Optional Consumables

[Spartan-228]

I know things like fuel, and ammo get a lot of people all riled up. However I believe that those things should be available to those that want to use them.

One way this could be achieved is through game types. This of course I understand is definitely down the road a bit, but game types is not what I am here to discuss.

I believe that Starmade could be greatly enhanced if consumables were added to the game, but made optional.
For example fuel. Fuel should not be mandatory, instead it should be used as a way to boost a ships default power output. Now granted you would have to balance this with different full qualities and a set amount of full a full tank can hold.

Ammo can also be handled in a similar way and I have touched on this before, but not every one seams to understand what I am suggesting.
Ammo can be used to decrease the amount of power a weapon uses. Or it could be used as an alternative to effects blocks.
An example being instead of using explosive effect blocks you could use HE (high explosive) ammo.
of curse like fuel you would want different quality ammo and limited storage capacity.

Now nothing I have just suggested would replace anything currently in the game. Instead these things would be implemented to give players more ways to build their ships.
On one hand you will have players that will use fuel and ammo, but will be dependent on their factory that build their ammo and full.
Then there will be the self sufficient ships builders that don't need anything to keep operating, but those ships would tend to be a bit bigger and maybe not quite as efficient as the others.
And then there will be those that try to have the best of both worlds.

Any ways those are my thoughts on those two items and I am sure there are more consumables and more ways that they could be incorporated without ruffling too many feathers.

 

[starhaiden]

*Fuel not full
You still haven't fully corrected it

 

[FunnyBunny14]

I dislike consumables for ships. For players yes, but not ships. The blocks basically are the consumables already. Just look at how many you lose when your ship is completely destroyed!

 

[Spartan-228]

*Fuel not full

Thank you.

 

[Ciggofwar]

Your expressing this world we live into the game, which is not overly healthy by which it operates from greed and finite. The game people want is far removed from this type of ignorance's when it comes to technology and application of power, greed is preventing you to having a hover vehicle, or a nice computer that will invoke creativity. In lue of separation from this home world ideal idea. You left and are starting your own system and with your clean technology designs starting anew from scratch, your recycling is very efficient, you make things for longevity, your pollution is nil, why would you revert backwards.

Near the end of ww2 Britain had somewhere near 2% waste for a country, imagine had that trend continued in todays world for a country, but natural greed from ignorance's soon followed and the sell out began. As to why you would leave and venture out on your own, and leave behind the ignorance's in there own feces and perversion of a way to live.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I had an idea for a server experiment I wanted to try but it would need a consumable that would kill players when they ran out of "Foodstuffs". I don't like the idea of having to eat to survive like Minecraft but I am not apposed to the idea of consumables (optional of course). I was thinking you'd just have the foodstuffs on your ship and it would be consumed over time, when you ran out you would start to loose health. The ability to produce food on a ship would be possible too. Larger ships could have a higher foodstuff consumption rate because of theoretical crew. Anyway it might at least make a good mod someday.

 

[ResonKinetic]

Your expressing this world we live into the game, which is not overly healthy by which it operates from greed and finite. The game people want is far removed from this type of ignorance's when it comes to technology and application of power, greed is preventing you to having a hover vehicle, or a nice computer that will invoke creativity. In lue of separation from this home world ideal idea. You left and are starting your own system and with your clean technology designs starting anew from scratch, your recycling is very efficient, you make things for longevity, your pollution is nil, why would you revert backwards.

Near the end of ww2 Britain had somewhere near 2% waste for a country, imagine had that trend continued in todays world for a country, but natural greed from ignorance's soon followed and the sell out began. As to why you would leave and venture out on your own, and leave behind the ignorance's in there own feces and perversion of a way to live.

Way to be a fucking downer.

Finite resources and greed cause conflict, and fantasy conflict is interesting and exciting; fun.

 

[SapioiT]

Maybe, besides the foodstuff, a new block to be added, which would allow using energy (a lot, like a cloacking device) to make food, and it should also show up in the weapons menu...

