Recognized Consumables for purposes other than a hunger mechanic.

[RoyalWolfe]

it has been a popular suggestion to add consumables to starmade for a long while. It has also always been popular to counter it, as being a reason to artificially add in an unwanted and wasteful development time for a hunger based mechanic.

there are however a counter for that argument as well, as the consumables do not actually need the Hunger mechanics to add a viable and gainful development time to an unpopular concept mechanic. They can add an actual reason to have them without the need to force you into using them. other games in the genre are heading towards the extreme survival and doing it n ways that do. starmade however can do this without doing so.

1. Why do we want or need them?

Well to answer this question we need to consider what exactly we do need.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to heal characters that was portable? we do sort of have one, in the form of the medical cabinet and supplies blocks. they can be placed on ships, and that makes them sort of portable. But, what if I could get a Medical Kit (a new meta item, that heals the player, but when used will be consumed.), and take it from an inventory storage version of this block IE re purpose the supplies block for this. if this was done, I now have this meta item which I can now carry around, and use when, and where, I need it. and I can do this without having to take my ship into danger to heal myself.

this means we can add in the reason to have a consumable item in the game, without forcing players to use them. hunger for food could then be an optional thing added later on, this way at the least we can have this item in the game for now and the rest of the concept can develop as needed.

 

[jayman38]

I think this will be an absolutely essential item for the upcoming fauna bit of the game. Otherwise, we'll have a bunch of half-dead crew and/or other NPCs shambling around.

I think it might interfere a bit with what the dev team is wanting as far as quarters-mechanics and healing crew, but I think this would actually be a big improvement.

(This improvement will lead to medics wandering out away from the medical quarters to heal other astronauts/npcs, instead of forcing injured astronauts/npcs to gather in the medical quarters; gathering in a central place inevitably leads to bunched-up traffic jams.)

Other consumable item ideas:
armor patches, npc accuracy stims (meta item that could be anything from an injection to disposable thermal imagers), morale stims (meta item that represents anything from injections to cookies to disposable hand-held games), and disposable battery packs, not to mention resupplies. (Resupplies: Imagine one medic runs out of medkits; along comes another medic with 50 medkits, splitting up the amount with the first medic, so they can both work.)

 

[Blodge]

I'm one of the people who likes the infinitely regenerating resource aspects of Starmade. So long as the consumable items are there to give you or your ship a temporary/one-off boost, and all the essentials remain regenerating like they do now, then I'm very much in favour of these suggestions

 

[kilemeino]

there are more to consumables then just health you could also have a consumable weapon like grenades or mines
you could also have small consumable ship modulus such as a depoyable shield that orbits your ship for 5 minutes or until its destroyed (though that might just be a drone )
personal one/two use armor

 

[kiraen]

1. Schema has specifically stated that there will be NO hunger system.
2. NPCs might need food for morale requirements.
   
3. Frequent Suggestions Megathread, #24

 

[Zaphord]

Consumables of any kind should have a cool down to prevent people using them constantly, like popping med kits everytime they get shot, effectively making them unkillable as long as they have med kits on them. Same goes for any special effect meta items, like stims and such.

 

[nightrune]

Also you should not be able use consumables from a personal cargo area.
[DOUBLEPOST=1456237400,1456237282][/DOUBLEPOST]I also like the idea of consumable computers for ships with different effects. Like maybe double damage for so many shots. Let it be a player only item as well. AI can't use them.