Renewable Resources from Planets: Core Drilling and Plant Farming

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    So, technically, this is two suggestions in one, and they both involve obtaining renewable resources from planets. Right now, the most useful purpose of planets is stripping their crusts off for ore; so adding the ability to use planets as a steady source of renewable resources would make planets more valuable assets. And you'd be motivated to actually maintain control over multiple planets because of the benefits they give you, instead of just visiting to mine them.

    First of all, CORE DRILLING:
    No, this isn't about the age-old combat tactic to destroy ship cores. This is about planet cores, and a way to get renewable resources from them. The idea is this:

    There would be a new block, called a "core drill" or "extraction node" or something. When placed directly on a planet core, this block will begin extracting one of the 24 mineral blocks, metal ores, or crystal shards, from the core, into a linked storage block. This would provide an alternative to asteroid mining that encourages building on planets. It wouldn't necessarily replace asteroid mining due to the fact that core drilling would provide resources very slowly, but it would supplement it, and be useful because it's a permanent source of the resource that can't run out.

    Note that drills require a lot of power to function, but the more drill blocks are placed directly above the bottom drill, the less power it requires to extract ores, encouraging the building of large drill towers containing the supplementary drill blocks.

    If you place more and more drill blocks on a face of a planet core, the rate at which individual drills extract ores will go down, until eventually you'll hit a soft cap that makes creating additional drills ineffective at extracting more resources. However, drills placed on different faces of the core ignore each other in this respect, so the most efficient way to extract resources is to build drills on all the plates of a planet, rather than just one, therefore encouraging planetwide building.

    Which of the 24 resources is extracted from a planet's core is different for each planet. One planet may have sugil in its core, another may have firtikeen, another may have varat, and so on. This isn't connected to the type of planet, although it may have something to do with its distance from its star. So, you'd need to have drills on 24 different planets to have a consistent source of all the asteroid resources in the game. This would encourage players to explore and seek out planets with core resources that they need, and then establish drilling bases on those planets. And what happens if a neighboring faction has planet that's core contains a resource that your faction particularly needs? Well, you could ask for it politely. Or not so politely...

    The second suggestion is PLANT FARMING.
    So there's 25 kinds of plants in starmade if you count those small rocks on desert planets, and not counting trees and cacti and whatever the heck alien planets have on them. But, they don't actually do anything except serve as cool looking decorations. But what if there was more you could do with them?

    First, methods of farming:
    Mining a plant would yield the plant itself, as well as 2 seeds of the corresponding plants. These seeds would then be planted on the type of block the plant naturally grows on (grass for terran planet plants, sand for desert planet plants, etc.), and over time, grow through 4 different block states, from seedling, to partly grown, to mostly grown, to fully grown. Mining it in any state other than fully grown would simply yield the seed, but when fully grown, it yields the plant itself as well as 2 seeds. Yes, this includes the aforementioned rocks. I guess they could be renamed "pebble plants" or something. You can grow plants anywhere, including on ships and stations, but, they grow twice as fast when on their native planet type, encouraging players to build farms on planets. Also, there could be tree seeds and cactus seeds, which eventually grow into a full-grown block-based plant, like saplings in minecraft.

    But what's the point, you ask? Well, what most immediately comes to mind is food. It's been proposed that when crew is implemented, they should require food. Food would be crafted with plants, with each type of plant getting turned into a different type of food. Different types of food could have different benefits, such as being more nutritious, or lasting longer. Different types of food could also give buffs to both players and NPCs, to things like damage resistance, health regeneration, movement speed, mining speed, etc. Since all the different types of plants would have different uses, players would want to have farms for each type of plant, preferably on the optimal planet types. Or if not, they could build a somewhat less effective, but very cool looking, farming station instead.

    In conclusion, these new gameplay mechanics involving renewable resources and building on planets would provide players with an actual reason to build on planets, and also to explore to seek out planets with particular attributes, and to fight over control of particularly valuable planets, and maybe even buy planets from other factions if you need it more than they do.
     

    Lecic

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    Certainly not a new suggestion, but definitely one I want. The usual term I've seen used for these is "mantle extractors" to prevent confusion with the old core drilling damage system. It should be one fixed resource per planet, so you need to have a lot of planets under your control to get a sizable amount of resource income from them.

    I think renewable planet resources are the best way to encourage and make them useful in gameplay.
     
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    Great idea, but I don't see why do you need to mine the core itself.
    If the concept is to make the mining procedure longer to motivate the building of drills and mining machines, why would we need a pseudo-resource when we already have everything we need.
    Players are abandoning planets, because all their resources can be mined almost instantly. Since targeting them with the salvage beam takes more time than salvaging them, why would anybody build drill-like salvager automatons targeting only one place?

