Either Simplify or Expand Factories

[Edymnion]

Okay, so we've got the three factory types, and some rudimentary production line capabilities.

Personally, I love Factorio, I can sit and play "build an automated system so that it plays itself" all freaking day long. The idea that I could play Starmade as a "Set up this ship to go mine, bring it's raw ore over here to have it processed, then load that into this place over here for storage, then have this place over here running a factory to make X that pulls cargo runs from storage" blah blah blah makes me happy. I could play "build an interstellar supply and demand infrastructure" and be happy.

Having multiple types of factories that used different numbers of inputs so that getting a final product produced automatically required a planned setup would be great.

Failing that, I'd rather see factories simplified so that its a glorified crafting station from Minecraft where basically the one factory can do everything.

Right now the basic/standard/advanced seems like just an arbitrary split along arbitrary rules. All the same thing, just with different recipes in them.

Frankly, its really just middle road enough to make me frustrated. Its just complicated enough to make me want to do much more with it, but still simple enough that I can't really do more with it unless I just pretend that it has limitations.

So yeah, for the Universe update, I'd personally like to see factories get a LOT more complicated, or a lot simpler. This middle ground approach is just kind of clunky, IMO.

 

[NTIMESc]

My vote is for making them more simplified; a single factory that produces whatever you want, and that crafts missing ingredients automatically from available materials.

 

[MacThule]

I would vote for greater complexity, to increase the value of manufactured goods.

Every recipe in the advanced factory could be as complex as Advanced Armor, for one, and advanced factories could be more complex and draw more power. I think this would make the existing tiers more meaningful and provide some texture to the economy as well as legit value-adding work players could live off of selling that wasn't just mining and farming. As long as manufacturing is this simple, there is a pretty low ceiling on the economic value of manufacturing and the dominant play mode will still be one of total self-sufficiency rather than complex interdependence.

Honestly though, simplifying it or just streamlining & improving the current system would be fine as well if done right. Enhancement would just be... noice.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I would vote for greater complexity, to increase the value of manufactured goods.

Every recipe in the advanced factory could be as complex as Advanced Armor, for one, and advanced factories could be more complex and draw more power. I think this would make the existing tiers more meaningful and provide some texture to the economy as well as legit value-adding work players could live off of selling that wasn't just mining and farming. As long as manufacturing is this simple, there is a pretty low ceiling on the economic value of manufacturing and the dominant play mode will still be one of total self-sufficiency rather than complex interdependence.

Honestly though, simplifying it or just streamlining & improving the current system would be fine as well if done right. Enhancement would just be... noice.

AFAICT the main issue with crafting and the economy is there's zero chance of innovation and niche markets. In the old system, you leveled-up you recipies, letting you naturally specialise into production of certain things. While EVERY crofter eventually had max-level thrusters, shields, and cannons, niche crafters would show up around hull colors able to provide better value or just plain quantity needed. This was compounded by recopies being an individual thing where investment/research would eventually give you that raw materal edge, even if it was on the surface illogical that a flower and bit of moon dust could turn into a plethora of power-hull it provided necessary variation and depth to the system.

IRL examples:
-A table: can be made out of iron ingots and sand (metal frame glass top), or logs and more log (wooden), or flowers and dirt(resin cast), or...
-aircraft: bugs and logs (silk skin, woodframe), metal and metal (monocoque ), bugs and fish(bio-plastics), etc...
-fuel: diesel from crude, from corn, from peanuts, from fish, from whale, from....

Alternative supply chain is one of the core tenants of RL industry and ability to compete, which is a prerequisite of a functioning economy. If EVERYONE has to do things the SAME WAY all the time capitalism cannot function with the fetters. It's a prime reason every communist state and authoritarian government fails economically, and that is reflected strongly in the structure of the new crafting system.

 

[-PR-Sandbag]

I'd vote for more complexity, in the mean time I'd like all recipes available to a factory from the level below. It's a PITA trying to remember which factory makes which block. I'd rather just get to advanced factory stage and look in that factory alone.

 

[splatthecat]

I'd vote for more complexity, in the mean time I'd like all recipes available to a factory from the level below. It's a PITA trying to remember which factory makes which block. I'd rather just get to advanced factory stage and look in that factory alone.

