Do we need yet another crafting overhaul?

[sayerulz]

The crafting system has gone through many overhauls. At first we had a bizarre and extremely complicated system, that was not very usable. Then we got cubeatoms, which made no sense and were still not very practical. The current crafting system is certainly better than the other two, but still leaves much to be desired. It is very dull, has no real progression, and is not all that well balanced (for instance, some colors of hull need much more rare and valuable resources than others while giving the same amount of protection). I personally would like a system using at least primarily real materials, and with my suggestion for factions becoming more adept at producing certain ship elements ( http://starmadedock.net/threads/faction-specialization-to-encourage-trade.8298/).

So what do other people want changed, if anything?

 

[kiraen]

We need more resources. A significant rebalance and rebuild of the recipes is a given.

Having said that, it can wait. I imagine flora / fauna will be adding resources. There are many more blocks in the pipe. It makes little sense to 'fix' it now, only to have to 'fix' it again and again at each stage of development.

 

[Deleted member 433088]

Disclaimer: I wasn't around for the first two mentioned crafting systems, and only know cubatoms from leftover bits in the config files.

I have to agree the progression is close to null, since getting enough materials to make up to the advanced factory is trivial if you know which asteroids have what and where they are located. However, I must ask to analyze whether and why we need or want more or more strongly defined progression in the crafting system. Right now, ship building seems to be limited by one's ability to find an asteroid containing what one needs, mining it, and then building something out of it. Adding an additional obstacle to ship building in the form of crafting progression has the potential to create serious blockages in overmined/unfriendly servers, I think.
That been said, giving a bit more depth to the crafting systems, if done well, could turn out to be interesting. But what do you suggest for this? I'm having a hard time thinking of something that would add variety for the system, that at the same time doesn't fall into the kind of things we seemingly can't have due to data/IDs/engine constraints.

primarily real materials

If you mean replacing what we have for iron, diamond, uranium, etc... I don't really care. I don't think there's anything broken enough about having fantasy resources to warrant changing the entire game's crafting materials.

some colors of hull need much more rare and valuable resources than others while giving the same amount of protection

In my scarce experience the only rare stuff is Larimar asteroids... that been said, if anything is to be done about imbalanced crafting recipes, it goes without saying it should be adjusting the costs, not making red armor stronger than green armor xD

 

[sayerulz]

Well, balancing the resources is what I mean. Really, one ought to just be able to make grey armor, then paint it whatever color. As for using real resources, I agree it is not needed, it is just what I would prefer.

 

[Lecic]

The current system is fine. Some recipes could use some tweaks (hull shouldn't require a specific capsule, for example), but it's a good system.

What we really need is unequal resource distribution.

 

[alterintel]

I like the way it is now. It could be balanced a bit better. for example it's allot easier to make blast doors than advanced armor, and they both have the same armor value. I really like the idea of item costs being derived or based off of the number of capsules needed to make the item. for example to make a computer it typically takes 500 or so capsules. this in turn makes shops buy them for alot of money.

Changes that I would make:
1) do we really need 3 different types of factories? would it break the game if everything could be made in one factory?
2) I would love to be able to break down blocks into their base capsules crystals, and meshes. This would encourage more fighting just for the salvage.
3) blue prints should list how many of each base material is needed to build it. Just like this tool does for you: http://starmadedock.net/content/mscc-megacrafter127s-ship-resource-calculator.2481/ (this would totally reduce the time it takes to build a ship since you don't have to constantly go on mining runs.)

 

[Rokiyo]

However, I must ask to analyze whether and why we need or want more or more strongly defined progression in the crafting system.

The answer to this question is down to how much players are expected to specialize into activities like crafting and mining.

For example, EVE has an enormously complex item crafting system that only a tiny fraction of the player base truly understands... But it works really well in that situation because the players who specialize in that system are able to sell their goods to those who don't. Likewise these players are also able to largely avoid combat (which is also vastly more complex in EVE than most realise) and focus on their specialty.

The key point being that it is okay to have extremely complex systems if they are both optional and valuable to individual players at the same time.

This is a tricky problem in StarMade because we can't assume a ship builder will be on a multiplayer server where they can buy stuff from a crafter... So you need NPC shops.... But you can't make the NPC shops so good that crafters can't compete with them (or there will be no point).

Long story short: The real question is how much room for multiplayer specialisation do we allow for, without significantly impacting the single player enjoyability of this game?

 

[Megacrafter127]

The answer to this question is down to how much players are expected to specialize into activities like crafting and mining.

For example, EVE has an enormously complex item crafting system that only a tiny fraction of the player base truly understands... But it works really well in that situation because the players who specialize in that system are able to sell their goods to those who don't. Likewise these players are also able to largely avoid combat (which is also vastly more complex in EVE than most realise) and focus on their specialty.