 

[NeonSturm]

And then there will be those that try to have the best of both worlds.

Like me:

Build self-sustaining stuff in your carrier which also supplies your fighter.
Or build weapons with pwn normal threads, but use ammo weaponry in drones for bigger threads you can not handle with self-sustaining weapons.

Drones are like ammo currently.
Does it really matter so much if you lose a drone OR lose ammo if you wanna fight a bigger thread to a smaller ship, in order to win what you usually won't win?

Near the end of ww2 Britain had somewhere near 2% waste for a country, imagine had that trend continued in todays world for a country, but natural greed from ignorance's soon followed and the sell out began. As to why you would leave and venture out on your own, and leave behind the ignorance's in there own feces and perversion of a way to live.

The universe could be infinite.
The supply can be infinite.
But fuel could be some kind of "condensed power" which needs TIME to produce.

Which country does have only 2% of Life Time waste or sun-light waste? :p


I imagine a self-sustaining power supply like:
* 2 blocks fuel-production, 1 block reactor = equivalent to our current.
* just 1 block reactor = dependent on a carrier with 2 blocks for fuel-production per reactor block, or has idle-time.

Fuel would be like a power-tank, just:
1. can hold MUCH more
2. has a limit on consumption (defined by number of reactors)

Same with ammo.


I support this - as long as it is an addition to our current.
It would be like the split into shield capacitors and rechargers.

 

[SapioiT]

There already is a block used to store energy... maybe buying Batteries, for when the energy from your generators is not enough... but it would have to show up in the Weapons menu, for usage purposes...

 

[Spartan-228]

The idea I had for fuel was that you would have two types of fuel, an example being like hydrogen 3 and antimatter.
Hydrogen 3 would be the cheapest fuel and the easiest to produce and would give you say a 25% boost in power output. Antimatter would of course cost more and be harder to make, but it would give you a 50% boost to your power output.

Now you also need a block to store this fuel in and it needs to have a set amount of fuel it will hold, this can of course be increased by adding more of those blocks.

The downside to all of this is that if a player relies too heavily on fuel they could find themselves in a bad situation if they run out.

 

[srs008]

I had an idea for a server experiment I wanted to try but it would need a consumable that would kill players when they ran out of "Foodstuffs". I don't like the idea of having to eat to survive like Minecraft but I am not apposed to the idea of consumables (optional of course). I was thinking you'd just have the foodstuffs on your ship and it would be consumed over time, when you ran out you would start to loose health. The ability to produce food on a ship would be possible too. Larger ships could have a higher foodstuff consumption rate because of theoretical crew. Anyway it might at least make a good mod someday.

actually i don't mind the idea of needing food to survive, and water... minecraft did it wrong, it should work in stages...
stage 1 is full, as in you have the required water and food.
stage 2 would be say 3/4, you'd have a small movement penalty (in gravity) and small "reaction" delay to all actions.
stage 3 would be half, and you'd be noticibly slower, your max health would slightly decrease.
stage 4 would be 1/4, you'd barely walk, your max health would be further reduced. and you'd begin to experience small visual impairment (just "shadows" of color that occassionaly appear across your vision, obscuring things...)
stage 5 would be empty, at this stage, your health begins to tick down... slowly.
your reactions are seriously affected, your vision is becoming harder to see.
at stage 6, your practically immobile, your health is ticking more rapidly, and you can barely see a clear thing. if you do not get sustance, you will soon die.

of course, these would not be immediate, and would take a long time to progress, basically you'd have to be really neglectful to actually die from starvation, or dehydration (unless your close to a sun, that should eat the hydration)
i'm talking about four hours of real-time before you'd starve, and about three and a half from dehydration.

an expensive block would produce low quality food and drink from power, which would require say 30 seconds each to fully replenish...
the mid range would be 20 seconds...
and the best would be 10 seconds...
this would require time to do, a possibly dangerous action.

