Ape Apps

I like the idea. I remember you showing all of the images that you had to draw for one wall. I know how tedious game design can be.

The scroll3d engine would be better because it could allow you to have an elevation and sea level element, or even an underwater element. I’m feeling like “My Realm” sounds better since it is an rpg game, but that’s just my opinion. How will you implement underground mining and house construction though?

I feel like you could create a cave system via z-levels. For example, each Z coordinate could be tied to a different playfield. ground/sea level could be z:0, higher elevations could have a negative z value, and lowlands/caves/underwater/underground could have positive z values, or vice-versa. You could traverse between these playfields/coordinates via stairs/cave entrance just like the old game.

Each chunk could contain data for all playfields at the same x and y coordinates(kind of like how minecraft chunks go all the way down to the bottom of the world), eliminating the need to repeatedly unload and load chunks when switching playfields. This way, you just need to pull different tile and object data from each chunk depending on the value of z. The chunk object is always in memory, but not all of its data has to be. You would only have to load/unload chunks when the player moves around along the x and y axes.

If the player is at or above sea level, they will want to see the ground below and above them. I’m not sure how this could be done when each z level is a separate playfield. People might want to dig into a mountainside to make their base, and that wouldn’t be possible if you put everything at and above sea level into one playfield.

Either way, i look forward to the future changes.

Awesome! can’t wait to see what gets added next.

Also, I’m getting my screen recentered every time the character moves. I feel as if this were unnecessary. Sure, if you move the character and it doesn’t recenter the screen, you could lose track of them. However, implementing a button to center the screen around the character would fix that. This should allow the player to pan around the loaded chunks while directing their character to move and interact with the world.

Regarding loaded chunks. You could load a wide radius of chunks and yet only display the closer ones depending on the player’s choice of render distance. This allows for the invisible chunks to spawn mobs, update crops, and allow things like furnaces to smelt without having to draw them. This would allow a player to have a big base where everything works, yet only part of it is visible to them at any given time.

Edit: Then again, everything outside the screen should be invisible anyway, so you don’t have to have a render distance. However, i recommend keeping the player from seeing the rigid chunk edges by not letting them see outside a certain radius. I’m keeping the above paragraph in to show my thought process on this, even though it was mostly incorrect

cobblestone walls - self explanatory.

wooden chair - crazy idea: what if when you’re sitting in a chair facing a table, you get a hunger bonus to foods? Good rp value if its a feasible feature.

storage chest : we’re gonna need more places to put our items eventually.

Packed dirt floor - a shovel could be used to make packed dirt floor just like a hoe can make farmland. This floor type could be good deco for barns and just good option for making simple pathways.

Stone bricks - could be made by smelting stone. Then used to make various things

Clay/bricks - when water is implemented, clay could exist beneath its surface. If you’re planning on implementing swimming, the player could swim over to a clay deposit and mine it. The shovel should be the best tool for mining it. Once gathered, it could be smelted into bricks, which would be used to build various things.

Hearth - made from stone bricks, iron, and coal. Good for deco and could be place in a room to raise the room temperature if cold biomes and hypothermia will become a thing.

Fireplace - same function as a hearth but uses clay bricks instead of stone bricks. Should also have its own unique look

Flower pot - made with clay, could be place on other furniture, such as tables, or in floor.

Fences - If you plan to implement breeding, which im assuming you are, you’ll want to make fences and gates. Fences would let you shoot projectiles through them and let you breed animals through them without having to go inside. They are a necessity if you are planning on implementing town and having them raided by mobs, as the mobs have to break them to pass through, all the while you’re townspeople are able to pick them off at range. Wood, stone, and iron could make up the first three tiers of fences.

Doors - when the baddies come out at night, you need something to keep them out of your area, and doors are just the thing. Maybe add a wooden door and then later add a reinforced door when you implement iron. A reinforced door can be controlled by any automation devices that you may or may not put in the game.

Sand/glass - Sand deposits could exist beneath water, just like clay, and also in arid biomes like desserts. Smelt sand into glass.