They key point being that it is okay to have extremely complex systems if they are both optional and valuable to individual players at the same time.

This is a tricky problem in StarMade because we can't assume a ship builder will be on a multiplayer server where they can buy stuff from a crafter... So you need NPC shops.... But you can't make the NPC shops so good that crafters can't compete with them (or there will be no point).

Long story short: The real question is how much room for multiplayer specialisation do we allow for, without significantly impacting the single player enjoyability of this game?

The easiest way in your example would be to have the price for an item be slightly higher than the sum of the price of its components[excluding hull shapes or similar crafting recipies]. And by slightly I mean 1 credit.

 

[Deleted member 433088]

The answer to this question is down to how much players are expected to specialize into activities like crafting and mining.

For example, EVE has an enormously complex item crafting system that only a tiny fraction of the player base truly understands... But it works really well in that situation because the players who specialize in that system are able to sell their goods to those who don't. Likewise these players are also able to largely avoid combat (which is also vastly more complex in EVE than most realise) and focus on their specialty.

They key point being that it is okay to have extremely complex systems if they are both optional and valuable to individual players at the same time.

This is a tricky problem in StarMade because we can't assume a ship builder will be on a multiplayer server where they can buy stuff from a crafter... So you need NPC shops.... But you can't make the NPC shops so good that crafters can't compete with them (or there will be no point).

Long story short: The real question is how much room for multiplayer specialisation do we allow for, without significantly impacting the single player enjoyability of this game?

Oh, I played EVE back in the day, and since I didn't really like the combat I was an industrialist/trader; I'm familiar with the amazing depth of that game's economy. The problem here is that EVE is a massive game with dozens of hundreds of players on at the same time, globally... you can have a million different things and it would still be believable that someone out there would have a use for it. In here, not only the scale is far more limited (can you have over 100 players per server, even?), but from what I hear there is a hard cap to the amount of different IDs the engine can handle. Unless I interpreted what I heard the wrong way, this puts a very big dent in the possible diversity.

 

[Megacrafter127]

but from what I hear there is a hard cap to the amount of different IDs the engine can handle. Unless I interpreted what I heard the wrong way, this puts a very big dent in the possible diversity.

There are only 2047 itemIDs in total as of now. However, all so called metaitems[handheld weapons, logbooks, helmet, flashlight, recipe-item] all only take up 1 single ID.

 

[DivineEvil]

The present system is fine as it is, but the whole network of dependencies built around it is completely broken. Resource variety is built as if they're aestetically equal to one-another, but unequal in tecnical sense. They have the same trade value, but are not same in rarity. Rarity of these resources does not correspond to their crafting value. Crafting system itself is an aberration of completely different items requiring the same sets of resources and same items requiring different sets of resources. Many basic things require more rare resources, while some advanced items require junk to produce. Some resources are valuable solely as the source of an easy profit alone, while other resources and their byproducts are so valuable for ship construction, that the idea of trading them is inherently ridiculous. Many crafting recipes just doesn't make any sense.

At the same time, all of these resources are virtually unlimited, as even few sectors with Larimar asteroids can respawn indefinitely and give you all the associated resources you need. Aside from potentially having or lacking very few specific asteroids in it's asteoid sectors, all the systems are the same in value. There's no incentives to control anything but a single system with two or three asteroid belts present, there's almost no incentives in controling one system over another, and there's no incentives for colonizing a planet over mining it. Asteroid distribution is awfully unrealistic and undermines the the very idea of system's individuality in resouce abundance, while planets are spawned completely randomly with no appeal for astrophysics, and their biomic type is only an aesthetic parameter, ironically the one which almost nobody cares about. Finally, both asteroids and planets consist of an enormous amounts of resources and items, that are essentialy useless, or are present in abundancy in complete contradiction to their crafting value.

In light of forthcoming expansions on flora and fauna, all of these problems should be adressed to give us a working mining, crafting and trading structure, which is carefully thought-out and would allow to expand the value of resources further than the time it takes to mine them, and provide a well balanced crafting system, that would not be substituted by vote rewards, as it is on the majority of servers.

 

[Valiant70]

What the crafting systems needs is sense. I don't mean realism. I mean believable complexity with enough structure to make things easier to remember. Some materials should be hard. Others should hold a lot of energy. That sort of thing. Certain categories of products should use certain categories or combinations of ingredients. I think cubeatoms were an attempt at something like this, but they just weren't intuitive enough.

I think it would be interesting to use certain materials as catalysts when processing other materials to make the processes more efficient. e.g. One ore usually refines into one metal capsule. However, combining a small amount of a material from another part of the galaxy doubles the efficiency, yielding two metal capsules per ore.

