fans who are better-spoken than me have gone over a lot of the flaws in frackin' universe ad nauseam.
anyone who's been in this community for long enough has heard the stories of the kind of person the dev
of this mod is. in short: he's a total shitheel. abrasive, confrontational, and creatively bankrupt. i
could go on and on and write an entire blog post about just that-- but i wanna talk about something else
about this glorified modpack that's always bugged me:
the madness system.
for those not in the know, frackin' universe has a research mechanic. a fun idea in theory, but in practice it
ends up being a frustrating system that locks some of the best items behind hours upon hours of waiting and busywork,
gathering the right materials and having enough research points to unlock it. this is the only way to unlock certain items.
one particular branch-- the madness section-- uses a unique currency in addition to research: madness. see, certain items,
which are especially useful, are locked behind this research tree, requiring your character to descend into insanity to unlock
them. these items include an EPP (environmental protection pack) that prevents the erchius ghost haunting every moon from attacking
you, radioactive isotopes beyond one's wildest dreams, and machines that pull important crafting materials from the atmosphere.
cool, right? well you'd best hope you don't get intrusive thoughts that are easily influenced by what you see, because oh man.
as your character gains "madness", it starts to have a tangible effect on your gameplay. your character hears voices (groan), telling
them to do things ranging from nonsensical to outright murderous or suicidal. these effects persist as long as you have madness points,
and are relatively frequent. maybe this makes me "that one friend who's too woke," but i believe they make an absolute mockery of lots of
mental health disorders-- anyone who suffers from intrusive thoughts, auditory hallucinations, delusions, or even arguably anyone who is a plural
system. every time i've started up a new save file in this game and i inevitably get to the point where i have to start down the madness research
tree, i always think about how this would affect my sister. she doesn't play starbound, but she's told me about how her intrusive thoughts (and overall mental state)
are heavily influenced by what she reads, watches, plays, and listens to. i can't help but think about how upsetting it would be for
her to see the little text box pop up, with some monster saying to her character that they should get themselves killed in some horrific manner,
or that they should mutilate their loved ones, or something else equally edgy just for edginess's sake.
it disgusts me.
it feels like such a flippant and careless treatment of such a vulnerable issue, played off as comedy and game mechanics. and don't even get me
started on the delta freya ii mission, which is overall the climax of the story-adjacent missions that frackin' universe adds to the game.
it's such an abrupt and jarring shift in tone that's executed so poorly. it uses gore and viscera purely for shock, and haphazardly throws around
various concepts from the cthulhu mythos to make things look "scary" or "eldritch". nothing feels scary. it's all just a slog that you get through
to earn mass amounts of the currency needed to unlock items in the madness tree and farm important resources found nowhere else. maybe this is too
harsh, but everything to do with this madness mechanic is one of my biggest grievances with frackin' universe and i feel like it's not ever really
talked about when people are criticizing this mod.