On a note to the developers:
You shouldn't be able to buy everything from shops, nor should you be able to sell everything to them. Basically: make crafting/factorisation a necessity, because it is way to easy to just salvage a spacestation and completely empty the money resources of a couple of shops (default is 10 million credits in a shop, do the math and conclude: it is overpowered). After you sold everything, you just travel to a couple of shops, buy rediculous amounts of weapons and build a ship that can't be destroyed by pirates. With default sector sizes and shop spawning, this should take about 2 hours. And that is even in the new update, where ores no longer can be sold (not that they were may main source of income in, well, forever).
My ideas:
1. Make blocks for ships more expensive to buy and lose money when selling them again. (Example: you would pay 10.000 to buy an overdrive module, and only get a little more than the minimum price of resources needed to create that block in a factory when you sell it). Also make the weapons rarer to find in shops.
2. Make it so that you are unable to sell common blocks in objects (like hulls, glass and lights), but not sand and other really cheap blocks, since you don't make that much by selling them.
3. Don't use ice crystals in the cities on planets, it is to easy to sell those and get a huge profit.
4. For a stronger effect than the second point: make it so that you are unable to salvage space stations, because it still is to easy to get a lot of resources from them. Instead make them less likely to spawn and put a chest (or chests) with a few basic materials, like ores, hulls, glass and lights (my preference goes to this option).
5. Make cities less likely to spawn.
6. Make it easier and more profitable to mine/salvage by hand, and add certain advantages, because planets don't stand a chance against huge salvaging ships (by huge I mean 625 salvage beams in a 25x25 checkerboard, and that isn't even the biggest you could make). This could be done by adding a block which has to be mined by hand with a specific, hard to get tool. This block would be spawned naturally on planets in a certain layer, and underneath would be some special ores or other blocks. Also add some tools for mining and cave systems.
7. Reduce the max amount of a certain block in shops, also add a cap for the total amount of blocks (calculated using mass, and items, like capsules, would take up less storage space than regular blocks).
8. Drastically cap the stacking limit, it currently is a whopping 999.999!!!! Weapons other other blocks that don't have to be used en masse in ship should have a lower stacking limit than blocks like hulls and energy related blocks, and items like capsules should also have higher stacking limits than actual blocks like hulls. This idea should also be based on the mass, since the mass for non-ship blocks will be less in the next update.
9. In case these ideas will outbalance the current system for recipes, but even if it doesn't, the recipe system should be rebalanced to create a progressive system.
10. Make the default sector size at least twice as big, traveling is way to easy (so: 'Yay, a space station!' and then a minute later 'Yay, a space station!'.
11. Make shops spawn less often by default.
12. Make cities spawn less often. Right now just about every 'green' planet has one. (Haven't checked spawning with desert temples yet, maybe someone could have a look?)
13. To make this system work, the ability to link salvage computers to plex storages should be implemented (and I know this has already been mentioned a couple of times on this forum, but I had to list it here, because otherwise mynidea would have a serious flaw).
14. Probably the most import point (although it isn't really a point) to all the people on this forum:
a) Don't get mad and/or upset when these some or all of these ideas have already been mentioned. Please kindly tell me, and I will edit this post accordingly. It was late and I was tired when I typed this, so I didn't do any research on previous posts.
b) I believe this is an important point that has to be looked at, and if you don't agree, please kindly tell me and if a valid reason why this wouldn't work, and not a reason in which you basically state that you want this game to be easy and that salvaging space stations and cities to get extremely rich extremely fast is your one and only mission in life.
I honestly believe that this is a serious issue and should really be looked at and revised even more than it already was in the 0.158 update and the new update to come. Starmade shouldn't be about blindly salvaging objects, there should be tactics and economies that have to be built from scratch. This will make single player less repetitive and harder (so you won't be done in just over 2 hours, which is how long it takes me to build a huge salvaging ship that is capable of salvaging an entire space station in just under 3 minutes), and in multiplayer it work more like in real life, with factories everywhere and a constant struggle to control the manufacturing of items and blocks.
