I don't like rust.
I don't like building a full building inch by inch. I don't like having to worry about eating too. I can't speak to Palworld, but I don't like rust's empty world, devoid of NPC's short of playing it coop with a lib. I don't like literally every tiny thing having to be crafted, especially with it having its own little crafting subsystems like crafting firewood for fuel for a furnace which crafts materials that are used in another crafted device to craft something else. I also despise crafting and working farms.
One of the few mercies this game offers is Pals to pick up the pace.
I'm going to give it a chance but I'm already going in expecting to be disappointed.
One simple improvement would be being able to just plop down full buildings, but I don't believe that's possible at all.
Try it for free: https://hexbear.net/post/1657114
As it stands right now, the survival mechanics are extremely forgiving. Resources are abundant, even the lowest grade food items (berries) provide enough to refill the bar fairly quickly. Building is still individual pieces, but you unlock them from the tech tree as a full set (wood) and each piece costs about 2 wood. Your pals can harvest these resources for you, and you can setup plots for specific resources that continuously refill.
Of course, most of the settings for survival are customizable at world creation (and afterward). I personally don't like hunger mechanics in most survival games due to them tending towards "annoying bar that needs refilled every 5 minutes". I have my hunger rate set at 0.5 (50%) and sometimes I even forget it exists.
It's still very early in the game's lifecycle, but it has a very good foundation.
The only rust game that interests me is ARK and that's entirely because of the appeal of the cool dinos and prehistoric stuff, rust has this grimyness to it that always turned me off even before getting to the toxic ass gameplay of "oh this guys base is unguarded lets take his stuff" like at least if that happened in ARK there were even chances you got eaten by a sick-ass T-rex or something and not just gunned down by an ak wielding squeakers
The building system still sucks tho
ARK has PVE servers where you work together with other players and only dinos can wreck your shit and I always found that way more fun.
I played a lot of ARK back when it was in beta. Good times
I still remember basically trying to get my footing in the game, barely having anything, only to be taken down by CoD gear wearing players.
Thankfully Palworld has single player mode so I'm hoping there'll be more to the experience than just 'Rust with Pokemon' (and by that I mean I'm hoping there'll be towns, NPCs and quests).
But yeah, the building system is awful and I'm hoping it'll be moddable and will eventually see full buildings being put in.
Give Valheim a shot if you haven't already. You get to chop down trees and make your viking dream house, but there's also a structured series of goals to pursue which leads to an actual end-game and conclusion (you can still punch trees after that). There's more too it than just accumulating stuff to accumulate stuff - You're accumulating stuff so you can build a boot big enough to kick god in the generatives.
Factorio is another one where you're collecting and building stuff but there's a real goal - Build a space ship to escape the planet you're stuck on.
There's also Conan, which is a much more polished game with a lot more stuff to do and much cooler castles to build than Rust,. It's conan, though, and there's still a bunch of racism baked in to the setting even after they stripped the screaming in your face white supremacy out of most of it.
The whole notion of building shit for a couple of hours, logging off, finding all your shit wrecked, re-building, wrecking someone elses shit, always felt really greasy. Why am I spending all this time punching trees so i can build a bomb so i can blow up the stuff someone else spent hours punching trees to build so I can... take hteir stuff that is just like my stuff and is only good for building bombs to steal stuff?
Ah but this one has guns and made the one people weirdly sexualize textual so lol
Is Existential Comics still around here sometimes? Do you think they'd be down to contriubute to a Pokemon game where you put two philosophers in a jar and shake it to make them fight?
Apologies for necroposting, I was poking around trying to find a different post about Existential Comics and saw this. Is this purely a shitpost or do you have an intention to make this game?
I wish i could, I really do, it'd be so much fun. Alas, I have no coding skills, no game dev knowledge, and a bevy of mental health problems that would make a project of that scale infeasible.
I might be able to manage some kind of card game if I had a lot of help, but a video game just isn't within my abilities.
You might want to check out rpgmaker sometime. Up to you, of course, but if you ever do that or the card game and want advice/feedback, feel free to DM me.
You can set up custom difficulty so that you don't have to worry about some of the more annoying things about survival games, like hunger
Thanks, I'm not crazy about rust-like gameplay but at least if I can do something about the annoying hunger meter (which alone doesn't HAVE to be annoying; just compounded with the annoying building system is extremely frustrating) that definitely takes some weight off.
Valheim has a very different hunger meter that I like. You have 15 base health, and then when you eat food it adds to your max health and health regen. Higher tier food gives you more health and regen.
I don't like building a full building inch by inch
You will be kinda disapointed by that then.
I don't like having to worry about eating too
There's an option for lowering hunger rates (not sure if you can completely disable it) but you can automate food production very early on, and after you do food becomes a formality pretty much.
I don't like rust's empty world, devoid of NPC's short of playing it coop with a lib
Palword's Islands have settlements, camps and towns with npcs, so it's much less empty than rust
I don't like literally every tiny thing having to be crafted, especially with it having its own little crafting subsystems like...
This will be a big dissapointment then, bc it is exactly lije you described. Again, the fact that you can use the pals to automate the crafts is a big upside, but you will have to do a LOT of crafting, and some of ot will be manual.
On a final point, the game is very customizable. You can increase/decrease hunger rates, drop rates, exp rates, how much time it takes to craft and build and many other things. If you dislike a certain aspect of the game you can absolutely make it negligible with the configs.