This makes sense. Coupled to a previous suggestion of greater power consumption and maybe greater bake time for more advanced items.

We don't make tables, beds and chairs; we make hull blocks and ingots, etc and fashion them into these items. Unless these are going to be introduced to the game this will continue. If we want a glass table we make a glass block and so on. Some terrain items could find value with additional processing perhaps? Ice can be turned into ice crystals (or water), minerals such as Dolom and the like have carved versions. Wood could be further processed maybe for example?

A line does need to be drawn between the game and real life. Having factories be more "intelligent" could be beneficial. The option to make blue standard armor for example could be improved by making all of the parts needed providing all of the materials needed are available. The "tier down" approach where all of a lower tier factory recipes are available would help facilitate this.

A way of creating an item (especially some of the basic items) in different ways could be good as would "re-processing" or recycling. A trite example could be glass being made from crystal composite or copious amounts of sand and lava perhaps? Looted/salvaged items could be stripped down to their original recipe items (a reverse factory) with an obvious loss in returns. This would give another perfectly legitimate career path for players to take.

For me, factories need tweaking not changing. Too complicated and players will simply buy goods rather than make them. Too simple and the notion of manufacturing becomes meaningless too.

The game needs to appeal to the Minecraft player and their crafting tables and the Factorio player and their fully fledged automated production lines. I think it sits fairly well between the two at the moment and with some tweaks here and there should be able to satisfy the majority of players.

 

[MacThule]

Too complicated and players will simply buy goods rather than make them.

This is sort of the main reason why I think it should be more complicated. Simple crafting is a major factor in our "perpeturtle" problem. No reason to make connections or reach out at all when the most simple, economical and safest path is to personally administer every aspect of your infrastructure. Which is fine, but I think such an approach should mean a sort of fuzzy ceiling on level of influence you can assert and firepower you can field.

IRL we have seen that specialization tends to outperform generalization, at least in the human context. And we need more reasons to leave home and form alliances and trade relations. Making the outlay for any one person to effectively perform every step personally opens up niche play, interdependence, power and economic relationships within the game.

This does work even for small servers and SP as well. The NPC factions seem to provide a great backbone to the in-game economy so that you can always buy things you don't personally make, so even SP specialists can expand so long as they have the ability to sell value-added goods for reasonable rates that make sense because either the NPCs buy them at low cost, or in MP players not interested in the complexity of crafting buy them based on demand when NPCs inevitably run out.

I think the simple option should be "buy it" and just make more money by mining and selling ore or farming rats or shipping trades or raiding/ratting trades, or selling ready--made blueprints, or whatever.

I like your thoughts, by the way!

 

[Edymnion]

AFAICT the main issue with crafting and the economy is there's zero chance of innovation and niche markets. In the old system, you leveled-up you recipies, letting you naturally specialise into production of certain things. While EVERY crofter eventually had max-level thrusters, shields, and cannons, niche crafters would show up around hull colors able to provide better value or just plain quantity needed. This was compounded by recopies being an individual thing where investment/research would eventually give you that raw materal edge, even if it was on the surface illogical that a flower and bit of moon dust could turn into a plethora of power-hull it provided necessary variation and depth to the system.

I think we could go a long way towards solving that using purely decorative means.

As in, take hulls for example. Everyone starts out being able to craft Grey and Dark Grey hull blocks. However, we lock away the color hull blocks and require you to jump through some serious hoops to unlock them. That way, functionally no one is at a disadvantage. A plain grey ship is mechanically no different from a colored ship, the color ship is just bragging rights. Can do the same with most of the decorative pieces. We can start with White lights, colors have to be unlocked. A couple of standard decorative computer blocks, the rest have to be unlocked.

It used to be that way back in the day for blue hulls. Rammit asteroids were bugged so they almost never generated, so besides shields being hard to come by, the blue rock for blue paint to make blue hulls was rare. If you saw somebody roll up in a blue titan, you knew you were fooked because LOOK AT ALL THAT BLUE HE'S GOT!

We could even take a note from Factorio and make unlocking recipes require you to manufacture and then consume specific blocks.