of course, food and drink should be available on a planet, and in shops for cheap.
basically, everyone's goal would be a (let's steal the name from star trek for this) replicator, since it can generate food, but being expensive for a low quality, and insane for a high quality... and ONLY purchasable (that looks mis-spelt) from a shop...
it makes it rare.

that would allow us to have a more realistic experience, without impending game-play that much, and give us something else to do. a easy method of making small money (food)... and a actual reason to attack stations.
this system also opens the door for more mundane things, like farms to grow food... harvest parties on planets... since food may become rare if there is lots of demand...
being required...
as for water, it'd only be able to be replicated, or harvested from existing sources... meaning there would be fights for water... and it'd become more and more rare, hence making places with replicators a high priority target... also making ships with replicators dangerous. since water is also consumed slightly faster then food, it means the stocks would deplete faster...

as for replicator function, they should use considerable power, constantly draining a smaller amount of power (in a infinite sized buffer), so as it idles, it charges up, reducing the immediate cost in power when in use, until the buffer empties...
that said, it should need a massive amount of power to actually replicate anything.

 

[jayman38]

...of course, these would not be immediate, and would take a long time to progress, basically you'd have to be really neglectful to actually die from starvation, or dehydration (unless your close to a sun, that should eat the hydration)
i'm talking about four hours of real-time before you'd starve, and about three and a half from dehydration.

...of course, food and drink should be available on a planet, and in shops for cheap.
basically, everyone's goal would be a (let's steal the name from star trek for this) replicator, since it can generate food, but being expensive for a low quality, and insane for a high quality... and ONLY purchasable (that looks mis-spelt) from a shop...
it makes it rare.

...as for water, it'd only be able to be replicated, or harvested from existing sources... meaning there would be fights for water... and it'd become more and more rare, hence making places with replicators a high priority target... also making ships with replicators dangerous. since water is also consumed slightly faster then food, it means the stocks would deplete faster...

I had some additional ideas on this.

1. It should probably be more like 8 hours of real time to starve. It takes much, much longer to starve than to die of thirst. Generally, it takes 4 times as long (so it would be closer to 15 hours, if you wanted better realism). You'd be surprised how many players will let themselves get close to starvation. You think you've still got plenty of time, you get lost in some effort, like working on your latest frigate, and before you know how much time has elapsed, your astronaut is suffering the effects of later-stage starvation. (You could realistically reduce the obvious effects in build mode, so that it's even harder to anticipate your oncoming starvation, forcing players to be a little more careful.)

2. To avoid any possibility of copyright or trademark infringement, don't even call it a replicator. Since you can't create just any object of any type, only food, something like "organic constructor" would be better. There's plenty of technobabble without latching onto something that can get the dev team in trouble.

3. In addition to using up water, it would be interesting if there was an output of something like yellow poison after the consumption of water. Then there could be a whole economy (and associated factory blocks with huge energy requirements) that go into water purification. It's somewhat realistic, and provides a way of generating more water from waste products. Swamp biomes on planets could automatically convert poison (and maybe other stuff) into purified water so that would be a new reason to not harvest a planet. (I'm thinking that a swamp biome would look like a forest biome with additional pools of poison and separate pools of water. And quicksand. Any good fictional swamp is not complete until it has some lightning-fast, suck-you-down-like-a-milkshake quicksand.)

 

[Ciggofwar]

Way to be a fucking downer.

Finite resources and greed cause conflict, and fantasy conflict is interesting and exciting; fun.

Perhaps Shem is a downer as well, since he never put into the game in the first place, why else are you going to leave your home planet?
Same reason I would leave earth now, not really the earth but the retard shit heads that are on it, having some sort of fantasy as everyone else's expense, remember you heard from this old bastard first!

 

[SapioiT]

Well, there should be an item which should allow you to use energy to craft some things into another... maybe called "Subatomic Matter Rearanger" (basicly a 3D Printer which works by imputing anything + a huge ammount of energy and outputs a specific item). Maybe having like 4-6 different types of "base particles" (like the cubatoms were meant to be) which should be combined to make different items would a fair game...