Lighting - i know you said you were planning to implement torches and lighting mechanics, I look forward to that. In the meantime, I also have a few ideas to add.
A lantern could be crafted with a torch, iron, and glass. The lantern could be put on furniture or the floor, but when selected in the hotbar, it could generate a light radius that follows your character. This would be a huge qol feature once the player obtains iron and glass. However, the iron lantern should have a short radius. Higher tiers of lanterns could have better radiuses.
Lumen lichen could be found underwater in some caves. This fungus provides a moderate amount of light and spreads slowly, so its renewable. It can be harvested and crafted into a water lantern with iron and glass. Used to provide light when placed or carried underwater. It must be placed in cave water to grow. If you are planning on adding oceans with multiple levels/depths, the water lantern is the first thing a player should get before diving in. Multiple tiers of these could be added as well.

Hay bails - made with 16 wheat. Good for deco and can be placed in an animal pen so that the animal will go to it and eat from it and then breed, instead of you having to breed them manually. Makes up to 8 babies as it contains 16 meals.

1: Waste management - would be cool if we could burn wooden tools and furniture in the furnace as fuel.they can tend to build up after a while. Also, implementing a trash can into the inventory(like stardew valley) would also allow the player to declutter. Items put in the trash can could dump out into the world or be deleted. If you want multiplayer though, you’ll need a way to drop items to trade with others anyway.

2: Mining Speed - It takes a while to mine rocks, harvest wheat, or break floors or walls. Is this on purpose? I feel like things like that should be an instant thing. Maybe you could implement a sickle for instant crop harvesting and a hammer for instant wall/floor removal? Then the player won’t accidentally break stuff as long as those tools aren’t selected. As for rocks, reducing time to break by half would raise qol while still taking some time to mine.

3: Boulders - Since caves are few/far between in my play-through, maybe surface boulders could be added for convenient sources of stone. Might add to the atmosphere of the game too. Maybe you could have a rocky biome in the future where gravel patches and boulders are more prevalent.

4: Magnetism - the player having to walk into each tile to collect resources gets tedious at times. I recommend allowing the player to pick up items in the 8 tiles around their current tile.

5: Tree renewal - trees might be a bountiful resource now, but when you start adding more biomes that don’t have trees, they’ll start to get harder to find once you’ve demolished all the forests around your home. We need a way to renew trees, and saplings are just the thing. A sapling should need all 8 tiles around it to be empty in order to grow so that mass-production is not overpowered.

6: Charcoal - same fuel value as coal, made from wood in a furnace. Would be more available fuel source than coal. To preserve the value of coal however, you can implement recipes that only take coal along with others that let you choose between coal and charcoal.

Thats awesome, can’t wait to see these changes put into the game.

Ah, thats unfortunate. Thanks for letting ne know.

I have an idea that might improve gameplay. What if when a player surrounds an area with walls and seals it with a door, that area becomes a room. And maybe the only way to see out of the room is to place windows to see a certain range of tiles outside.

I feel like this could be useful to make mining more difficult and dungeons more mysterious, as you can’t see all the ores or enemies until you dig for them or enter the next room.

Also, if you ever plan to make towns buildable, you could add room types that give bonuses depending on what furniture/workstations are in them.

Anyway, hope you get more support with this app.

Thanks! Good to know’

Would alpha value be another feature to come? Would be nice to have glass and translucent textures.

Also, on ios, i can’t copy/paste

Hello,

I just want to know what planet types from mc1 will be carried over to mc2. I see that waterworld, ice, moon, and mars will be coming, but will asteroid, abandoned, earthlike, lava, and forest be coming?

I would love to see abandoned in 3d.

Wiuld also be nice to be able to create our own terrain and skybox textures for planets.

Will there be a terraforming element, or no?

Hello, was just wondering if any new features have come to this app. I feel like this app has potential and i like what has been done with it so far.

I have tons of ideas, i just hope this game is getting enough support.

Also, would be nice if it was on ios, i cant find it anywhere in the app store.