For those that have never played Factorio, the way they "encourage" you to build up your automation is that researching new stuff requires "science packs". You put a science pack in a research facility, it consumes the pack and gives you X amount of research time. A new discovery takes Y amount of realtime research to unlock. Simple stuff early on uses simple science packs made out of only a couple of items. Then as you go on, you start needing additional science packs that are exponentially more difficult to produce. So by the end you have this sprawling logistical setup of bringing in raw materials, making processed materials, then making finished items, and then feeding those finished items into science packs, and then feeding the science packs into the research facilities. Its all way too time consuming to make anything but the very early packs by hand, so most of your efforts go into perfecting efficient ways to generate those science packs.

If we increased the complexity of crafting, then we could end up with entire research stations/labs where its basically a dedicated manufacturing center specifically for making the "science packs". And if whatever final factory ends up making science packs, if we prevent them using factory enhancers and give the packs a long bake time, we've created a real-time bottleneck for research. Which would mean the packs themselves could become trade goods as well as the decorative blocks. Some reactor chambers to help make research stations that would increase science pack production rates, maybe increase the amount of time each pack works, decrease how much time a given unlock requires, etc, and we've got a block build basis for scarcity and trade, while encouraging more complicated and devoted factory setups.

 

[MacThule]

Teching is something that has been repeatedly shouted down by the community but I have always thought could play a positive role.

I think the devs have a longing eye towards a long-lasting tech/research process as well... considering the entire chamber dynamic originally came out with the reactor capacity element literally named "tech points."

It may be time soon to properly re-open that discussion in another thread. Or send the devs a Q&A question about it.

 

[EricBlank]

I would like to see an advanced crafting system, yes, including recipes that replace a portion of the normally necessary components with something else, potentially cheaper or just more economical for sheer volume of whats available (rocks)
And i do feel the current tiered factory setup is pretty artificial and not worthwhile.

but i also want an effective yet simple option to remain available, like the basic factory with some enhancers that can be run without recipes, to produce just one block type at a time, but can produce everything, at the baseline efficiency/average cost per block.

So i can be a lazy bastard and manufacture junk the slow, inefficient way, or buy stuff from shops, or set up a more complicated factorio style factory that produces exactly what i need from more efficient recipes that have to be found, stolen, invented etc. The more robust the advanced manufacturing route is, the better, because i will want to use that and perform as many different processes as i can with it.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I think we could go a long way towards solving that using purely decorative means.

As in, take hulls for example. Everyone starts out being able to craft Grey and Dark Grey hull blocks. However, we lock away the color hull blocks and require you to jump through some serious hoops to unlock them. That way, functionally no one is at a disadvantage. A plain grey ship is mechanically no different from a colored ship, the color ship is just bragging rights. Can do the same with most of the decorative pieces. We can start with White lights, colors have to be unlocked. A couple of standard decorative computer blocks, the rest have to be unlocked.

It used to be that way back in the day for blue hulls. Rammit asteroids were bugged so they almost never generated, so besides shields being hard to come by, the blue rock for blue paint to make blue hulls was rare. If you saw somebody roll up in a blue titan, you knew you were fooked because LOOK AT ALL THAT BLUE HE'S GOT!

We could even take a note from Factorio and make unlocking recipes require you to manufacture and then consume specific blocks.

For those that have never played Factorio, the way they "encourage" you to build up your automation is that researching new stuff requires "science packs". You put a science pack in a research facility, it consumes the pack and gives you X amount of research time. A new discovery takes Y amount of realtime research to unlock. Simple stuff early on uses simple science packs made out of only a couple of items. Then as you go on, you start needing additional science packs that are exponentially more difficult to produce. So by the end you have this sprawling logistical setup of bringing in raw materials, making processed materials, then making finished items, and then feeding those finished items into science packs, and then feeding the science packs into the research facilities. Its all way too time consuming to make anything but the very early packs by hand, so most of your efforts go into perfecting efficient ways to generate those science packs.

