Improvements to inventory.

[Raichor]

I propose a solution to the currently unbalanced Inventory system. At the moment you can get a build block and acquire a planet in five minutes without the use of any ship whatsoever. The solution to this stacks and cargo pods.

Stacks

players would be limited to 18 inventory slots with a stack of 1000 in each. The number of inventory slots can be increased by the use of cargo pods, however, only when in a ship with these cargo pods in. Tabs would be used to clearly separate default inventory and separate cargo pod groups. You can also create your own tabs.

Cargo Pods

These would work in the same way as plex storage except from the fact that they cannot be locked, this means that you will have to protect your cargo pods as much as possible using shields hull whatever, adding a certain degree of realism to the game in that pirates will now aim for cargo pods instead of the core and can take on stealth mission to infiltrate your ship and take the precious cargo on board. Cargo pods would have 2 slots in them each with a possible stack of 1000, for every 200 block the cargo pods mass increases by 1, meaning a maximum mass of 10 for each pod. Cargo pod contents of the whole ship would be shown in the inventory section under cargo pod, each group of pods would be under a different heading and materials can be easily transferred from the inventory tab. Salvaged items go directly into any available cargo pod space. When docked to a station all cargo pod contents under a tab can be stored into any of your own placed plex storage containers at the push of a button, this brings us onto changes with plex storage.

Destruction of Cargo pods and debris magnet

So, your a pirate and would like to collect all that lovely loot, but don't know how? the answer? Debris Magnet. This would act somewhat like a dropped item magnet that would increase in radius by 5 blocks for every blocked attached to each other, maxed out at 100 blocks radius. Ok i have my Debris magnet now what? Aim for the cargo pods! When destroyed, all items in the cargo pod are released into the cosmos. But be warned, using the item scoop drops shields down by 25% of your total shields for every 5 seconds used, so 20 seconds with the Debris scoop on will shutdown your shields!

The pirates...my stuff D :

We all have escape pods to get away from that eventual catastrophe, but what about my stuff in the cargo? Lets face it, its gone...most of it. You and your most expensive items will be immediately transferred to your inventory and escape pod / cargo space. You would also be able to select important items to be transferred upon activation of the escape pod. How would you make sure all this is transferred though? Simple, a new block, an escape block. When any docked ship with this block in it is undocked all items are transferred from the original ship. Alternatively there could just be an extra bobby ai setting that will make the ship into an escape pod, when you press the button assigned to escape it would transfer items if on and then put you in the ship.

Plex storage

Plex storage would be made into a station only item with a maximum of 24 slots and stacks of 1500, making them the ideal place to store items you want to protect. Any plex storage placed will automatically be protected to you or your faction.

Overall this means that to mine safely you will need a station with plex storage on to store your materials safely, and cargo pods on ships to store materials when transporting them to the station as the maximum inventory slots would be nerfed.

Possible Cargo pod Textures (two images to give idea of tiling):

The layout of inventory may look like this: (basic layout)

(*weapons) damn keyboard

(The default inventory tab would be frozen at the top so you can scroll through the cargo pod tabs and find what you want without having to go back to the top to place it in the default tab.)

But what if I'm just building using commands?

-creative mode

-Same slots as current version

-Same layout as current version

-Infinite amount in stack

Advantages?

-elimination of unbalances

-Destroyers will be destroyers, salvagers will be salvagers, couriers will be couriers, you will now be unable to create a destroyer that carries all your cargo and that can salvage a planet whilst being able to accelerate and move and fight.

Cons?

-A lot of changes needed

-Plex storage already on ships would need to be converted to cargo pods. (Ships could automatically be converted perhaps?)

TL;DR?

-Plex storage only on stations always locked and protected to person who placed them

-Cargo pods to store stuff in when transporting goods between mine and station

-For pirates: Cargo pods drop items when destroyed, item magnet to pick up dropped items

-nerf to the number of slots

-stacks

-tabs

-inventory layout in picture

Opinions? Comments? Flaws? post them below

EDIT:

-Changes to escape pod suggestion

-General Readability

-Made one of the textures better for tiling.

 

[theguy17]

sounds cool although my ship is rather big maybe more turrets then

 

[towerbilder]

i like the curent invintory but epandable storage is a cool idea mabby a tab on wich when clicked on shows a drop box of the storage units on the ship and when placeing a storage unit you can name it like ships just it wont get waypoints and if your using salvage beems it goes in the storage units befor your invatory the way the storage works might be 10 slots per storage but the mass change i dont like but a color change will look cool

 

[Wade]

nope dont like it building ships would be a pain too much micromanaging kills games for me its just un necasary garbally goop takes me alot longer to salavage a whole planet but then again i use decent sized ships. I think limit to the size of ships would solve alot of problems at once and if you say then there will be alot of cubes all over the place. I will say stop sniffing the glue there are alot of nice ships 25,000 mass or less. All my ships are less than 10,000 mass for a reason its logical and practical. If you make overkill ships of course its gonna make the game not balanced any more and you can salvage a planet in 5 mins an killl 50,00000 pirates at once that dont make the game broken that makes the ship broken

 

[Raichor]

This fixes the issue with using a build block to take out a planet, not a ship. Also if anything it makes buidling easier, as it allows you to organise your inventory into tabs, If you are talking about the issue of having to go back and forth between your build and your station to get materials then a fix to this would be to have remote control of stations, like shops, so if you are within 200 blocks of the station you can see items from storage in the station, in your inventory tab. This just means when you build a station you have to set aside a temporary storage unit with all the materials if you want to use more than 18,000 blocks from the start which i doubt you would do, unless when using commands, which is covered above.

 

[Wade]

lol just limit the size of ships and then dont need to make schema do alot of unnessasary programming.

