Core blocks are more-or-less indestructible

[Thundercraft]

I just wanted to share my findings from a couple of experiments regarding the core (root) block.

 

I had a suspicion that a ship's core block was particularly vulnerable in that if it was destroyed, then the whole ship would blow. To test this I performed a few tests.

 

In one test I changed the default core block into a Framework block. As you may know, this type of block has virtually no HP. (It reads as "0".) So it should be very easy to destroy. Then I designed a ship out of this such that my Framework core block was in front. I built this ship in a regular galaxy (creative mode was disabled) and I very gently bumped into an asteroid with the front (Framework) block. The ship took damage from the collision, but - amazingly - the Framework core block was still intact.

 

In another test, I shrunk the core block into something small, so it would not have much HP. And I designed a ship around this small core such that it was in front. I then built this ship as a separate ship in a regular galaxy. I had my regular ship damage the core block with a weak (iron) salvage laser. All it did was reduce the HP of the whole ship. In one test, I destroyed the ship entirely. I then rebuilt it and tried again, stopping just short of destroying it. Amazingly, I could not destroy that core block without destroying the entire ship.

 

My conclusion is that the core block is a bit special in that it can't really be "destroyed" like other blocks. You can 'damage' it, sure. But the damage goes directly to the ship's pool of HP. And it won't disappear - at least not until the ship blows.

 

I plan to take advantage of this fact in my designs by making my core block out of otherwise weaker materials like Framework blocks, Glow blocks, or Crew Quarters. (I plan to design combat ships with a lot of armor and, ordinarily, I would try to avoid exposed crew quarters.)

[Worm]

There was a feature on demo that you could destroy the ship core and ship parts were much easier to destroy and that punished alot creative ships and encouraged people to create brick ships

[Thundercraft]

Well... Experience and the advice of others strongly suggests that core blocks are also a vulnerable spot that can easily destroy the whole ship if not protected.

 

First, there are some serious collision mechanic bugs. Odd things can happen, like the impacted block being fine and a block on the opposite side of the collision being destroyed. IFG block protection can make it worse.

 

Also, collisions to the core block will always do full damage to the ship's hull instead of simply breaking off a piece:

Yes the root block has Hp equal to the ship's no matter what block type it is.  Therefore if you run into an asteroid and you root block gets hit it's easy to lose the whole ship.

 

I started designing my ships with the core block in front, thinking that this made the front block indestructible. But, then, enemy weapons seemed to chew threw my HP like a hot knife through butter. :( I'm thinking that blocks with limited HP (any block besides the core) can sacrifice itself to save the ship further damage.

 

In other words: If a piece of armor gets hit for an attack that does 100 points of damage, but it only has 40 hit points, I suspect that the game destroys the block and that's that. That piece of armor's sacrifice probably saved the ship from 60 points of additional damage.

[JimBob]

I started designing my ships with the core block in front, thinking that this made the front block indestructible. But, then, enemy weapons seemed to chew threw my HP like a hot knife through butter. :( I'm thinking that blocks with limited HP (any block besides the core) can sacrifice itself to save the ship further damage.

 

In other words: If a piece of armor gets hit for an attack that does 100 points of damage, but it only has 40 hit points, I suspect that the game destroys the block and that's that. That piece of armor's sacrifice probably saved the ship from 60 points of additional damage.

 

Seems to me like a pretty solid analysis of what appears to be happening, aswell as the bugs you mentioned ofc.

[Pob]

I'm not so sure about that, unless npc ships use the different mechanics from player ships.

If excess damage is discarded then unless you hit the core block you would have to destroy every block of a ship to reduce it's hp to 0 which means you never get wrecks.

Of course integrity fields will mess that up.

 

My personal suspicion is that excess damage is still carried over to hp and the core block has a damage multiplier on it.

 

Although what happens to a ship's hp if you cut a large chunk off?

[Thundercraft]

Of course integrity fields will mess that up.

 

I seem to recall reading that NPC ships never use integrity fields.

 

My personal suspicion is that excess damage is still carried over to hp and the core block has a damage multiplier on it.

 

A number of players have suspected that the core block is especially vulnerable - myself, included. But, I now wonder that how how collisions are bugged may have given us the wrong impression. Besides accounts of how players with a core block in front often lose their ship to collisions, there's not much evidence of that.

 

I'm not so sure about that, unless npc ships use the different mechanics from player ships.

 

That's a possibility, I suppose.

 

If excess damage is discarded then unless you hit the core block you would have to destroy every block of a ship to reduce it's hp to 0 which means you never get wrecks.

 

That brings up a good question: How -does- the game generate wrecks? Problem is, players are not privy to a lot of details, like how certain game mechanics are coded.

 

My theory is that each block only contributes about half of the actual, hidden, block HP to the ship's HP pool - perhaps less. That way, ships would typically only lose some blocks before it runs out of HP and blows. This is regardless of whether or not a ship has IFGs to protect blocks with x10 HP, which would be calculated separately. That would neatly explain how wrecks are often missing only a few blocks.

 

Remember: When fighting enemies, our ship gets peppered with weapon fire all over. If we could see the damage to each block on our ship after taking a lot of weapon damage, we'd see a variety of damage from 0 damage to barely any left.

 

Discarding excess damage merely means that an enemy has to do more damage to destroy a ship than would otherwise be necessary. It would also mean that ships with lots of little blocks would tend to last longer than a ship made up of only a few large blocks.

 

Although what happens to a ship's hp if you cut a large chunk off?

 

That's a pretty good question. I've managed to cut a large chunk off of NPC ships on occasion. But, usually, either the ship blows before I manage this, or it doesn't have much HP left and blows after a few more shots after I've achieved this. Perhaps the devs intentionally made this is difficult?

[Pob]

I've recently had an interesting fight with Boss Swoks, his ship was a sort of T shape, with a lump just in front of the bar of the T, that bar was the back where the engines where.

He was no threat to me, so I decided to have some fun with him.

 

I turn off my guns, except my lasers and carefully picked off blocks with weapons on them, I then tried to cut off the bar of the T that held his engines.

The bar was connected to the main lump by a single generator block (might of been an energy store) surrounded armour plates, I destroyed the armour plates but could not destroy the generator at this point he was at 33% hp and he died before that generator block broke.

Now there is no way that that block had that much hp, my suspicion is that for npc's is that certain blocks are treated as "core" and directly linked to the ships hp 

 

how many of an npc's blocks are flagged as "core" or how this affects player ship core blocks I do not know.

 

Here's another thought that might need testing, a block's hp is not the same as the amount added to the ships hp, ie if a block adds +100 hp when building then the actual hp of that block may be 200hp

This way a ship's hp will fail before it's totally destroyed.

 

There's a lot going on under the hood in terms of damage mechanics and with the rpg style mechanics going on, it's actually good to keep the players "in the dark" it reduces min/max'ing and encourages player testing and exploration of the game mechanics.

[TheSzerdi]

What happens if you use the transform block tool to change the core block to hologram? At work, can't test.

[Pob]

Something odd happens if you do anything to the starting 2x2x2 iron hull core, transform it or combine it, it seems to stop being a core block? well at least you can delete it in safe mode now, so I really don't know how the game handles it.