If we increased the complexity of crafting, then we could end up with entire research stations/labs where its basically a dedicated manufacturing center specifically for making the "science packs". And if whatever final factory ends up making science packs, if we prevent them using factory enhancers and give the packs a long bake time, we've created a real-time bottleneck for research. Which would mean the packs themselves could become trade goods as well as the decorative blocks. Some reactor chambers to help make research stations that would increase science pack production rates, maybe increase the amount of time each pack works, decrease how much time a given unlock requires, etc, and we've got a block build basis for scarcity and trade, while encouraging more complicated and devoted factory setups.

You missed the essence of what I talked about entirely it seems...Sadly factorio has the same production-fail that starmade does, and barely makes up for it by adding "kill the bugs" minigame. When there're only one way to build a part, crafting is a waste of time that can be spent on something more dynamic. I mean, I guess some people might find putting in the same rivet in the same place on the same sheet of metal for 9 hours a day "fun" and pay to be allowed to do it, but most people call that a "job" and expect to be paid for it.

 

[Edymnion]

Teching is something that has been repeatedly shouted down by the community

A lot of things got shouted down in the past that deserve some actual discussion.

 

[splatthecat]

This is sort of the main reason why I think it should be more complicated. Simple crafting is a major factor in our "perpeturtle" problem.

This is a valid point.

As EricBlank alluded to...

...sheer volume of whats available...

...maybe this could be partially covered by changing the availability of certain resources? More advanced recipes require rarer resources. Could this help towards the production/purchase balance? Two or three of the ores/crystals could have a lower chance of being found. This would make them expensive to buy and something worth looking out for? Capturing a delivery of these would be a greater prize to attack another ship than just for "shit and giggles". We now have a cargo scanner, let's use it. Fast, heavily armed or even cloaked cargo ships would have to be used. The recycling/reprocessing idea I suggested could make this a worthwhile career path and if this was a "thing" you could even go as far as making certain resources have a finite availability.

There is the built in mechanic of spreading the asteroid types by heat from the sun, could these rare items be spread into seams or clusters of systems? One could almost imagine an old prospector entering a space bar shouting about a, "Threns strike in 36,24,36!" and watching the bar empty!

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

My big issues with the current system are that:

1. There are too many types of ore
2. It's not intuitive what types of ore do what
3. It's also not intuitive what factory types do what
4. Factories are incredibly boring to run

3 is the thing about simplification; it would indeed be much better if we just had a "factory" block that you set to any recipe.
Now, the other direction would be to make intuitive differences; this'd be the approach you see in modded Minecraft where there's a machine for smelting, a machine for hammering, a machine for whatever, all in addition to the crafting bench. Just having a name for a particular process, attaching that to the particular processing block, and only having it do that one process really helps make things feel right.

1 and 2 are the "What the hell is threns?" problem; all these weird names and colors just make mining confusing, it'd be much better to only have like 7 kinds of ore, with a few being found everywhere, with really obvious names.
I've seen the same problem in modded Minecraft; nobody cares that tin and manganese are in the game, but it's damn annoying when you can't keep straight which ore is for what and some obscure thing adds its own ore just so the recipes can be different. Vanilla Minecraft has a too few ores to be interesting, but not by much.

4 mostly relates to the fact that factories are slow and you have to open their GUIs to see the processing. Some kind of block animation showing what's being processed would help loads.

So onto ideas already discussed here:

• Varying crafting abilities/efficiencies are a bad idea, they just make the crafting system a bigger headache to get into. The crafting system should be something I want to get into, which means not shafting me right out of the gate.
• Particular colors of paint being rare is a horrible thing that ruins asthetic diversity without really any benefit.
• There should be some resource specialization, but it should be in optional extras to make ships the best they can be, not in anything basic. Chamber types would be the obvious target.

 

[Edymnion]

this'd be the approach you see in modded Minecraft where there's a machine for smelting, a machine for hammering, a machine for whatever, all in addition to the crafting bench. Just having a name for a particular process, attaching that to the particular processing block, and only having it do that one process really helps make things feel right.

I still remember when I first started playing how disappointed I was in the Micro-Assembler.

"Oh, this sounds cool! What kind of things does it assemble? Wait, it processes scrap? The hell? Why does it have a cool name that sounds like it should be making high tech computer chips if all it is is a glorified recycling bin?"

