This is about the fabricate list and the refine clicking in cubatom. These aspects of cubatom kind of ruin the experience a bit.
The fabricate list seems to have been purposely mixed up to make it difficult to find things, and the one to one refine clicking seems to have been purposely made to limit the speed of cubatomming. There needs to be a better way to curb and balance the power of cubatom if these "features" were not there.
One good thing about the cubatom that makes it different from the factories is that you dont need a factory. Whatever solution is chosen, cubatoms should have a distinctly separate purpose, not as a redundant factory system.
Right now, cubatoms seem to be useful for: getting a small number of specialized blocks if a shop is out, say to get a core or components for a smaller ship, OR to get enough blocks to purchase recipes for factories (to make all the hardened purple hull corner you could dream of without flying to 100 shops).
I am not sure how the cubatom problem will be solved to make it a separate activity with separate purposes such as discussed above, while removing the tedious aspects of clicking or searching for items in the fabricate menu.
One easy way to limit the capability of cubatom so that it isn't an immediate replacement for factories (after the tedious nature is removed) would be to just have a heavy scaling down. Currently, everything can be made in pretty much a 2:1 ratio for ingredients to final product from splitting to fabrication of more basic materials. Just make it a higher ratio like 10:1 for each split and then it would require a ton more salvaging to get your blocks for recipes or whatever. (The idea of reduced returns from input to output could be implemented at the refine or fabricate processes in addition/instead of at the split process). I don't know that this would be a complete solution but it would be preferable to clicking or searching in a random list. Another idea in combination with this would be to reduce the efficiency of the cubatom splitting with larger ratios the more that you use it, or for it to burn out on splitting certain blocks after so many are split, so you have to find a different block to make the cubatom you want.
The fabricate list seems to have been purposely mixed up to make it difficult to find things, and the one to one refine clicking seems to have been purposely made to limit the speed of cubatomming. There needs to be a better way to curb and balance the power of cubatom if these "features" were not there.
One good thing about the cubatom that makes it different from the factories is that you dont need a factory. Whatever solution is chosen, cubatoms should have a distinctly separate purpose, not as a redundant factory system.
Right now, cubatoms seem to be useful for: getting a small number of specialized blocks if a shop is out, say to get a core or components for a smaller ship, OR to get enough blocks to purchase recipes for factories (to make all the hardened purple hull corner you could dream of without flying to 100 shops).
I am not sure how the cubatom problem will be solved to make it a separate activity with separate purposes such as discussed above, while removing the tedious aspects of clicking or searching for items in the fabricate menu.
One easy way to limit the capability of cubatom so that it isn't an immediate replacement for factories (after the tedious nature is removed) would be to just have a heavy scaling down. Currently, everything can be made in pretty much a 2:1 ratio for ingredients to final product from splitting to fabrication of more basic materials. Just make it a higher ratio like 10:1 for each split and then it would require a ton more salvaging to get your blocks for recipes or whatever. (The idea of reduced returns from input to output could be implemented at the refine or fabricate processes in addition/instead of at the split process). I don't know that this would be a complete solution but it would be preferable to clicking or searching in a random list. Another idea in combination with this would be to reduce the efficiency of the cubatom splitting with larger ratios the more that you use it, or for it to burn out on splitting certain blocks after so many are split, so you have to find a different block to make the cubatom you want.