 

[Lecic]

1) do we really need 3 different types of factories? would it break the game if everything could be made in one factory?

I don't currently see the need for 3 different factory types.

2) I would love to be able to break down blocks into their base capsules crystals, and meshes. This would encourage more fighting just for the salvage.

There's unused code for a recycler block in the game. I'd like a recycler that gives back something like 75% of the base materials.

For example, EVE has an enormously complex item crafting system that only a tiny fraction of the player base truly understands... But it works really well in that situation because the players who specialize in that system are able to sell their goods to those who don't. Likewise these players are also able to largely avoid combat (which is also vastly more complex in EVE than most realise) and focus on their specialty.

Starmade doesn't have (and probably never will have on a per-server basis) enough players to support a massively complex crafting system. Additionally, the devs want singleplayer survival to be doable, so making the game impossible to play if you haven't mastered a hyper complex crafting system probably isn't a good idea.

 

[Rokiyo]

Starmade doesn't have (and probably never will have on a per-server basis) enough players to support a massively complex crafting system. Additionally, the devs want singleplayer survival to be doable, so making the game impossible to play if you haven't mastered a hyper complex crafting system probably isn't a good idea.

I was beating around the bush a little, but yes that was the overall point I was trying to make in that post (I wrote that on my mobile, so it was difficult to review for coherency).

 

[sayerulz]

What the crafting systems needs is sense. I don't mean realism. I mean believable complexity with enough structure to make things easier to remember. Some materials should be hard. Others should hold a lot of energy. That sort of thing. Certain categories of products should use certain categories or combinations of ingredients. I think cubeatoms were an attempt at something like this, but they just weren't intuitive enough.

I think it would be interesting to use certain materials as catalysts when processing other materials to make the processes more efficient. e.g. One ore usually refines into one metal capsule. However, combining a small amount of a material from another part of the galaxy doubles the
efficiency, yielding two metal capsules per ore.

Now, I'm not sure about the increased yield with two ores together, but the material properties, THAT is what I really want. I want to be able to make sense of why you need certain materials for different things. WHY do we need a certain metal for shields? Is it conductive? Is it strong? Is it light? Is it magnetic? What makes it useful? That would make the system much more intuitive. One can just think "oh, well, parstun is strong and light, and so it is used as a framework for just about everything, so I will need it for this" or "the green crystal (forgot what it was called) stores energy really well, so I will need it for power components", and "macet is very heat resistant, so I will need it for weapons barrels and thrusters". If we have a logical crafting system, people can figure out what they will need without memorizing everything.

 

[DivineEvil]

I don't currently see the need for 3 different factory types.

The use there is to separate different tiers of items, so that it is easier to find the items to craft you need. The best example is hull/armor, which is found easily by color, but otherwise will be frustrating to look-up since there would be all the blue stuff there is in a single factory.

 

[kiraen]

I think it would be interesting to use certain materials as catalysts when processing other materials to make the processes more efficient. e.g. One ore usually refines into one metal capsule. However, combining a small amount of a material from another part of the galaxy doubles the efficiency, yielding two metal capsules per ore.

Just one word: alloys.

 

[Valiant70]

Now, I'm not sure about the increased yield with two ores together

This is a way of distributing materials around the galaxy while still allowing people to craft everything from the materials in one system or even on one planet. You could just have trace amounts of all materials everywhere, but a catalyst/additive system like this would be spicier.

the material properties, THAT is what I really want. I want to be able to make sense of why you need certain materials for different things. WHY do we need a certain metal for shields? Is it conductive? Is it strong? Is it light? Is it magnetic? What makes it useful? That would make the system much more intuitive. One can just think "oh, well, parstun is strong and light, and so it is used as a framework for just about everything, so I will need it for this" or "the green crystal (forgot what it was called) stores energy really well, so I will need it for power components", and "macet is very heat resistant, so I will need it for weapons barrels and thrusters". If we have a logical crafting system, people can figure out what they will need without memorizing everything.

This is exactly my thought. This would also lead to some materials needing to be more common (or rare) than others. I think we also need some more machines that do different things. Three loosely defined "tiers" are pretty dry and boring. A computer and an armor plate are created from the same machine. This contains incalculable amounts of "WAT?" Seriously, how the heck does that make any sense or have any style?

 

[Andem]

It definitely needs some balancing. terrain blocks desperately need more use functionally. maybe a molecular refinery of some sort, just something.

 

[jstenholt]

I think most people agree on the issue of coloring, but then again, some people be having some weird opinions up in this voxel-based sandbox game. But yeah, some minor tweaks would be nice.

My main complaint is that there are way too many random made-up resources to memorize. Would it be so bad to use existing elements like iron, copper, gold, aluminium?