After playing around with this mod for a while, I feel like I am now able to provide some feedback about some of it's content. The mod definitely does a good job of sprucing things up on regular planets and allowing FFS to feel like it has more significance outside of it's main story levels. However, I feel that a few things could be addressed in order to make the experience just a bit better.

The first thing is pretty simple, and its that the 'encounter' style structures (the ones with a tiny group of enemies and like a bench or campfire or something along those lines) feel unusually common in contrast to vanilla and other mods I have. Generally speaking, it feels that for every non-FFS 'encounter' I see, there seems to be 3-4 FFS encounters that I find in between, and even then it feels like there is sometimes even more than that somehow. I'd suggest maybe toning it down a tiny bit to balance out the enemy variety.

The other thing I noticed is that the vehicle type enemies (trucks, APCs, aircrafts, etc.) feel grossly overpowered when compared to the other enemies (which includes mortars somehow), especially the aerial enemies.

The reason this is the case is likely due to their really high base stats, which is an issue that stems from FFS itself, and really becomes an issue here. FFS' story missions, despite being intended to currently have a tier order of [0,1,2] (based on what I have seen), play out more like the planned updated tiers in the discord server [1-2,3-4,5-6] due to a plethora of factors, the enemy scaling being one. You may not agree, but I'm pretty sure the mortars with 1500 potential damage at tier 1 and the APC that deals 220 contact damage (1 shotting many vanilla tier 6 players) speak for themselves.

DaE puts these FFS enemies onto planets that have much higher base tiers, and while it does indeed buff cannon fodder into foes that are competent enough to actually do something, it retroactively turns all vehicle enemies into REALLY high damage, REALLY high health (and in the cases of aerial enemies, REALLY high speed) juggernauts of an enemy. Combine this with the buffs that you made to your version of the aerial enemies, along with the fact that the FFS vehicles don't seem to make any attempt to telegraph their attacks, and we've got quite an unbalanced foe that can even one shot people with over 1000 health on tier 6 planets, and just overall doesn't feel fun to take on.

With all of that in mind, I would suggest some changes that may make the aerial enemies less painful to deal with, since from my experience, they seem to be the troublemakers in terms of balance between dangerous and unfair.

- Pirate aircrafts could be made to only fire 2 missiles instead of the 4 you made them fire.
This would make them feel less overwhelming while still retaining a deadly profile.

- Cultist aircrafts and small carriers could do with a notably reduced HP pool. I know this would technically make them weaker than the original enemies, but I feel that these guys would work a lot better as lightly armored damage dealers due to sheer damage of their attacks. You can make unnerffed versions for the space encounters if they die too fast to mechs.

- The medium cultist carrier could actually be made into a rare miniboss in my opinion. It appears to be already really rare, and it does have the stats to be one, so I'd suggest slapping a boss healthbar onto your version of the enemy to give forewarning to those that may encounter it. I would also suggest removing the 6 missile spam attack since that attack 1 shots on each missile and is so random that it makes mortars look consistent.

I feel that these changes could make these enemies in particular more fair while still maintaining their threatening aura.

Wow, that was a really long post. I'm still quite new to using the steam forums and am quite
shy about what I say, so I hope I provided some meaningful feedback and am not another person just complaining about the starting planets being too hard :P

tl;dr: Mod really cool, probably slightly reduce 'encounter' structure spawnrates and probably adjust aerial enemies to be less unfair.

P.S.: I really like what you did with putting the cultist aircrafts in space encounters, was really clever in my opinion .

DaE puts these FFS enemies onto planets that have much higher base tiers, and while it does indeed buff cannon fodder into foes that are competent enough to actually do something, it retroactively turns all vehicle enemies into REALLY high damage, REALLY high health (and in the cases of aerial enemies, REALLY high speed) juggernauts of an enemy.

In theory, the spawners should only ever spawn the vehicles at tier 1 regardless of planet (same as the mission vehicles.)
Upon inspection, I noticed that I set this correctly for the Cultist Lair encounter, and the normal tank/truck encounter, but I had somehow neglected to do this for the planet-spawning aircraft, or the space aircraft.

Come next release that should be fixed. I will leave the space ones as is though, as you have a mech in those encounters to offset their tier changes.

Plus, next release, pirates and cultists will fight other enemies, so the space ones will need the extra tiers to deal with the space enemies that will no doubt attack them relentlessly.

Generally speaking, it feels that for every non-FFS 'encounter' I see, there seems to be 3-4 FFS encounters that I find in between, and even then it feels like there is sometimes even more than that somehow. I'd suggest maybe toning it down a tiny bit to balance out the enemy variety.

