot easier for players to get started with making a new planet as it can be based on WorldProviderSpace: https://github.com/micdoodle8/Galac.../api/prefab/world/gen/WorldProviderSpace.java
* However, the real skill is going to be in designing new blocks, liquids, terrain features and sky to give a new planet an "other worldly" feel. As anyone who has tried it has probably fairly quickly discovered, that's a fair amount of work, and like most things in game programming, it needs a combination of art skills and coding skills.
* Maybe I should write a tutorial some time on how to use the API to make a planet for GC3.
 

Ezer'Arch

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Definitely, Mars could do with more love ... but what? How about some surface features - maybe boulders. Other ideas?
<3... We had suggested some terrain and structure improvements here: http://forum.micdoodle8.com/index.p...-ideas-read-this-before-posting-an-idea.3677/ (see Martian biomes and structures)

Right off the bat, I'd add biomes so that terrain looks less "placeless". Placelessness is when a set of physical traits repeats evenly all over the landscape so that the explorer can't identity regions, directions, visual hierarchy and other visual cues which could aid the wayfinding. Each landscape feature looks unique individually, but they all share same traits and are evenly spread. Example, every hill in GC Mars is unique, but all hills are covered with the same material and have similar roughness and are evenly spread all over the terrain (there's no "plains" or a hilly region), which also has the same mean altitude all over entire planet.

That's why I had suggested that Mars could "borrow" some terrain features from the overworld, such as dried river beds, ravines, dried oceans, well, biomes so that terrain features won't occur evenly with the same intensity. I once converted an overworld terrain to get the result I was looking for: video, images, download.

As to structures, why not joke about conspiracy theories and add pyramids?
 
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Douglas_Fresh

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<3... We had suggested some terrain and structure improvements here: http://forum.micdoodle8.com/index.p...-ideas-read-this-before-posting-an-idea.3677/ (see Martian biomes and structures)

Right off the bat, I'd add biomes so that terrain looks less "placeless". Placelessness is when a set of physical traits repeats evenlyons, visual hierarchy and other visual cues which could aid the wayfinding. Each landscape feature looks unique individually, but they all share same traits and are evenly spread. Example, every hill in GC Mars is unique, but all hills are covered with the same material and have similar roughness and are evenly spread all over the terrain (there's no "plains" or a hilly region), which also has the same mean altitude all over entire planet.

That's why I had suggested that Mars could "borrow" some terrain features from the overworld, such as dried river beds, ravines, dried oceans, well, biomes so that terrain features won't occur evenly with the same intensity. I once converted an overworld terrain to get the result I was looking for: video, images, download.

As to structures, why not joke about conspiracy theories and add pyramids?

I really like the idea of biomes on planets, especially on Mars like you described. For the most part the moon is pretty uniform, but if I recall I've seen pictures of canyons and at least one particular large crater on Mars. I think it would be quite cool to come up and over the lip of a crater and look out to see a massive, somewhat shallow crater as big as 100 meters across (possibly larger).
 
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Space Viking

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I sure can't complain about the space stations getting extra love. Eventhough optional, they are what I'd describe as a nice core feature of Galacticraft. Certainly it also has much potential in the future.

When it comes to the Moon, it certainly has achived a great finesse when it comes to technical features, and definitely whose attributes can easily be reused or customized for future celestial bodies. The Moon itself is however pretty bland, with one of the expressive thing I've heard from exploring players is "It turns out on the Moon, it's just the Moon". If truth is to be told, its current sole biome of endless dunes are probably even blander than the real deal, since there actually are varied surface features there.

The brighter highlands could typically be plains or hills contrasting with the darker lunar maria. Between these there could be collapsed lunar lava tubes ranging from the size of smaller rivers to giant canyons (the former would actually be rarer). Meanwhile those tunnels that supposedly aren't collapsed could as well have a variable size, appearing either as typical cave entrances (reminiscent to those found in the overworld), or at its height as really large sinkholes connecting directly from above to big underground tunnels, having enough space to house entire player communities. The otherwise surplus lunar soil could be absent from its extreme edges, which would otherwise be a thin layer using similar logic as snow. The layer of soil could also be brighter around occasional impact craters of larger magnitude inspired by ray systems.

Much of this could in turn be adopted for half of the Martian biome types inspired by its particular dichotomy. It's certainly a concept I could discuss with fishtaco about. On a sidenote I've already talked with him about a similar subject on how biome types could be customized and reused in a similar manner for separate celestial bodies of similar composition.

It's nice fuel will be possible producing locally on Mars. I thought something similar about the Moon inspired by a real-life concept using electrolysis on lunar regolith to produce aluminium and oxygen for hybrid rockets. Possibly could water ice be needed for that, which then would be a rare subterrain feature on the Moon (though players would probably already have brought their own infinite source of H2O already, lol).

When it comes to asteroids, it was an unexpected feature to learn about I must admit. Still, it has the funny theme akin to the vanilla game where essentially the digging is slightly like a lottery. Of what I know is fishtaco indeed still has some features left to implement for that.
 

radfast

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Hey @Space Viking. Nice ideas, especially if something is re-usable. (For example, I can imagine crater code can be re-usable on any other celestial body which has no atmosphere). I think this is really micdoodle8's and fishtaco's call. For myself I have a list of ideas to code which is a couple of pages long, even apart from all the current issues, so I'm unlikely to be looking at worldgen any time soon!
 

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