I’m thinking, and I feel like it would be cool if we not only had our one planet to colonize, but what if we had an entire solar system of linked planets that a player can spread to after they have started to produce starships. That could actually be a campaign, to colonize every planet and accomplish certain goals.

You could have three types of solar systems: one for “sol” or our solar system, which would contain all of our real planets, another for a pre-built fictional solar system Containing fictional planets like abandoned world, and a third Solar system that uses rng to generate a randomized system with any combo of planets, fictional or not.

As for the resources required to maintain multiple planets, I would suggest just treating each planet like you treat each map in a region and just process statistical data in all inactive planets. It’s inherently inaccurate as we know, but it gets the job done and adds to the gaming experience

As for the first systym, “sol”, i think adding a blastfurnace/mercury type planet, a Venus/high atmosphere type planet, and helium and methane has giants would be feasible. Asteroid planet would be Ceres, which is a dwarf planet in our asteroid belt, and ice planet would be Pluto.

I think you could use Europa for the underwater planet, and a Dyson sphere map would just be a special station that has to rely on power itself to survive. One other thing that would be cool would be titan. Sure, it’s a cold planet, but it’s not an ice planet. Most of its atmosphere is made up of organic materials like methane, and it has actual lakes of propane. Even that sand that covers Titan’s ground is made of organic compounds. You could give it a yellow-orange hue and make the planet your system-wide gas station. I can imaging it being as brutal to play as ice world.

Anyway, these are my ideas, let me know if you have questions.

That’s a good list you have there. Here are my thoughts:

Each planet should also have its own unique resource, but, that resource shouldn’t be vital to colony’s on other planets to progress. However, each of these planet-specific resources should give you a unique advantage over colonies on other planets.

For example, ether can only be collected from abandoned worlds in mc1, but any colony that collects it or buys it will be able to produce a lot of wood because they can build adv. tree farms, and yet it isn’t a required resource. So if we make a 3D abandoned world with ether, which would be awesome, ether should still be used to bring unique advantages to the user instead of being a required material to progress through the game.

Here are some examples of planet based resources:

Mars: rust - rust contains iron and oxygen. It’s also what makes mars’ soil look red. It could be used to make buildings that produce far more ore, oxygen, steel, and atmosphere than a player normally would be able to produce. You just have to extract it from the soil somehow.

Moon: Titanium - a very strong a flexible material. This resource could be used to build better defensive structures than normally would be possible.

Asteroid: iridium- highly heat resistant, this metal is often found in asteroids. It can be used to make better rare metal and complex material smelters. It could also be used to make thermal power plants if heat is going to be a factor in mc2.

Waterworld: sand/glass/salt - the most abundant resource on the planet, salt can unlock better food buildings. Sand, on the other hand can be smelted with ore into glass, which would unlock better microchip and commodity factories, it would also unlock more compact housing And utilities to help with the space challenges.

Forest: animals- native species of the forest planet. There are lot’s of uses for them, such as zoo’s for entertainment, livestock farms fir food, animal racing For entertainment and money, pet stores for money and happiness boost per colonist, and you could even use them as mounts, hunters, and defenders in combat.

Abandoned: ether - healing yet radioactive.l, this resource unlocks better organic resource production buildings as well as some unique entertainment buildings.

Ice: permafrost - a fictional material that eternally absorbs heat and emits light. It can be used in decorative lights and in buildings that need to produce light or absorb heat. For example: Any solar panels placed within a certain radius from a permafrost Shining tower will produce light, since ice world is dark. The permafrost shining tower needs heat to continue to work though, so a regolith burner could be added for basic heat and power, and crystalline can be gathered to make micromines like normal. You could also create units that deal cold damage to slow enemies with this resource.

Lava world: - ember shards/ obsidian - ember is a fictional resource that rapidly generates heat when either light or electricity is applied to it. It’s likely the cause for lava worlds superheated atmosphere. They say that ember is forged within the strongest of supernovas and is a death sentence to any planet it happens to land on. Therefore, it’s a useful heat source and can be used to make units that deal fire damage, which lower their defense. Ember can also unlock siuperior heat generation building in colonies that need more heat than usual. Obsidian on the other hand, should just be another resource only available on lava world, and should be used to make lava-proof buildings,

These are just examples, I’ll post a list of planets That’ll eventually and each of those planets will have more detailed ideas.