I have noticed that distributing microdungeons can be quite tricky business. It has to do largely with the size of the dungeon in question. The smaller the 'dungeon', the more often they spawn, even if they have the same distribution configuration.
The trick is to distribute them often enough for them to be a presence, but not too often to be stifling. Nonetheless I will tone it down slightly next release.

Pirate aircrafts could be made to only fire 2 missiles instead of the 4 you made them fire.
This would make them feel less overwhelming while still retaining a deadly profile.

The reason they have four is because the missile box on the sprite has four. I could slow down the time between shots though.

- Cultist aircrafts and small carriers could do with a notably reduced HP pool. I know this would technically make them weaker than the original enemies, but I feel that these guys would work a lot better as lightly armored damage dealers due to sheer damage of their attacks. You can make unnerffed versions for the space encounters if they die too fast to mechs.

Like I said earlier, they really were unintentionally spawning at higher tier when they weren't supposed to. Now that (space ones aside) they will be spawning at tier 1 like they should, this shouldn't be a problem anymore.

The medium cultist carrier could actually be made into a rare miniboss in my opinion. It appears to be already really rare, and it does have the stats to be one, so I'd suggest slapping a boss healthbar onto your version of the enemy to give forewarning to those that may encounter it. I would also suggest removing the 6 missile spam attack since that attack 1 shots on each missile and is so random that it makes mortars look consistent.

They currently have a 1 in 7 chance of spawning on all planetside aircraft encounters (including the cultist lair.) I could bump that to 1 in 10. (the space ones don't spawn carriers, as that would make zero sense.)

Good idea though on the medium carrier.

Thanks for taking the time to looking into my feedback!
(idk what else to put here, I kinda just wanted to state that I saw your response )

holy hand grenades i cant to far with out running into one of them on a planet. maybe drop the spawn chances. for both as the worlds are just covered in camps and ♥♥♥♥, otherwise its fine.
edit: you may need to tinker with the camp spawning more for my dragon has to deal with like 20 per planet drop on worlds i do not plan on inhabiting oddly but here is a funny spawn *under water* unless you plan on making aquatoc pirates can you make it so the dungeons cant spawn under water on oceian planets or soemthing.

In this mod, there is a weapon called "SPR-44a Plasma Rifle" and the category is also Plasma Rifle
There is also a weapon with the category "Semi-Auto Plasma Sniper Rifle
But the name is just "M&K Pl-MK.62" and not Semi-Auto Plasma Sniper Rifle
Is it considered to remove the Palsma Rifle from the name "SPR-44a Plasma Rifle" for consistency? Make it just "SPR-44a"
*I found another gun called "SPR-44SG Plasma Shotgun" which is the same.

There is a similar problem.
The ID of SPR-44a is fss_miniknog_ar, while the ID of M&K Pl-MK.62 is fss_minknog_"plasma" sniper.
One is the abbreviation and the other is the full name, I think it should be standardized in the future.
For example fss_miniknog_plasma_automaticrifle and fss_miniknog_plasma_semiautosniperrifle.
Or fss_miniknog_plasma_ar and fss_miniknog_plasma_sr.
In any case it would be better to unify all full names or all abbreviations.
(Incidentally why the SPR-44a is named Plasma Rifle in the game, but the ID is an abbreviation for AR: automatic rifle or assault rifle.)

Hello, it's me again.

I managed to pick up some odd things that should probably be examined to make sure the mod is working as intended (tm). I shall list things below.

- USCM soldiers (very) occasionally drop Perfectly Generic Items upon death. I'd assume these are meant to be a weapon, except it doesn't exist.

- When a FFS Penguin tank fires an incendiary round, said projectile will proceed lose all velocity and face-plant into the ground in front of the tank, blowing itself up. It is very comical, but probably not intended.

- Cultist mortars, some aircraft and maybe other things seem to be spawning at higher tiers than intended. I noticed this with some pirate aircrafts (one had higher stats than the 2 it was next to) and also with many mortars (you can tell by their comically overpowered shrapnel)

- Hostage NPCs appear to not properly beam away upon rescue and instead just become invisible. Killing them in this state causes them to drop intended rescue loot with no death animation. May be only on my end, but wanted to check to make sure.

- Majority of the time, money from crates spawned by hostage altars cannot be picked up.

- The most recent update seems to have messed up FFS cultist ship encounters, rendering them unwarpable.

- One of the intractable weapon props (Looks like a LMG) drops a PGI instead of a weapon. Likely a similar issue to the first one.

