Starbound

[PatientZero]

Been following this game for a while now, and since it's waiting for a big update and wipe, thought I'd go over a few things I've seen some confusion about.
Probably a bunch of opinion in here but there's some technical jazz to go over too.

First, it's probably worth mentioning this game isn't actually finished yet, the devs themselves explained this is the earliest possible public beta you can play, which is to say the game "works" from a purely technical viewpoint, but nothing is nailed down as being ready to ship yet, there's piles of unfinished and/or currently disabled content at this point.

Which is probably why a lot of the controls are not explained properly, particularly the L/R confusion, those are your kind of "default" equipment outside the quick select, you access them by pressing X and switch hands by pressing Z (mostly useful if you use two-handed weapons)
This means, for example, I have a character who uses a sword and a gun in either hand, if I'm mining I can press X at any point to equip both weapons, shoot and stab some business, then hit X again to switch back to my pick.
Another useful example would be having and one-handed weapon and a flashlight, particularly for exploring, saves so many torches.
The other function of it is if you're using a one-handed item, like an axe or food, your other hand can switch between your two default items (assuming they're one-handed) by pressing Z.

Some of the more unusual unexplained controls are the whole thing with holding shift to place/break a single block (and also walk), and holding control lets you move your camera around to see further in one direction (dependant on your zoom level I think).

Personally I like a few of the crafting systems people complain about, having to wait for ore to smelt or food to cook, in particular I like the idea of finding blueprints to learn how to make new things, and upgrading equipment vs just making new items is a pretty neat idea, you end up with much less junk equipment laying around and it ensures you haven't just gotten lucky or something.
(I found diamonds way before having enough platinum to upgrade)
Same goes for the "pixel" requirement on some recipes, it encourages you to explore and get your hands dirty, currently the numbers are a bit unbalanced or verging on grind-y, but again we're dealing with things that haven't been tested out in the wild all that much.

If you guys didn't know, the armour upgrades have a race-specific branch, you've got standard armours with standard upgrades which seem like the obvious choice since their stats are higher, but you get bonuses from race-specific armour, like avian armour letting you glide or human armour letting you carry more, along with each race having their own obvious aesthetic differences.
(any race can wear any armour, but only that race can make it by default without needing blueprints)

I'll admit this game feels a lot more fun in multiplayer (but so do most games) but from the looks of things there's a lot more to this game than meets the eye right now, hundreds of pieces of equipment, more sectors to explore, bigger ships, space stations, and probably a lot more "oh shit it's 2AM already" moments.

[Koh]

You can also press - to use your L/R items.

Now, the waiting for things to cook/smelting is a hit and miss for me. I get that, realistically, this stuff takes time, but in the game world, it just slows things down immensely, especially when you're packing 417 Iron Ore like I was last night, and have to smelt all of that at once. It takes too long. I literally just plopped that whole stack to smelt, and went internet browsing until it was over. A game shouldn't pull you out of it like that.

Upgrading equipment is also a hit and miss...this doesn't make much logical sense this time around. If you have enough materials to make a Platinum Pickaxe, for example, why should you have to backtrack all the way to a Copper Pickaxe and climb up the tiers just to make it?

I dislike that you can only see your hunger bar at milestones of getting hungry, or eating something. It should be displayed when you're looking at your inventory/character page.

Regarding holding shift, I can't help but feel it should be the other way around, where holding shift let's you build/mine/etc. clusters of four, and by default it's one.

The game is still in early beta, but that doesn't exempt it from heavy criticism. It needs all it can get in this phase.

[PatientZero]

If you have enough materials to make a Platinum Pickaxe, for example, why should you have to backtrack all the way to a Copper Pickaxe and climb up the tiers just to make it?

Couple of reasons I can see, first it just stops things like copper being redundant (aside from using it to repair), and it better controls the progression, in the sense that you're "supposed" to have the lower tier pick before you get the next one.
I'll grant you it's a bit of a knee-capping solution, but it does prevent say, having enough diamond to make a pick and then having no use for platinum until you get the armour blueprint.

I dislike that you can only see your hunger bar at milestones of getting hungry, or eating something. It should be displayed when you're looking at your inventory/character page.

Press Alt, I'd prefer there to be some kind of page to show you your hunger and temperature, maybe alongside other stats and details, but again blah blah blah beta.

Regarding holding shift, I can't help but feel it should be the other way around, where holding shift let's you build/mine/etc. clusters of four, and by default it's one.

In general you'll spend a lot more time mining and digging around large areas of dirt and rock than you will building, particularly with blocks, can you imagine how annoying it would be having to hold down shift all the time?
If there were some kind of toggle for it, now that I could get behind, but in general I'd much rather have the faster way of digging be the default.

The game is still in early beta, but that doesn't exempt it from heavy criticism. It needs all it can get in this phase.

Totally agreed, but complaints about things like keybindings and general usability need to be tempered with the fact that pretty much everything is subject to change right now, a lot of the things that need changing or fixing are pretty low priority.

[Vipershark]

I liked the way Terraria's crafting worked in that you find the item, click to craft once, or hold to craft a bunch in bulk super fast and could stop whenever you wanted.
The new system requires you to manually select the amount you want before crafting, and having to manually click the increase button until you reach the max amount gets old fast.

Regarding the hunger bar, I think it would be best to have it placed on the HUD under the Health and Energy bars (Minecraft pulls it off well enough) and the HUD is so small that they might as well fit temperature up there too.

Also I think my 3D Printer may have been broken? I read something that said you should put your starting seeds in the 3D printer so that you can get them whenever you want to grow new stuff (for pixels, of course) but I put my seeds in and they got destroyed but never showed up in the printables list. I tried two other printable items and they worked as normal but I tried three different types of seeds and they just deleted themselves. But characters are getting wiped today anyway so it's not that big of a deal.

I wish Iron Ore was more abundant.

[Koh]

Viper, you can type in the amount of stuff you want to make there. Like, if you click on the x1 part, it lets you type. So it has that going for it, but the smelting/cooking takes way too long in bulk. Characters are getting wiped today? What the hell xD. Oh well, I guess it's to be expected.

[PatientZero]

Also yeah, the 3D printer is a bit skittish, don't know why you'd need to duplicate seeds but yes, thing's genuinely pretty busted.

[Rosencrantz]

A friend of mine had a spare copy and decided to hand it over to me.

I kind of didn't want to play it at first since I wasn't able to get into Terraria and I was afraid this was going to essentially be the same deal, but this is pretty fun from what I played! They just need to update all of the interface stuff because I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing yet, haha.

[PatientZero]

Word to the wise, the recent balance update patch and wipe was a dud, looks like the rush to get it out the door left behind a lot of mistakes and errors, getting re-re-patched again soon but does unfortunately mean another wipe.

It's kind of annoying, but if these issues are putting you off the game I'd say maybe leave it a couple months or so to get all these emerging problems fixed up, doubt it'll be out of early beta that quick but at least the core mechanics should be a bit more refined.

[Koh]

Makes me not want to play until this new patch it out at least, so I don't have to start over a third time so soon XD.

EDIT: Can you guys please start posting your sources when you mention news like that? People are skeptical when I tell them about wipes mentioned here, which is rightfully so. Post your links like a nice referenced post for us, please and thanks~