Biotechnology

[Valiant70]

Farming was more or less rejected from the game. Fine then. Let's do one better and add equipment and powerups that use biological technology based on plants, fungi, and creatures that you can find, grow, and possibly manipulate into new forms.

The gimmick is that biotech is hard to control perfectly, so its characteristics are random by nature. Ever tried selectively breeding horses on Minecraft? In the game's mechanics, the two parent horses' stats are averaged with a random third set to create the baby's stats. If you have some starting stock with reasonably good characteristics, you can get some improvement over time up until positive random variations just become too rare for your patience. Something similar is a good starting point for a biotech system.

To make the system more varied and interesting (and possibly less tedious), I would like to see the addition of rare substances that increase or decrease the randomness of certain characteristics. Perhaps even rarer items could have a more predictable chance to add certain characteristics to organisms.

There are a lot of ways biotech could be incorporated into game mechanics. Self-repairing armor comes to mind. Most likely though, it would be best suited to astronaut gameplay for buffs, equipment, and pets/bioweapons. (Weaponized cyborg crabs, anyone?) I'd like to hear your ideas for biotech applications in Starmade.

At any rate, biotech's potentially wide range of variations could allow players to create or find some very powerful (but rare) organisms. Imagine trying to break into an enemy base to steal samples of a valuable organism, or even torching your own factory base to keep your biotech out of enemy hands. It's one more thing for players to compete for and fight over.

 

[Ptotheextreme]

Hmmm... a private army of cyborg velociraptors.

This is a fun idea.

With biological tech from gathering organisms I would make a race of radioactive super crewmen, who don't need sleep and only obey my commands.

 

[JNC]

Terra forming perhaps? Maybe a bio-missile or pod launched to a planet that has plant/animal info in it that has been collected/fabricated, causing the planet to eventually change?

The necessity for farming was rejected for Starmade but I'd still like to see some of its mechanics implemented for RP reasons, and stuff like this.... creating hybrid strains of things and such would be a cool purpose for a science station/ship. We still havent seen much of the spider but I thought creature randomization was mentioned? So creating a system to breed critter traits doesnt seem too far fetched.

 

[Agame3]

In current game state, I guess even planet mining should be avoided due to lag reasons.
I am not supporting a suggestion that will make us need to land on planets.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Planets are not that bad to mine in current state, it is the miners people use that are the problem. If you try to hit something with a 5000 beam waffle, and all 5000 beam have something to hit... the game will eat $h|+ and die trying to figure out all those block removals, but you can gobble one up with a 300-400 beam waffle and not really lag any worse than you do with a good sized asteroid.

 

[Valiant70]

In current game state, I guess even planet mining should be avoided due to lag reasons.
I am not supporting a suggestion that will make us need to land on planets.

Nonsense. Planets will be completely reprogrammed in the universe update, and mining will be completely different too. You don't need to worry about this.

 

[MacThule]

Planets are not that bad to mine in current state, it is the miners people use that are the problem. If you try to hit something with a 5000 beam waffle, and all 5000 beam have something to hit... the game will eat $h|+ and die trying to figure out all those block removals, but you can gobble one up with a 300-400 beam waffle and not really lag any worse than you do with a good sized asteroid.

This is true; I tested my new 600 beam waffle miner on a few planets this week and it works pretty smoothly.

As a general notion I think that orbital mining is a little absurd and, if removed or substantially re-imagined, wouldn't be much missed.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Yes, be cool if you had to build mining facilities on planets. Basically, prevent salvage beams from working in atmosphere, but allow ppl to build mines that would slowly leach resources from a planet over time. Maybe make it so it has a bubble kind of like shields and all the ore containing blocks in the bubble generate X*[mining facility] amount of ore per cycle so that planets can basically be used to perpetually produce resources.

Also be cool if there was a way to produce money with planets as well.

 

[Cluwne]

Would it be a good idea to add some sort of "farm" module+computer that grows whatever you put in it, and another function to factory that turns rocks into soil/fertilizer for the farm and plants into "biomass" resource.
Biomass may require special "biomass storage" combo or simply turn regular storage into one, allowing to store only the biomass.
Why the hell would you need that nasty green goop? For organic or semi-organic blocks, astronaut weapons, stimulants and other stuff of course!
Imagine, instead of having to manufacture blocks for the shipyard you only supply biomass and, maybe, some refined resources for the blocks.
While those organic blocks may not regrow on their own, they could at least regenerate and, perhaps, harden in response to physical trauma last received damage, providing heightened resistance to that specific damage type. Regenerating adaptive armor, to put it simply.

Planets will be completely reprogrammed in the universe update, and mining will be completely different too.

I wouldn't entrust Schine with a pet rock, much less reworking the planets to not melt PCs of anyone looking at them.
Don't count on them reworking something right, ever. Just look at reactors, then look at them again, then at weapons, and again at weapons, also at planets, and for the third time at weapons.
Abandon all hope, embrace broken mechanics and out-the-ass balance. Embrace the Schine Way.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Would it be a good idea to add some sort of "farm" module+computer that grows whatever you put in it, and another function to factory that turns rocks into soil/fertilizer for the farm and plants into "biomass" resource.
Biomass may require special "biomass storage" combo or simply turn regular storage into one, allowing to store only the biomass.
Why the hell would you need that nasty green goop? For organic or semi-organic blocks, astronaut weapons, stimulants and other stuff of course!
Imagine, instead of having to manufacture blocks for the shipyard you only supply biomass and, maybe, some refined resources for the blocks.
While those organic blocks may not regrow on their own, they could at least regenerate and, perhaps, harden in response to physical trauma last received damage, providing heightened resistance to that specific damage type. Regenerating adaptive armor, to put it simply.

I wouldn't entrust Schine with a pet rock, much less reworking the planets to not melt PCs of anyone looking at them.
Don't count on them reworking something right, ever. Just look at reactors, then look at them again, then at weapons, and again at weapons, also at planets, and for the third time at weapons.
Abandon all hope, embrace broken mechanics and out-the-ass balance. Embrace the Schine Way.

Although this is a neat idea, Schine has already mentioned that they plan to never add agriculture as a game mechanic.

Also, Schema for all his faults is actually pretty good at performance optimization. The concern here is not about whether he can make planets not lag to shit, but if when such planets, when done, will be glitchy as sin in all other respects.