I know you already have stuff like that, but it requires a specific imput to craft a specific output, not tons of stuff made from any other tons of stuff with the price of literally tons of energy.

Maybe something like... 100 energy generators to decompose 1 block each second or to recompose 1 block each 10 seconds... that would be a fair trade, in my oppinion...

 

[ResonKinetic]

why else are you going to leave your home planet?

so you can stir up some trouble in different places B)

 

[srs008]

I had some additional ideas on this.

1. It should probably be more like 8 hours of real time to starve. It takes much, much longer to starve than to die of thirst. Generally, it takes 4 times as long (so it would be closer to 15 hours, if you wanted better realism). You'd be surprised how many players will let themselves get close to starvation. You think you've still got plenty of time, you get lost in some effort, like working on your latest frigate, and before you know how much time has elapsed, your astronaut is suffering the effects of later-stage starvation. (You could realistically reduce the obvious effects in build mode, so that it's even harder to anticipate your oncoming starvation, forcing players to be a little more careful.)

2. To avoid any possibility of copyright or trademark infringement, don't even call it a replicator. Since you can't create just any object of any type, only food, something like "organic constructor" would be better. There's plenty of technobabble without latching onto something that can get the dev team in trouble.

3. In addition to using up water, it would be interesting if there was an output of something like yellow poison after the consumption of water. Then there could be a whole economy (and associated factory blocks with huge energy requirements) that go into water purification. It's somewhat realistic, and provides a way of generating more water from waste products. Swamp biomes on planets could automatically convert poison (and maybe other stuff) into purified water so that would be a new reason to not harvest a planet. (I'm thinking that a swamp biome would look like a forest biome with additional pools of poison and separate pools of water. And quicksand. Any good fictional swamp is not complete until it has some lightning-fast, suck-you-down-like-a-milkshake quicksand.)

yeah "replicator" was just a name that came immediately to mind, should have mentioned i was just assigning a name for us to refer in that context, although as i said, the idea is food is fairly common, water would not be easily renewible, since it has to be created, or found... so the longshot, is that over time, water becomes increasingly scarce, since it needs to be used for hydration, and for growing crops, since "replicators" (from herein, we'll use "constructors" as the term. a nod towards your suggestion, whilst keeping the base idea)
basically, over time it becomes almost impossible to find water naturally, forcing people to buy, or make the stuff... since constructors are an easy solution to getting food and water, people will fight over them...

when they are destroyed, a random shop gets a equivalent stock to what was lost, making sure the universe is not empty... but allowing a player, a faction, or groups of either to control the whole economy... logically i would say this includes pirates... who could actually trade water back, at insane prices.
the upshot is, the requirement to either be friendly to the controllers, or to gain control yourself, a tradible king of the hill setup. everyone wants it, needs it...
if that makes sense, as for the "Poison"... i like the idea, but a yellow liquid???
i'm under the impression the game is not being aimed towards adult audiences... so somethings as simple as organic waste... might be out of the question... we need a viable excuse... suit byproduct every couple of hours? appears in inventory? just happens to process to clean water in a swamp? tint it blue, or green... and no one can claim it's waste...

i like the build mode reducing the obvious effects, if done correctly and gradually, the effects could actually be quite unnoticeable until you remember to look...
as for the time figures, i just made random times up, i'm going to assume you know the figures better, and yield to your estimates. besides, i agree, 4 hours is short...

 

[starhaiden]

Well in the universe there should be a lot of water if you want to be realistic.

 

[srs008]

yeah, a lot of planets would have water, the idea is it's a diminishing required resource. hence forcing players to fight/co-operate for water...
adding a survival element to the game, without actually hindering it much.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Well in the universe there should be a lot of water if you want to be realistic.

Oxygen isn't that common in the universe.