@Hector G , what Kassonnade said, and you can pick up enough crystals on Akua's moon for several jumps. They usually occur on the flat plains there.
Yeah I just recently left Akua and thought I'd have to go back to farm it. I did find some on Omicrons moon in the swamps. If that info is in the PDF then at least I can plan my trips knowing where I can find it and manage warp fuel appropriately.
Some resources in 7 are noticeably less bountiful than they were in previous versions. Before, if you started on Akua you could gather enough crystals from lake bottoms to give you a good start while harvesting seaweed for food.
7.3 So I just put some hardened steel like 40 blocks into my blueprint factory... and I get 123 Sathium back. Now THAT is sweet. Just from robbing POIs I get a whole pile of great raw material that I cannot get anywhere until I start warping around. Is this the planned behaviour going into the future? It seems a little too sweet.
I would say the factory is too abusive. It is supposedly a place holder until they replace it with a physical systems. I would also assume a proper recycling system would give little to no rare resorces back. Right now resources seem very over abundant. This could be only a alpha issue as they want quick progression for testing.
What kind of a sandbox building game would this be with almost no resources ? If I want to build only, I will do it with a full fledged 3d suite, not with a game. This looks like an evasive maneuver to avoid making proper NPC content / plot, and force players along a definite path. There are other ways of doing this, and I would expect a guy of zillion ideas like you could see this easily.
I'm open to the physical factory idea, like I can make a factory where I want and build something there...and it will be output there. And then I can build other things elsewhere.. But I agree, I don't think it makes sense to chuck rare resources. It's highly rewarding to get the rare resources back. I also agree that when you set resources to "Medium", it gives you a really good amount of resources to work with.
I never said no resources, I said Limited/No "Rare" Resources to be refund when recycling or using the factory. This means if you want a lot of rare resources you can't just up and toss a PoI into your factory. You would have to actually go mine it from the proper planets. The issue i have with the current system is that you don;t even need to leave the first planet to build anything. Just take junk into the magical Smelter/Recycler/Constructor/Manufacturing/Shipyard we call a factory and tada pop out your ship. Blocks and items are supposed to be resource and level locked. Until you meet the requirement you should have to work for it. Level are a joke because I can dig a hole to max it out. Resource locks are a joke because I can use the factory to get what I need with out going to the proper planets. This has nothing to do with NPC , I want them as much as any one else. Heck they could be a source for rare resources. they would not be on the starter worlds. Plot, That been missing from day one, and making the factory return less rare resources is not going to slow or hinder that. You think changing the return amount in a factory is going to take a huge amount of coding and time. I suspect not. Force Player, I guess you can call it that but I see it as slowing an easy exploit and give player a reason and incentive to reach for other planets. Right now all it is is Yeah, I got to planet X with a new resource but I already built everything that this new resources can make so nothing new here I will just stock up and leave.
Well I think it's just too bad : if I find an alien machine and dismantle it with a screwdriver, I can recover every part. If they don't want players to have the materials the POIs are made of, then they should not have the POIs made of these materials in the first place. How did these POIs get there, first of all? I don't have a problem with building on the first planet, really. Lots of players think that the tech tree / leveling should be changed for something more in line with "skills", and proposed that tech be unlocked in more coherent manners in game. This is what the game is trying to bypass with a cheap shot on resources. I believe it could have everything to do with NPCs and quests : forcing the players to go to another planet just to get the materials that are sitting in his face under the shape of POIs is a cheap trick. If they want to have the players moving around they can do it in many more ways. Even if a planet has plenty of resources, these are not infinite. Players can stay longer if they wish, but at some point they will have to go elsewhere because they will have depleted all resources. Why forcing the same pace on everyone ? Is this what can be called "An absolute free-roaming experience" ? No, that is not what I think. I think changing only one aspect that already seems stable is a waste of time, and changing lots of aspects that are also already stable is a proportionally greater waste of time. Taking one issue out of the whole will never give a good idea of how much we are spinning around, back and forth with nerfs and buffs, and adjustments to material, fuel, etc. In essence, they are "fine tuning" a game that is far from being complete, although when some players ask for specific issues to be fine-tuned they are served with "this will come later, in Alpha it's important to add features in the game, and fine tuning comes later". Want some quotes ? It is not an "easy exploit" to spend hours looking at walls of rock to get enough materials to build a vessel, or to keep the mouse clicking for hours to dismantle a POI. If they want to get the players moving, then they should call them with missions, quests, messages, contracts, name it, but surely not by simply making the planet vanish under their feet. I have to add that you clearly see this issue with the "veteran bias". New players and those who really don't like grinding might not see this game getting more artificial difficulties added as the "open world space sandbox survival adventure" it is supposed to be. An "open world" where you have to go from A to B to C in a definite time ? News to me.