Maybe, but each planet is different. Remember that a lunar planet has no wind, but Martian planets have lots of wind. Martian planets have different features than lunar planets. For example, would you allow a waterworld to have a canyon biome?

You also have to decide whether a planet can be terraformed and what you need to do to terraform it. For waterworld, you’d need to lower the sea level, for a Venus planet, lowering temp and atmosphere, and for mars and lunar, raising temp and atmosphere.

So basically, look at what the planet is now and what it will become after terraformation to decide the biomes of each planet and how they transition from one to another.

Great idea👍. Perhaps on earthlike planets it could be an amphibious vehicle that travels over water.

Ok great. I was just going off of mc1. Surely we can have more colonists at the start.

The fact that only one race is used is better because it means bast can focus all attention to them instead or splitting it between 3 or 4 races. I still hope he keeps adding content for mc1 though.

Glad I could bring another option to the table.

Thanks, didn’t realize someone had a similar idea,

I think they should be buildings. Once a building is chosen From their build screen. They will take on the attributes assigned to them by that selection. For example, if in order to build a pub you need 10 construction workers and it takes 10 seconds to complete with full workforce, the construction site will mirror that. At the end of the worker round(The progress bar shown under most buildings in mc1) it’ll turn into the selected building.

If you don’t want to place the site first and Then select a build, you could just select a building from the main build menu and it would automatically start out as the correct construction site and start the build process. It should work well even if multiple buildings are placed. I just think the manual two step process should still be available for layout planning, since the sites would remain inactive until the player wants them to build something. Another thing you could do is make it so that you can select a building from the main menu and drag over sites with it to start their build processes for that building, provided they are the same blueprint and the resource needs are met.

The resources would be deducted directly from colony storage as soon as a selection is chosen and could be redeemed if the build is canceled before completion, at which the building will return to it’s inactive state and await another selection.

This build system makes employment more challenging because you’d need workers to actually build your city. This means you’d need at least one of your two initial workers to be a builder from the start. However, some more advanced buildings could just regularly sip robots from your storage instead of requiring workers. Or instead of that you could upgrade your normal construction site into a robot construction site, which would use robots to build all buildings with the same footprint.

Reptilians can warp things in easily, so they could start with normal site and end with warp sites, which would take something like ether or uranium to build things. Just try not to make it too protossian...

Zolarg would need to have some other sort of technology to eliminate the need of workers to build. Perhaps antaura can be used to conjure tri-antanium golems to do the building? Whoa, that could be a good war method as well, tri-antanium war golems used as artillery batteries and battering rams. that would be quite a sight in 3d.

Anyway, hope that answers your question.

Wow, I had no idea this idea had already been suggested before I posted my ideas in the rover thread. Gj G.W.

I still think that if you are going to use heat maps, you should need to use surveying buildings to reveal a certain radius of the heat map and not the whole map. So survey buildings like my ancient alien survey tower would still work with heat maps, just apply it to chunks and heat maps instead of region maps.

I think that if mc2 does end up having a war element, having the player not be able to see the whole resource map without placing multiple towers would add sort of a fog of war experience, let alone a realistic element to finding resources irl. I also think the lander being a basic surveyor is still a must if you can’t reveal the entire Heat map.

These would All be excellent biomes for an earth like world. You forgot 3 important ones though:

Swamp- lots of water and clay. That’s the only reason people go there.

Taiga - an arctic forest. The trees provide more wood than forest trees but it’s harder to get water and food here. There’s also the fact that you can get natural sweetener from the tree sap.

Tundra - The coldest earthlike biome. Mostly Ice with sparse trees and rocks. Little to no resources but would serve as a good Hardcore survival area.

However, not all mc2 worlds will be earthlike, so let’s think of biomes for each planet. We also have to remember that the biomes will change into other biomes as terraforming happens.