    Let's make the ores and crystals last longer. All the other block types can vanish instantly, I don't care, but resources should stay there. I don't say they should be infinite or renewable resources, I just say every ore should last a couple days and every crystal a couple weeks maybe, constantly salvaged by a beam. However if you want to get rid of them quickly, you could still do that with any weapon.
    Still we don't want to mess with those who just need a few resources, so keep the original salvaging time to have the original amount of resources. But after that, double the time for double amount, and then double again, and again. The more time the players will spend with salvaging, the more they get. With a system like this, for quick results players will salvage many resources for a few time, and for big projects they will build an automaton to salvage only one for weeks.

    The result would be almost the same as core drilling, but it would expand the possibilities and motivate the players to build several drills per planet segments, and even some drills on asteroids. And it would motivate players to move on to other planets, not because they already maxed out one planet with only one drill block, but because they are looking for different resources.
     

    Lecic

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    Great idea, but I don't see why do you need to mine the core itself.
    If the concept is to make the mining procedure longer to motivate the building of drills and mining machines, why would we need a pseudo-resource when we already have everything we need.
    Players are abandoning planets, because all their resources can be mined almost instantly. Since targeting them with the salvage beam takes more time than salvaging them, why would anybody build drill-like salvager automatons targeting only one place?

    Let's make the ores and crystals last longer. All the other block types can vanish instantly, I don't care, but resources should stay there. I don't say they should be infinite or renewable resources, I just say every ore should last a couple days and every crystal a couple weeks maybe, constantly salvaged by a beam. However if you want to get rid of them quickly, you could still do that with any weapon.
    Still we don't want to mess with those who just need a few resources, so keep the original salvaging time to have the original amount of resources. But after that, double the time for double amount, and then double again, and again. The more time the players will spend with salvaging, the more they get. With a system like this, for quick results players will salvage many resources for a few time, and for big projects they will build an automaton to salvage only one for weeks.

    The result would be almost the same as core drilling, but it would expand the possibilities and motivate the players to build several drills per planet segments, and even some drills on asteroids. And it would motivate players to move on to other planets, not because they already maxed out one planet with only one drill block, but because they are looking for different resources.
    Because planets being mined to nothing is ugly, and this would encourage that, except now there's a bunch of floating magic ores that you can mine a billion times before they vanish. That's stupid. The mantle extractors allow you to mine from a planet indefinitely as a renewable source of income to fight over, and without ruining the planets.
     
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    Why would you ruin the planet if you can mine the resources close to the surface a billion times before they vanish?
    The mantle extractors wouldn't prevent ruining the planet, only the complete removal of resources from a planet would prevent ruining it. With mantle extractors the resources would be still there to mine, and after the planet would be completely mined to nothing then the mantle extraction could be started without any problem. The planets would still look ugly, but as the OP wrote they would be still valuable.
    With my addition the original concept would be there, but without the complete ruination of the planet. Especially if the current resource generation would be swapped to ore vein generation. Even 1% of the current resource blocks would generate more resources than before. It would be enough to have about 10 bigger ore veins per planet segment, and nobody would mine all the dirt off from a planet just to reach these.
    And by the way, I don't say we shouldn't have mantle extractors too. I think they can fit into this system pretty nicely.
     
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    Based on some hints in the last update, if there are going to be focal points for resource collection, there's going to have to be some sort of renewable element or it won't work. This seems like a decent suggest for that, neat.
     
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    Why would you ruin the planet if you can mine the resources close to the surface a billion times before they vanish?
    The mantle extractors wouldn't prevent ruining the planet, only the complete removal of resources from a planet would prevent ruining it. With mantle extractors the resources would be still there to mine, and after the planet would be completely mined to nothing then the mantle extraction could be started without any problem. The planets would still look ugly, but as the OP wrote they would be still valuable.
    With my addition the original concept would be there, but without the complete ruination of the planet. Especially if the current resource generation would be swapped to ore vein generation. Even 1% of the current resource blocks would generate more resources than before. It would be enough to have about 10 bigger ore veins per planet segment, and nobody would mine all the dirt off from a planet just to reach these.
    And by the way, I don't say we shouldn't have mantle extractors too. I think they can fit into this system pretty nicely.
    What if you need to cover the core or all the resources would spew out at a fast rate. Then it would be easy to sabotage if they just put a layer of glass over the core, and just leaving the surface would give you a nice fluffy buffer.