 

[Zoolimar]

I don't really like the idea of absolutely random recipes or needing to scourge half the galaxy for a couple of thousands of ore of a certain type (maybe if there would be actual superweapons but we don't have them). IMHO, there should always be a possibility of making any block from almost any resource albeit ineffectively.

So for example you could make say a shield block from any ore but it would cost 2, 5, 10 times (or maybe even) more than if you did it from the right ore.

Where you could make it more complex and randomized is in factories/reactions. As in there would not be a single way to make any block but dozens of them, and in some case the reaction to make a block would give you some byproducts that could be used to make something else. So, let's say instead of just making a shield block directly for 20+ pieces of refined material you could load up the factory chain with 10 pieces of different types of ore that would be processed in a very particular order and in the end give you 5 shield blocks, or 1 shield, 3 armour pieces and 1 gun block, or any other variant of a result.

The reactions themselves should be randomized per server with a procedural generator that allows to create a needed config file. If you make it deep enough not only each server would have different ingredients for each reaction but reactions themselves could be randomized.

This on one hand allows everyone to build a ship from any ore. You could just go and dig some rocks and then transform them into the things you need. On the other hand dedicated people would produce 10-20 times the amount of blocks from the same amount of ore, but it would need a lot of time to research and to make proper factory setups.

 

[NTIMESc]

This on one hand allows everyone to build a ship from any ore. You could just go and dig some rocks and then transform them into the things you need.

I'm not sure about the factory parts of your idea, but this got me thinking about trace elements.
I like having the different ores and crystals, and being able to identify concentrations of them by color. But I also think it would be interesting to add trace element extraction to the refinery, so you can get a very small, perhaps random amount of one or two elements by refining the abundant rocks. Perhaps even using the color of the different rocks to hint at which elements might be more likely to result.
[doublepost=1531667658,1531667463][/doublepost]On a side note, I would really like to see recycling added into the game, where at least some materials can be reclaimed from all manufactured blocks.

 

[EricBlank]

Both the above posts would be great ideas and pretty similar to what i meant by random alternative recipes.

What i meant by processing bulk resources was taking like the 99 billion sugil or whatever blocks i have and having recipes available through the advanced crafting system that let you use sugil in place of another mineral, at a cost to efficiency, to produce a block that i otherwise dont have access to right now because of resource shortages. Because im sure as hell not going to make that much paint. And nobody in their right mind would purchase that much paint from me. It becomes trash i jetison into space. Or i literally build my homebase out of colored asteroid rocks, im lazy like that.

The universe could generate ten or so different recipes for every block over a period of minutes after starting a new server for the first time, some being used for alternative low-efficiency reagent recipes and others for higher efficiency recipes, that players can find and use in the game world, alongside the baseline, moderate efficiency recipes we have now (and the resources they consume/produce can obviously be adjusted to balance.)

So if ive got a high efficiency recipe i can use to produce important ship components like shields or cannon barrels cheaper than anyone else, i want to keep that to myself, and purchase or mine those resources i need to make and sell my product. Other players would have an incentive to trade with me; saving time and money to acquire components they need in bulk anyway. I can offer other recipes i have in trade for diplomatic favors etc, and other factions have a reason to go to war with us; to force capitulation to acquire a strategically important recipe.

 

[-PR-Sandbag]

We definitely need to find a way back to specialisation in recipes. It would make trade in multi much more engaging. At the moment we're all just building mega factories that make everything and then play creative in a shipyard. I kind of like that Im always having to explore to find threns, but having a billion spare ore of everything else while scouring the universe for a single threns node seems a bit much.

I don't really have any good ideas but it needs to be a balance between rewarding miners/explorers and people that want to specialise in production.

 

[Edymnion]

What if we mixed in a bit of D&D terminology?

Stick to the idea that everyone needs to be able to make the base form of everything right from the start, but then have some sort of research that lets you improve the base blocks? For lack of a better term, make +1 weapons and armor?

So you have to research/find a recipe that lets you make, say, +1 Cannon Modules. You'd need to make standard cannon modules, and then use that and some rare and exotic crafting component to make your +1's. They could do more base damage than regular cannon modules, meaning you could get more power in a smaller package.

Then simply expand that out across everything. +1 stabilizers, +1 power reactors, +1 thrusters, +1 shields... and then of course there's +2, +3...