I’ll go ahead and list some lunar biomes for a good example of how biomes can change with planet terraformation.

Lunar biomes:
Lunar plains - large areas of flattened lunar regolith. Great for building on a large scale. These will become grasslands When the planet reaches the habitable zone.

Lunar badlands - filled with craters and densely packed rock, this area wouldn’t be a worthwhile place to be if not for its large reserves of organic compounds used to synthesize oil. The densely packed rocky soil will prevent plant growth, while atmospheric winds will whether the crater formations into sand to create a desert once the planet becomes earthlike.

Lunar Frostlands- tiny pieces of ice are strewn all over this area. It will be a good place to start a colony as it contains lots of water And is relatively flat. Trees will start growing in this area once the planet becomes earthlike, turning this biome into a forest.

Lunar Iceland’s - filled with many large ice deposits, this Place would be a better place to start you colony with than frostlands, but will become a swamp after the planet becomes earthlike. The main benefit of this area is the absurd amount of clay than can be gather.med from it’s shallow ponds.

Lunar arctic - Sheer cold greets those who dare settle in this area, but the naturally growing crystalline is a valuable reward for doing so. The ground is completely covered in many kinds of ice, and it’s the composition of the ice that allows the gradual formation of crystalline over time. This area will loose its ability to spawn crystalline over time once the planet becomes earthlike, at which Point it will become a taiga biome. Imagine a taiga with naturally grown crystals, sounds almost like something out of a fantasy game.

Lunar glacier - the most extreme area on a lunar planet. No special resources, just ice, as far as the eye can see. It will still be all ice after the planet becomes earthlike, becoming a tundra biome.

Lunar crevice - a giant crack in the ground with many defined and sharp rock formations. This is oddly the best place to get regolith do to miners being able to build Down the sides of the crevice and strip mine outward from multiple elevations. However, it gets weathered away by want and flowing water when the planet becomes earthlike, becoming a canyon and attracting tourists.

Lunar lowlands - these are similar to lunar plains, but will fill with water to become rivers and seas once the planet becomes earthlike. You can build here at early game, but you’ll lose any buildings that get flooded at least halfway to their top by water

Lunar caves - a very rare Occitan ever. Often caused by exposed lava tubes and can contain small amounts of obsidian and uranium, but the lava has long since cooled. Will turn into a cave biome when the planet becomes earthlike, therefore losing any obsidian within.

Lunar mounds - natural mountains caused by tectonic plate movements don’t exist here, but the sides of giant craters will do. Will obviously turn into mountain biomes once terraformed.

Lunar wastes - an area containing garbage piles and deposites. Challenging to settle this area but will yeild lots of different resources, including aluminum And plastic most of all. It will become a waste dump once terraformed and will start spawning pools of mutagen, which can be used in genetic experiments.

Anyway, I hope I can get others to do biomes for their favorite non-earthlike planets and make them able to become other biomes at certain atmosphere levels.

Hello everyone. I bet yall were expecting me to post a good long book of terraforming ideas. The ironic part is that I don’t have to. Most or all of the ideas that I’ve posted are well within the realm of possibility for mc2.

This means that My planet hub thread can still be used for ideas regarding mc2, even though they will need to be adapted to fit 3D style gameplay.

One of the bigger ideas that I’ve always liked was the idea of platform building for space stations and floating gas giant cities. This is totally doable in mc2 and I would like nothing more than to see it implemented into mc2 eventually.

Another thing that I’ve always pushed for is terraformation dynamics, or basically the planets’ ability to change with the atmosphere level instead of just using it as a progress bar to becoming earthlike. This means it could become barren if atmosphere gets too low and become hellish if atmosphere gets too high. A balance would need to be reached to keep the planet habitable. The addition of a temperature element to terraforming would add another “dimension” to the terraforming side of the game.

I’ve put more detailed versions of these ideas on My planet hub thread, so be sure to check it out, I’ll add the link shortly.

Edit: planet hub link:
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=29302