Here's the link to his tweet

In a recent tweet, Matt was asking for suggestions for the "boring" planets. I don't have a twitter account so I'm making this thread.

Personally, I think what makes a planet in this mod less interesting to explore is the monotony. If we take the Moon or Mars for exemple, there are some excellent ideas: the cyber bases for the former, the Ice Warrior stuff for the latter and particuliar/new minerals for both of them. However, once a player finds the stuff they wanted to find (generally the good ideas I was talking about), they leave and only come back a very few times.

Why? Because of the monotony. The landscape is always the same. Unless you're looking for something specific, once you explored a little bit, you've basically seen it all. If we look at the most visited planets, there are the Overworld, Gallifrey, Mondas, etc. All of these have different biomes, with specific and unique stuff from one to another, you want to see what's next after the one you're in.

So, we just need to add more biomes to the boring planets, problem solved, right? Well yes, but actually no...

The main problem of planets like the Moon or Mars is that they're supposed to be flat and monotone. In real life, there's nothing really interesting/unique about a specific part of them, so we just can't make extravagant biomes because that would just be out of place. So we need to rely on Doctor Who episodes, but again, there are some difficulties.

For Trenzalore, we have two episodes but with a lot of stuff to work with: graveyards (a lot of people were requesting that under Matt's tweet and it's a cool idea so I'm supporting that suggestion), a town/potential villages, a very few Weeping Angels, a giant dead TARDIS (although that last one would be really hard for the devs to create), etc.

On the other side, we know Mars have colonies of Ice Warriors underground (which could follow a similar scheme to the cyber bases in Mondas in the game). Maybe we could add the Adelaine Brook's base on the surface which could be a single place like the citadel on Gallifrey (but again, that would require a lot of work for the devs).

On the Moon, maybe add Apollo's base/the american flag. Looking at the Kill the Moon episode, it would be literally impossible to add a giant creature inside it, but maybe it would be possible to add spidery-like creatures in the underground like the bacterias of the said episode. Maybe they could even burn when reaching a certain amount of luminosity, like zombies and skeletons during the day outside.

(Note that I'm French, and I don't think the classic episodes ever aired in France in any way. So I've only watched the New Who episodes; I can't really suggest anything for planets like Varos or Vortis.)

Those were some suggestions for how to make "boring" planets less empty. However, if you follow my reasoning, you may notice there is one paradox. There is one planet/dimension that is mostly the same everywhere without a lot of minerals that yet still attracts a lot of people constantly. Did you guess which one it is? It's the Nether (I'm obviously talking about the 1.12.2 version). Which takes me on the final part of my (way too long) thread.

When we look at the Nether, it follows the exact same pattern almost everywhere: netherrack + lava (There's sometimes a soulsand plane but I don't consider it a different biome). The only thing that doesn't follow this pattern is the Nether Fortresses, which in themselves, don't contain anything really special. So why do people often come back in the Nether? Because almost everything there has a purpose. The fortresses blocks can be used for decoration/construction; the soulsand is used to grow nether warths, which are used in alchemy; the mobs are very useful because what they drop is often used to craft something very useful/complex or something that will help the player to progress to a more difficult part of Minecraft.

The lack of purpose is second main problem of "boring" planets. If we take the Moon once again for exemple, as far as I know, the Moon rocks don't serve any purpose, neither for construction nor crafting recipes. Yet, there are loads of type of them. It's the same for Mars rocks, granite blocks (on Trenzalor), etc. If the majority of things on a planet doesn't have any purpose or doesn't help the player getting better stuff, people generally just won't need to go there. I said earlier that we couldn't just add more stuff all the time, so the best way to optimize the planets would be to find a purpose to the "useless" blocks.

Maybe the rocks from different planets could be used for construction by using them to craft bricks just like the Gallifreyan ones (for exemple: Mars brick block). Maybe pillars, slabs and polished blocks would be possible.

Maybe the dirt/sand from Varos or Mars could be used to craft fertilizers that would work like bone powder or something related to nature.

Maybe use the rocks to create decoration stuff like roundels (Moon roundels/Mars roundels, etc.) or TARDIS console slabs.

The best thing to do with them would be to make them necessary for the crafting recipe of some gadget or something that would help a player in any way.

Maybe different types of Moon rocks would be required for some items's crafting recipe. One of them could even be a bit rarer than the others and help crafting something interesting or complex.

Ok, I think that was all I wanted to say. I just want to precise those are just some suggestions I wanted to share to make some planets more interesting to explore. I'm absolutely not expecting the devs to do all of these for the next update or anything, I just want to give them some ideas.

Thank you for reading this way too long thread.

Yeah pretty sure this wouldn't have fit in a single tweet anyway.

I think that Skaro desperately needs some dalek cities, albeit not to the extent that think. I think that it would be a small generated structure, as like a small colony outside of the main city. Each of these structures would have at least 1 laboratory and 2 prison cells, and would ALWAYS have one control room. The daleks inhabiting the control room would not be able to leave the structure as they would be unable to leave the city as they are original skaro daleks. Also the structures would have a new door: the dalek city door (note: either the Cushing door or the dead planet door). Encafa17 wat do u think?

Nice suggestions! Good point with your comparison to the Nether. I'll look for stuff to make people return to planets.

R u referring to both of us or just one?

 I think that's a great idea! There could even be a chance of a chest being in a structure with some Dalek stuff inside!

 Thank you very much for reading this and taking the time to respond! I love the Dalek Mod, keep up the hard work, because everyone is enjoying playing this! :D

Thank U