SM Economy Discussion

[BinaryMan]

After playing single player for awhile, I started thinking about the economy in SM. These are kind of the phases I thought of:

1) No recipes/factories - exploration - basically trying to get 5000 blocks of common ship elements so you can craft them without shops, this is mainly done by searching for shops. Might as well take off in a direction and go; a small cloaked ship to avoid pirates and salvage stations (local edit block and take the glass in chunks), sell to shops and buy up common ship components until you have 5000.

2) Recipe/factory - stripmining - find a home planet or station - hopefully with a coordinate you can remember like 100,0,0. When there is some better mapping / saved waypoints / warping or teleport structures it might be easier in the future to *return* to your base from a long range haul but I find it a pain to make a permanent base (also stuff drifts?). Now with 5000 blocks (tediously?) obtained buy some module recipes and the cheaper credit L1L5 recipes. Install a base somewhere with factories, faction module, shop (for inventory), and so forth and set up production chains. Now, stripming asteroids or (more efficiently) planets using a build module to remove chunks quickly. Feed these into your production chain.

3) Recipe leveled up - generate net positive matter - at some point of feeding factories, it becomes possible that the output of one process can feed into the input of others without external matter (may require cubatom manipulation to actually make the conversions). At this point you have all the resources you need.



So the issue is in #2, stripmining results in the local region becoming devoid of asteroids and planets, at least as it stands now. Spherical worlds might help a bit over the disk-shaped ones, but it's still a problem. I was thinking, planetary mining that doesn't completely destroy the planet seems like a good idea. You'd need to install them on each world type and the output of rarer materials on that world would not come up too often in mining rigs. This makes planetary ownership, rather than destruction, the prime focus for gathering resources.

 

[NeonSturm]

1) No recipes/factories - exploration - basically trying to get 5000 blocks of common ship elements so you can craft them without shops


You can find recipies as loot from pirate stations. You just need a ship with 700 (better 800) range to take out the turrets without getting shot at.

Or use cloak to hide from turrets and jammer to not make them retarget on you once you are visible (only the attacked turret will target you then - or if your jammer runs out of power!)




2) Recipe/factory - stripmining - find a home planet or station - hopefully with a coordinate you can remember like 100,0,0


You can press H (faction-menu) and see where your home is. You can take paper and a pin and just write it down.


When there is some better mapping / saved waypoints / warping or teleport structures it might be easier in the future to *return* to your base from a long range haul but I find it a pain to make a permanent base (also stuff drifts?). Now with 5000 blocks (tediously?) obtained buy some module recipes and the cheaper credit L1L5 recipes.


You can edit the speed limit and recipie price on your local server in StarMade/server.cfg

Stationary stuff does not drift. Planets remain in their sector (and only rotate). Even for Asteroids you have to manually enable dynamic movement.




So the issue is in #2, stripmining results in the local region becoming devoid of asteroids and planets, at least as it stands now. Spherical worlds might help a bit over the disk-shaped ones, but it\'s still a problem. I was thinking, planetary mining that doesn\'t completely destroy the planet seems like a good idea. You\'d need to install them on each world type and the output of rarer materials on that world would not come up too often in mining rigs. This makes planetary ownership, rather than destruction, the prime focus for gathering resources.


I think most peoples agree with you here.

Do asteroids regenerate? I think there is some idle-sector timer which resets unvisited sectors after some time. But I may be wrong.

Although on multiplayer there are a lot of healthy planets around spawn.

 

[BinaryMan]

Thanks for the input. I was thinking from the \'final game\' perspective where for example ships may require the building blocks and not just credits (as this was a way I found to create the blocks needed more easily than shop hunting, once you have funds). Some of the map and logistical stuff I know will be added later.

It is too early to tell what the true \'economic model\' is going to be. It\'s all about harvesting and throwing matter and bio-mass into the reactor! I\'m not sure how the factory \'crafting\' vs. the cubatom model is going to play out. Cubatoms are missing a way to tell the outcome of 2 atoms combining if you don\'t actually have both in stock, making it hard to tell what to break down and I\'m not sure the input to output ratio but factories are obviously better with a leveled up recipe.

Yeah replenishment seems to be important though to keeping the engine running long-term. I\'ve not noticed shops getting new items but the variables I saw in the config suggest they get credits now and then. If you\'ve got a chain of recipes that create infinite matter somehow (has anyone done that?) I am not sure that should be possible, but then again my suggestion of mines also creates that (just at a certain pace).

I do wonder, what is the design goal for the game economy anyway ?

 

[NeonSturm]

you would get by combining cubatoms to Level5-awesomeite or unoptanium/oranutanium :D

(Or other L5 ores)

 

[schadavi]

Did Schema say if he wants to keep the current manufacturing system?



I personally find it pretty counter-intuitive and difficult to use, plus the whole deal with recipes is very annoying.



Instead of randomized recipes and the cubatom system, i would prefer the simplicity of minecraft... harvest materials, smelt them, craft stuff from them.

 

[Florrible]

I would find that too simple..I actually like the recipe system and also the cubatoms, but it needs to get made simpler(less bad or really good recipes and being able to mass produce easier using cubatoms)

 

[NeonSturm]

Rather than that Asteroids should replenish.

I made some suggestion suggesting that each cubatom \"costs\" some power of 2 - 1 2 4 8 16 32

All ressources now can have 2 cubatoms (why not 3?) and only 25% cost divergence at max - on average you have at max. 12.5% gain from converting.

With 3 it would only be 12.5% divergence and 6.25% gain



For recipies - that is a bit more complex - see http://star-made.org/content/new-recipie-system-suggestiondiscussion (Just 2 days old and page 3? That\'s stupid...)

 

[BinaryMan]

With cubatoms, I wish you could choose the desired block and it would tell you what blocks would contribute 1 or 2 of the needed source atoms, so in other words show you the possible inputs and the output so you can decide if it\'s worth it.

If mining/factory took inputs from the asteroid / planet it sits on ? The salvage beam is completely destructive but maybe there is another way. If for purpose of mining structure, what if the blocks contained multiple resource potential ? Then the structure would be busy for some time extracting the resources, and a planet would take a long time to go dry (or maybe planets don\'t go dry but asteroids do, but asteroids re-generate?).

I don\'t mind the \'tech tree\' being a little randomized, but it should make some sense between inputs/outputs.