Below is my feedback about resources. Number of Resources I want to see more resources, not fewer. It seems odd to me that there are several "mystery" resources, like Zascosium and Erestrum that don't correspond to elements that exist, yet things commonly used in reality aren't there (aluminum, titanium, lead, platinum, chlorine, sulfur, uranium). Adding every element on the periodic table would clutter the game, but now I think it is over-simplified. Please bring in a wider variety of resources, suggestions would include aluminum (or titanium) as a lightweight metal for ship building, uranium (or thorium) as an alternate energy source, lead for ammunition as well as radiation shielding, and hydrocarbons as a source of plastics and alternate fuel source. Yes, I know some people hate mining and resource collection, but in my opinion the way to address that is to make it easier for those people to trade for rarer resources, rather than dumb down the resource collection too much. Collecting resources is one (of many) ways to kill time in the game, and some people like doing it. Extraction Methods I'd like to see more resource types. Right now everything is extracted using a drill, which works like a high-tech mining pick. Mining used to be voxel based, now it is rocks. Which is better? Keep both! The voxel-based mining made more sense for ores where the resource is likely to be in veins where large amounts of material need to be filtered through. I think it made more sense for metals like iron, gold, and copper. The new "find the nugget" based mining makes sense for resources that are found in clusters. This might be deposits like coal (hydrocarbon) where it forms as a cluster, something like cobalt (or sometimes iron) which might originate from a meteor impact. But currently there's only one liquid resource (water), why not liquid hydrocarbons (oil or tar), gas hydrocarbons (natural gas), or other gas (extract oxygen and hydrogen from atmosphere?) It would be cool to build a well and drill for certain resources that way. Silicon exists in the game as an "ore" but in reality is not produced that way at all. You don't mine silicon, real glass is made out of sand. You should be able to take rock dust (same source material as used for cement) and extract silicon from it. New Environments I believe adding more diversity to resources can make the game a lot more interesting when adding more realistic planets: Extremely cold planets or moons wouldn't have liquid water, they might have ice. But they might have pools of liquid methane or ammonia, which could be fuel sources. (Methane is a hydrocarbon, so it could be used as a fuel source, or converted to plastic, even on a lifeless world.) Extremely hot planets may have certain resources that are solid on our world be liquid on that world. For example lava on earth contains iron, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, and other elements - why not extract them? Gas planets may not even have a core you can land on, but they could be a valuable source of hydrogen and helium - if those were useful resources. Currently hydrogen exists but can only be made from water, helium is not used in the game. Resource Abundance I think that certain resources should be nearly unlimited. On most planets, iron and silicon would be virtually infinite. (As would aluminum if the game had it.) The idea of running out of iron after building a few large buildings is crazy, do you know how much iron exists on earth? Magnesium is also pretty abundant, unlike in Empyrion where it seems to be rare as gold (in my current seed anyway). Iron, nickel, cobalt, and silicon are extremely common in asteroids. You shouldn't need to find an "iron" asteroid, most of the asteroids are going to have iron in them. Resources that are actually limited would be things like copper, gold, and neodymium, as well as the "made up" ores like Sathium, Erestrum, and Zascosium. Neodymium (and all rare earth elements) are actually rare and if anything there's an excessive amount in Empyrion. I have stacks of neodymium ingots that I'll never use for anything, and I ignore most deposits because there's so much of it. "Trade Only" Resources There could be more resources which exist only for the purpose of selling them, rather than using resources only to make things. Right now, gold exists