We can all agree the economy does not work correctly at this time. The way I see it, the factories should work so that you go salvage a bunch of planet/asteroid materials, feed it into your factory, and the factory makes the stuff that you want in significantly less quantities, so you need to continue salvaging to make more. This will ensure the resources are in demand and fights break out regarding scarcity, or trading happens. Right now, salvaging, fighting, and trading is not really necessary as the high level minerals are grossly overpowered and easily obtained. I do not think minerals are necessary at all, since there is already a currency, there are unlimited inventory stacks, and recipes themselves level up as you use them. Plus they have crazy complicated names and many colors that are hard to learn and distinguish! And for what?
The minerals should be hulls instead. it could be the same type of levelling up using the existing refine/coarsen recipe system and blocks as for the minerals. So you would have to refine a ton of crappy L1 hulls to make a L2 hull etc. Each level could take a corresponding multiple quantity of damage to AMCs for instance, so L5 could take 5x more damage than L1. Of course, the minerals/hulls need to be very rare or not available naturally and definitely not 1000 L5 in a pirate loot. Another idea to expand on that would make it so different minerals had different protection properties versus certain types of weapons. Or each different type of mineral could be changed to a hull color.
The minerals should be hulls instead. it could be the same type of levelling up using the existing refine/coarsen recipe system and blocks as for the minerals. So you would have to refine a ton of crappy L1 hulls to make a L2 hull etc. Each level could take a corresponding multiple quantity of damage to AMCs for instance, so L5 could take 5x more damage than L1. Of course, the minerals/hulls need to be very rare or not available naturally and definitely not 1000 L5 in a pirate loot. Another idea to expand on that would make it so different minerals had different protection properties versus certain types of weapons. Or each different type of mineral could be changed to a hull color.