These are all of the things I have noticed. Hopefully with this information you can ensure that the mod is indeed working as intended and not breaking itself. Do let me know if you need more info on anything here.

So i have played this mod for a really long time now and i always get an error spam about ffs, today i finally decided to find the cause and it seems to be this mod and the original ffs

[Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed2_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/ffs_missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed2_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:20.463] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_start_penet_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_start_penet_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:21.138] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_2_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/ffs_missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_2_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:21.779] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:22.648] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7_back_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7_back_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:23.129] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_start_dae. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_start_dae.projectile
[13:02:23.373] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_bullet_fmj_3_burst_3crit_start. configfile /projectiles/ffs_bullet_v2/ffs_bullet_fmj_3/ffs_bullet_fmj_3_burst_crit_start.projectile
[13:02:23.381] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:23.425] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed_dae. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed_dae.projectile
[13:02:23.746] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_2_dae. configfile /projectiles/ffs_missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_2_dae.projectile
[13:02:23.835] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_dae. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_dae.projectile
[13:02:24.134] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_start_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_start_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:24.146] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed2_dae. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_failed2_dae.projectile
[13:02:24.780] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_2_penet_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_2_penet_no_ff.projectile
[13:02:24.825] [Error] Duplicate projectile asset typeName ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_penet_no_ff. configfile /projectiles/ffs_missile/ffs_missile_rpg7/ffs_missile_rpg7vl_front_penet_no_ff.projectile

actually it turns out to not be the original but just be an issue with a copied folder for some reason.

Oh well. Never really caused any real issues, so I never bothered to look into it until now. Should be fixed now.

Great mod, absolutely makes planets harder and more exciting, but when starting a new game, pretty much over half the enemies I encounter are FFS enemies, who will melt my HP in seconds especially the cultists, and spiders, I killed at least 100 spiders before I ever even left the starter planet, and they killed every single trader/npc I would find before I could even react. Kind of leaves the map barren of NPC's. I recommend toning down the spawn rates if possible.

You shouldn't even be encountering summoners on starter worlds. How odd.

Should all the absurdly high damage/instant kill attack has some form of early warning? eg; Pirate sniper deal fixed 250 damage which pretty much instant kill in most of scenario. It is not a problem if I see them but they sometime shoot from off-screen. Same deal with Miniknog sniper. Is it possible to give them the cliche long red laser on their gun so we know they are taking aim at us.

The Miniknog heavy robot that fire missile is somewhat annoying to fight since it love to stay off-screen and it fire 2 missiles. It is much worse in space even at x2 zoom with camera veer to the most edge.

Not really a fan of all the high damage instant kill stuff really. Something like a grenade or a mortar I can look over it but getting kill from off-screen with no warning by sniper is annoying.

Are the sheer number of bullets the same as in FFS campaign? I remember getting fustrated simply because of the bullet spam; the attacks weren't doing much damage in of themselves but there was practically nowhere to avoid them.

How about the infected persons that spawn more tentacles?

The short answer is: No, not really.

The long answer is: It depends on the encounter. The 'sniper tower' or 'cave' or 'couple of people milling about' encounters, you are less likely to get spammed by bullets as much as you're bound to encounter only 0-3 of them at a time in those situations.

The 'enemy camp' and 'slave camp' ones? Yeah, especially if you don't keep on top of the enemies coming out of the tents.

For the cultist ones, you can destroy the tents to stop them from spawning enemies if you're quick enough.

At any rate, you won't be encountering the kind of hordes you do in the campaigns. The likelyhood that you'll come across walls of bullet spam are very slim. And since I know you're going to ask: yes, there are the mortar cultists, but they tend to appear as isolated units rather than being backed up by a bunch of people, so they're much easier to deal with here.

But do keep in mind that tiering affects (all enemies in the FFS campaign are tier 1) them and the planetside encounter versions are different from the campaign ones.

The zealot pirates (aka tentacle pirates) only spawn on certain biomes.

Also keep in mind that enemies in this mod will just as happily engage wildlife or vanilla bandits or gic bandits or anything else really as they will you. You can use that as a distraction. Also unlike in the campaign, you have the matter manipulator and terrain to use to bend things to your advantage.

oh nice, I was fond of the tentacle/zealot pirates. They were technically impressive and fun to fight, as were the secret level's enemies. The spiders were pretty fun too.

Also, PURPLE blood for the pirate captain?
That's a bit concerning.
There's very few starbound races that have purple blood.