Read by Schine Salvage beams harvest loot clouds?

[Panpiper]

Getting loot is great, loot clouds can be fun given that they are loot, but there are a couple of major problems right now with loot clouds; they disappear way too fast and they fill your personal inventory with useless junk which you have to manually clean out. This latter can be especially irksome if you have multiple (fast vanishing) loot clouds and your inventory has already been filled with junk from a previous loot cloud.

Meanwhile, we are often (I am always) flying around with ships that have a salvage array. Moreover my salvage arrays are connected to a filter/sort storage system. If salvage arrays could pick up loot clouds, the loot could be shunted to that storage immediately and painlessly. This would remove the tedium of hunting pirates and leave only the fun.

 

[FatCobra]

I completely agree with this, or at least some mechanism for scooping up the look. I'm inside a ship why should the loot go to my inventory when the ship has 12 storage containers.

 

[CyberTao]

If I remember right, I think they are just going to remove loot clouds eventuallu, and just add a credit "bounty" for every pirate killed, based on the pirate it was.

 

[Methuselah]

I'm inside a ship why should the loot go to my inventory when the ship has 12 storage containers.

I completely agree with this, but not that salvage beams should pick up the loot. To me it seems far to easy to wave a salvage beam and pick it all up. Flying a ship in and picking it all up is fine. For any loot that drops that a ship cannot pick up (i.e. turrets), the player should have to experience some form of difficulty or danger in picking it up by leaving their ship. Otherwise, to me at least, it seems like a shortcut or cheat to a large "gift" of machinery or credits for little to no effort.

To solve the sorting problem I always set my cursor on my input chest for my salvage arrays in build mode. When my personal inventory get full, a single spacebar click puts me back in build mode above the input. I quickly dump everything in the input, spacebar again to flight mode to get the rest, and the sorting system does the work.

 

[MacThule]

I completely agree with this, but not that salvage beams should pick up the loot. To me it seems far to easy to wave a salvage beam and pick it all up.

Using a salvage beam to mop up some dropped storage items is too easy, but salvaging whole planets with said beam isn't? I don't follow.

 

[StormWing0]

I'd like this too since it'd be rather helpful, I've always found it strange why loot could only be picked up by the player or the ship core and ended up in the player inventory. Also a side note: Why not make loot spawn into inventories like storages, factories, refineries, etc? This way it'd be more reasonable since if weapons fire hits and destroys a thing that has items in it it'd turn into a loot cloud. Also the devs could explain away the loot clouds at that point.

 

[Methuselah]

loot clouds; they disappear way too fast

The time that the clouds float can actually be ajusted by the server admin, if you can talk them into it.

Using a salvage beam to mop up some dropped storage items is too easy, but salvaging whole planets with said beam isn't? I don't follow.

I don't know what kind of salvage array you have, but the biggest I have is an 860 block array with 700 slaved cannons. A radius 50 planet takes forever to mine with that. If I have an automated mining array, it stops working as soon as I leave the system, and can be attacked in my absence. And, if thats not enough, the lag is immense for planet mining on a large scale, but it does give you bonuses for mining in astronaut mode.

if weapons fire hits and destroys a thing that has items in it it'd turn into a loot cloud.

Oooo... I just had an evil thought. If the loot clouds do become targetable with a salvage beam, that means that they will also be targetable with other weapons as well. You could be sitting there vacuuming the cloud from your kill, and someone else come by and either suck it up quicker, or destroy it with cannons/beams/etc.

 

[spunkiethefirst]

In the mean time you could use blocks like light rods or the trigger areas to get in those hard to reach places, since they do not collide but they still pick up loot. In the case of the area triggers you can make a rotating inviso flyswatter that grabs loot in a radius around your ship.

 

[Dire Venom]

+1
Even having pulse with salvage as secondary might work (pick up all items within the pulses radius and put into connected storage)

 

[MacThule]

OP is a very good idea that streamlines the game without nerfing any other features.

 

[ltmauve]

Yeah, definitely. Plus this feature could be used to make nebulas as well.