What I would really like is a garbage can block though so I can just toss a bunch of crap I have and not worth flying to 1000 diff shops.



Um yeah it is a game not a space simulator I never seen the words realistic space game used or advertised by schema if you want realisic 0 inventory space have to float back and forth and push each block into place and weld it in place so about an hour to place each block no amc cannons since those arnt possible and if your out of your ship in build mode or normal you run out of oxygen in 1 hour... you see it already is not realistic because it is pixels on a screen called a game and your character is 2 meters x 1 meter x 1 meter thats not realistic either and if you say aliens then that is totally not realistic since they are not real

and that still does not fix the problem of game breaking ships sooner or later a size limit on ships will have to be addressed. With no limits the game will always be unbalanced and have game breaking ships. Realisticly some of those ships if you want realistic would take 100 years or more to compleat

 

[Raichor]

But limiting the size of ships doesnt sort out the build block issue, it doesnt have the advantage of an easier to use inventory layout and it would annoy a lot of players : / Also this method is more realistic than the current system in place, as carrying 10million meter cubed chunks of rock in a spacesuit seems a bit unrealistic. Furthermore this system allows for easier transfer of materials between ships and stations.

 

[Wade]

i like the tab feature for between home base and inventory though but not the limiting of stack sizes just make a lot of micro managing for storage space with in a year every player would have over a million storage containers for excess supplies that in it\'s self creates alot of problems. just pretend you have a inventory pod that follows you all over the place and is perma invisible and that is where your inventory comes from. I could a gree maybe stack size limit in the inventory alone but not for the storage containers and that is only if you have the inventroy and home base storage linked some how but that seems like it would be a programming nightmare

 

[Morrigi]

+100% support for this. It would give all those freighters people have been making a real use.

 

[Enkelados]

Thats a great idea, it will make the game much more fun, because it would take much longer to build your own deathstar and so u have a real \"lategame\". People who want to just build megaships can still use a creative mode.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Nope Nope AND NOPE.

People have ships with sizes in the high 10\'000 s so limitation to 1000 is just stupid. Agree with wade apart from the size limit of ships.

 

[Snk]

I like the idea of limiting inventory and plex storages as to make a reason for merchant ships. +1 good sir

 

[Enkelados]

Its about inventory not the scale of ships

 

[Iskandar]

This fixes the issue with using a build block to take out a planet




Instead of redoing the entire inventory system from scratch just to fix build block strip mining (and making large-scale construction a pita in the process), why not simply change the build block so it can only be used on a planet flagged as a faction\'s base or a planet that has been claimed and held by a faction (with a faction block) for a certain number of days?

So a player has to be in a faction, that faction then has to claim a planet and keep it under their control for, say, two days before they can even place a build block. That won\'t eliminate the build block strip mining option, but the time and effort now required for that option will make it VASTLY inferior to simply going there in a good mining ship. Especially since a good mining ship can strip a planet to nothing within a couple of hours.

 

[XxDanclarke96xX]

+1 why isnt this in already?

 

[TheDarkOne05]

This would be frustrating to use. It would impair building anything large, and make it very annoying to transfer resources. However, I do agree with things being automatically sent to storages when you pick them up. This would not require drastically changing inventory size, though. When you are trying to make a ship with a few tens of thousands of blocks, you don\'t want to have to go and get new blocks every few minutes (or more).

 

[Raichor]

The idea is that you build a station with enough plex storage to hold the building materials required, as i explained in a later post you would be able to access station storage within a range of 200m, much like shops. The station storage would show in the inventory under the tab station-\"station name\". This means you can effectively have as much inventory space as you need if you are building near a station.

 

[-Moose-]

I\'ve been pondering the same idea. Here\'s a few of my thoughts

1. Provide an Adjacency Bonus

This gives a tradeoff between high storage and security. You could clump all your cargo pods together and transport half a planet, but one missile will send it space side. This also allows the pods to store more on larger ships, increasing the likelihood of frieghters and couriers becoming an actual class of ships.

2. While I agree that the Cargo Pods need to start out with a low amount of space, I believe that 2 slots is a tad unforgiving. Pirates drop an immense amount of loot right now, I have difficulty finding space with the six chests onboard my ship right now, and I believe that ships should still be able to collect a fair amount of loot with a limited amount of pods. Personally, I think that each pod should add one line of storage(+adjacency bonus). This still means you need 4-5 pods to rival a chest, but you can still store the loot you get from your foes, also allows for decent personal storage onboard ships.



3. I like and want to see dedicated cargo ships, however it is worth noting that these will always be specialty ships, how many times do you need to move your station\'s entire storage? It is important to keep this in mind, while plex storages need to be lowered, I believe it is important to find a balance between practicality and speciality so that ships don\'t need to sacrifice too much space for decent storage. but are still capable of attaining large amounts of storage.

 

[Dman1791]

Think. 1000 blocks is NOTHING in StarMade. With ships being constructed of tens of thousands of multiple different types of blocks, not to mention few slots, it would be a nightmare to build any large ship. And before you mention the station providing you with the materials again, the station itself isn\'t likely to be small, having storages, so just building the station itself is a hassle. And after that, most people wouldn\'t like to have to build near a station, as if thee location is known, you effectively have to abandon that base and go make a new one. Think about it. This could make lots of people leave the game very quickly.

 

[Raichor]

Actually i suggested plex storage as having 1500 stack limits with 24 slots. that means 360,000 blocks per plex storage, that means just 10 plex storage on a station in order to make a 3.6 million block ship. I dont see this as a problem, if you make the a temporary storage box for the creation of the station and then move it all later. The only drawback of plex storage being, to make it a station only block.