The top of this month brought another update to the playtest build of Stars Reach, and in it there are some big top, big deal changes to… material heaviness. Apparently making sure sand acts like sand, rock acts like rock, and materials have a stickiness point that causes them to fall over if it’s exceeded is vital to development of the sandbox.
What this means in immediate practice is that players will once again have to pay attention to any underground tunneling or building things as a result of these adhesion changes for specific materials, as things should now more realistically fall over because of these new adhesion values. Additionally, certain materials will now either sink or float in liquids as they do in the real world. Because of these adjustments, existing planets have had to be reworked in order to brace naturally occurring caves from the new heavy materials.
Another significant update made in this build is related to XP: Most XP rates have been brought up to meet the speed of mining XP earnings, but as a result skill tree node unlocks have had their costs raised to compensate for the higher rate of XP speed. Incidentally skill trees have also gotten overhauled, with existing nodes moved to new categories and extra trees for things like cooking and artisan crafting have been added.
This patch was the primary focus of the latest fireside chat livestream that brought on former EverQuest 2 and EverQuest Next dev Dave Georgeson, who as we’ve noted before is Stars Reach’s game director. In it he talked about how planet caves completely failed when material weights were added (hence the changes to planets), elaborated on the rationale for XP changes (it’s about balance and “an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation”), promised that “a lot” of combat abilities are planned, confirmed that an anti-decay kit will not be in SR, and discussed plans for crafting that takes material quality into account and changes to how planets are connected to one another.