 

[Edymnion]

I don't know what kind of salvage array you have, but the biggest I have is an 860 block array with 700 slaved cannons.

You seriously need a bigger salvage array on your main miner. 10,000 block salvage arrays are what I consider default for any established player's mining ship (and thats 10k salvage blocks, not counting cannon blocks).

If you're having trouble powering that, look up how to do efficient reactor design.

 

[Cablestinks]

I wonder if a pull beam would work....

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I think the problem is more loot clouds are ridiculously full of tons of crap. I don't think they should be gotten rid of completely but toned down, you can get millions of credits worth of high value blocks way to easily, breaking any hope for an actual economy.

 

[Panpiper]

The main loot for me with pirates has typically been the wrecks of the pirate ships. I always hunt pirates with a battle miner to make harvesting their wrecks a snap. Loot clouds are typically too short lived and too much of a hassle given their propensity to fill your inventory with crap, requiring tedious micromanagement to clean out. Meanwhile timers are counting down on the wrecks...

The ideal in my opinion would be much longer lived loot clouds that contain much smaller numbers of individual stacks, but with those stacks made of higher quality goods. That or perhaps do away with loot clouds all together and make loot spawn in storage chests on the pirate, again though with smaller numbers of stacks but made of higher quality items (or lower quality but higher numbers).

What is the most irksome is having half your inventory filled with stuff like one cactus or two red dirt, etc..

 

[FatCobra]

The main loot for me with pirates has typically been the wrecks of the pirate ships. I always hunt pirates with a battle miner to make harvesting their wrecks a snap. Loot clouds are typically too short lived and too much of a hassle given their propensity to fill your inventory with crap, requiring tedious micromanagement to clean out. Meanwhile timers are counting down on the wrecks...

The ideal in my opinion would be much longer lived loot clouds that contain much numbers of individual stacks, but with those stacks made of higher quality goods. That or perhaps do away with loot clouds all together and make loot spawn in storage chests on the pirate, again though with smaller numbers of stacks but made of higher quality items (or lower quality but higher numbers).

What is the most irksome is having half your inventory filled with stuff like one cactus or two red dirt, etc..

Don't forget the "Place Holder"s

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

The main loot for me with pirates has typically been the wrecks of the pirate ships. I always hunt pirates with a battle miner to make harvesting their wrecks a snap. Loot clouds are typically too short lived and too much of a hassle given their propensity to fill your inventory with crap, requiring tedious micromanagement to clean out. Meanwhile timers are counting down on the wrecks...

The ideal in my opinion would be much longer lived loot clouds that contain much numbers of individual stacks, but with those stacks made of higher quality goods. That or perhaps do away with loot clouds all together and make loot spawn in storage chests on the pirate, again though with smaller numbers of stacks but made of higher quality items (or lower quality but higher numbers).

What is the most irksome is having half your inventory filled with stuff like one cactus or two red dirt, etc..

There is a whole new cargo system planned so I doubt there will be any changes to loot clouds or how to acquire them. Hopefully the new cargo system will include a new loot system as well such as spawning items in chests on pirate ships or some other kind of mass storage block. Personally I would love to have to denote storage areas using invisible blocks that slowly populate with some kind of graphical representation of cargo as your ships storage fills up.

 

[Panpiper]

Personally I would love to have to denote storage areas using invisible blocks that slowly populate with some kind of graphical representation of cargo as your ships storage fills up.

That would be seriously cool.

 

[FatCobra]

There is a whole new cargo system planned so I doubt there will be any changes to loot clouds or how to acquire them. Hopefully the new cargo system will include a new loot system as well such as spawning items in chests on pirate ships or some other kind of mass storage block. Personally I would love to have to denote storage areas using invisible blocks that slowly populate with some kind of graphical representation of cargo as your ships storage fills up.

I like this idea it would make us actually build and use cargo ships of some sort.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

That would be seriously cool.

I like this idea it would make us actually build and use cargo ships of some sort.

Open cargo bays on big ships would have to be a thing, I do this already for RP purposes but it would be really awesome for it to serve a functional purpose as well.