in the game, and is used only to turn it into money. There's no reason we couldn't have silver, platinum, or rhodium - even if the game doesn't use it today, you could just mine it and sell or trade it for something useful. When the game has something like missions or quests, you could also be assigned a task like "Deliver 500 platinum ingots to Acme Resource Company on Omicron" and get a reward for it. Water, Hydrogen, and Oxygen Water is a resource used in the game for several things, notably food production. It can also be used to create hydrogen and oxygen. However, you cannot convert hydrogen and oxygen back into water, which may be useful on dry worlds or up in space. You can't extract oxygen from the atmosphere, even on worlds with oxygen content. There are oxygen tanks, but you can't build a hydrogen tank, or a water tank. Why not? Why do we have to lug around water jugs, rather than being able to fill some central tank with water? Why couldn't we attach water, hydrogen, or oxygen extractors to a base that is adjacent to the water?
I think surface rock shouldn't be spawn locked by biome, at least for the very basic ore (iron, copper and silicon). Just a QOL thing. These 3 should be available in all biome on the starter planet. The thing is, most biome contain only 2 type of ore, so you have to travel (sometimes very long distance) on foot to get the third resources required to craft the first portable constructor. Considering the very small amount of resources we get per small surface rock, it wouln't have any impact on mid or late game anyway. On my last start, it literaly took me an hour and a half before I find an iron rock.
You can convert stone to the three basic ores, though the ratio is a bit on the grindy side. It would probably be better if the build time was longer and the sone requirement was about half of its current rate.
The conversion rates used to be half of what they are now . I think we could use increased crushed stone drops, but honestly the point of producing ores this way is to fill in small-scale early-game resource deficiencies; you wouldn't want to try building a large ship just from crushed stone at this point.
That's correct, but I was mostly talking about the first 2-3 ores required to actually craft the first portable crafting unit. you might start with one depending on the "difficulty" setting. I always do all my testing on hard.
Playing a new game in alpha 8, been going for about 25+ hours now co-op. We have had no meteors and across multiple systems, found ONE asteroid with resources in it (a random iron asteroid somewhere). Is this bugged? I flew through an asteroid belt in a complete circle around the system and even though it's supposed to have sathium and magnesium, I found nothing. The planetside resource nodes feel alright, although promethium and pentaxid both tend to be much smaller than I'd like.
Current resource selection is fine. Number of deposits is barely adequate for single player dont even want to think about how much of an impact it has on multiplayer, however this can be fixed easily, idea will be below. Size is tied to above, as is, they are too small. Drop rate will depend on if you are making this a combat based game or a building one. As is I think the drop rate is fine and the deposits should be worked on. My feedback. Give us greater control over the games options. If you add an option for deposit size/amount instead of just poor/average/rich, as well as an option to set a respawn rate on them, it would solve just about all the questions/issues here. In fact, you should give more options for every aspect of the game. It will add a great deal of lifespan to the game and multiplayer really needs it badly in my eyes. Give admins the ability to create a server that is a grind. Or removes the grind. can force a pvp focus, a pve focus or mix just via settings...like increasing rate of pve spawns around key resources, creating drone attack waves to defend against. Just more control over everything...and that should include the ability to spawn a resource anywhere when needed and even the ability to announce it on the server. Imagine a PvP server created where "resource" is very rare and the admin wants to get some PvP action going...spawns that resource on whichever planet and announces it server wide. Let the chaos commence!
