The Quarry Ai block, Automatic salvaging!

[Giegue]

Eventually admin commands will be removed from single player once the developers finish the none creative mode, so you're going to need a better way to get resources than slowly dissolving a space station or getting into a lethal dog fight with pirates early into the game.

We already have BOBBY so why not get another Ai to do it?

The Breaker will control the ship core, salvage computer and any storage modules next to it.

Once activated, it will fly in a random direction until it finds something to salvage, this can be toggled in the ai config menu.

Once it finds something it will start to slowly break the object and place anything it finds into any plex storge modules placed next to the computer.

Once these modules are filled, or the item is complely salvaged, it will fly back towards the players location (or the players home base depending on what you set it to do) and alert you when it arrives so you can collect the treasures it find while you were out exploring.

If the ship is attacked while it is salvaging or finding an item to salvage, it will try to escape to the player or the home base, the AI cannot control weapons and only 1 Ai can be active at any 1 time so be sure to give it some powerful shields and thrusters if you want it to survive for long.



The Ai block is also unique in that it cannot be bought in the shop, but it can be manafactured using the recipe you spawn with, shops also give the recipe for free. This is used as introduction to the factory system, and how it can be used to make various blocks using a recipe and components.

The tutorial begins once you place down a build block, and teaches you about some more advanced concepts like turrets, factions and factorys.

 

[mou]

I can\'t imagine hundred of salvaging bot lagging server and getting money for lazy asses

 

[Jcewazhere]

I immediately thought of the quarry from the Feed the Beast modpack for Minecraft, this idea sounds more like a Turtle; still cool but very different.

I thought of an installation you could set up on a planet, that requires power, and stuffs the items into chests. Basically exactly like the MC quarry. Keeping others from stealing the items out of it, or just blowing up the planet it is on would probably be difficult if not impossible though.

Have you seen the ComputerCraft for Starmade forum post? If you\'re thinking of an AI which can multitask well I can think of nothing better than a Turtle.

Another problem with my idea is the quarry would have to be incredibly fast, I built an ugly but effective salvager with almost 10,000 salvage beams on it that could eat a planet pretty quick. Far quicker than the quarries I\'m thinking of could.

If you stuck a turtle in that salvager and then went afk, or even offline for the night if it\'s on a server I think it would be rather OP. But no moreso than the current catalog, or how mining beams seem to take no power.

 

[Sir Lego]

this would be awesome for a hunter type mothership. It could fly out and kill something with the bobby AI module, then the swarms of scavenger drones could pick apart the enemy ship.

This would really help fleet development.

 

[z1967]

So far, a few people have commented on this thread. Arguments have been brought forth about this being an amazing suggestion, or how incredibly OP it would be. So lets look at various problems and possible solutions.

Large drone fleets consisting of hundreds of drones

As mou stated, these would be incredibly laggy if used in mass amounts. So somehow they would need to be hard to use in massive quantities. a possible solution is to require a \"home station\" or a drop off and docking point. These could also be mounted on ships but a configurable limit could be set by the admin of the server. This would make it so you have to expand your systems in order to accommodate more drones. And if you want to spawn a ship with more drone spots then allowed, an angry red message pops up that says, \"SHIP HAS TOO MANY DRONE DOCKS. CANNOT SPAWN DUE TO LIMITATIONS BY SERVER ADMIN.\" value in config file can be set to -1 for infinite amount of docks per station or ship. another method is to make the ships a different color diamond on radar, maybe eye-hurt yellow or something like that to make them very, very visible.

What would happen when drone goes out of render?

The drone can only target blocks in the sector it is put in or maybe the surrounding sectors. That way, a planet on the other side of the galaxy cannot be salvaged by your drones. Another solution (and possibly more laggy) is to make the drones their own chunk(that\'s what its called right?) loading entity. This is unfavorable for servers as a greifer could release several large salvage bots to the other ends of the galaxy to open up too many chunks for the server to handle. this is could lead to a possible single player only approach to this or another config option for the server admins.

Drones are easy prey for players and pirates

Protect them then, its not hard to slap on a few small turrets to discourage others form attacking it. or a separate Ai ship could be assigned a follow order to defend the salvage drone. this would also be useful for other things. Another argument would be that having the drones be vulnerable is a good idea as then it would encourage a \"smarter\" implementation into the game so people don\'t ruin its reputation by sinking ALL OF THEIR MONIES into it right off the bat.

My opinions

This is a good idea as it would lead for some sort of other use in the drone fields. As an introduction to the mechanics of factories? I would ask to consider something else, perhaps maybe giving them a random useless recipe like for laser pistols and have them learn using that. returning to players is not something I would like as I may be dueling when my Derp_Salvage_5 might show up with its L5 loot in its storage. Also, personal note to Schema, this should probably be debated on Reddit before even thinking of implementation to remove out the kinks in it before hand.

Thanks for reading the wall of text.

 

[War Dog]

Like with factories, nothing will happen unless a player is in a nearby sector.

So the whole automated ANYTHING is pretty meaningless unless the devs are willing to completely rewrite parts of the game..