The question wasn't directed to me but I do the same stuff so I'll add my two cents. Right now the game doesn't really have a reason to grow massive quantities of food, defend bases with a huge number of turrets, or mine massive quantities of metal to build gigantic carrier CV's. I hope someday it does. Perhaps eventually you'll be able to mass produce stuff to supply your NPC's, or trade it to another faction for money. But it is easy to get into the "survival" aspect from a role playing perspective. You crash land on a planet, so you need water, food, and shelter. You need defenses. You need materials. You make bigger and better ships. You make more bases and defend them. And you want to set up facilities to produce things you need, including water, food, and ammunition. Particularly on a server with multiple people, you can specialize, set up a factory that mass-produces food and medical supplies for everyone that needs it. That is a realistic thing to do if you were to colonize a new planet. But for now, it is just another thing to do. You can make lots of cool buildings in Empyrion, including manufacturing and agricultural facilities, they aren't really needed but some people just like the manufacturing/production aspect of it.
I don't mind collecting plants, it is much improved with the logistics system. It would be even better if refrigerators could be modular, like cargo storage is. When automation is added, having an "auto harvesting" drone might be interesting. Water production is currently terrible. The existing water generator is OK to keep but they really need a base block that can do it, so it can be hooked up to base power, and connected to a cargo box for output. I have also made arrays of anywhere from 10-40 water generators, and it is super tedious to collect from them. Particularly considering they are not generating water, they are purifying it, since you have to put them in water. Alternatively, give us a large water generator, that is much faster and holds more stuff.
Already been mentioned but an auto sort button for cargo and inventories would be nice with options to sort various ways
I had trouble thinking of anything annoying lately, and was coming up empty until I read that... At this point, I find the most tedious aspect is in transferring stuff from my corpse/backpack to my inv. It would be GREAT if items from the backpack (unique container situation), upon hitting the TRANSFER ALL arrow button, remembered which inventory and tray slots they were in when I died. I keep my inventory and trays in a specific layout to make typical tasks faster/efficient. And yeah, the simple answer is 'Don't die', but there's always a mean gang of Zirax Shotties stuck just on the other side of the next door, waiting to prove to me that Epic Armor is still not enough. I should have just blasted the entire site to ash from orbit, just to be safe, but nooooooo, I just HAD to go in to check containers for Loot furnaces and warp engines that are too heavy to take home with me. But I digress. Backpack->memory. Please.
I agree a little bit on the water. I posted in the hopes for A10 thread about there being ice asteroids in space we could mine and convert to water in a constructor. A drone or functional crew maybe would be pretty darn cool for simple stuff like plant harvesting. I do have to say I sometimes enjoy staring at my garden and picking what I need to make some E-rations before a voyage into space. My garden is 64 plots, I don’t go bigger for the exact reason of trying to harvest and support something bigger.
Though not thinking of such a grand scale, I had similar thoughts of a robot or NPC "crewmember" to manage local resources like grow plots, water and oxygen generators.
My server allows bases up to 8.49 and i like to exploit that privilege. I like to make large bases that are supposed to connect or be flush with other bases or certain terrain features. However, spawning in any base at the right angle, position and depth very difficult with the current system. Placing large bases is especially frustrating. Often the base is wider than the camera angle of the drone meaning I can't see whole base. I've tried a work around of launching my drone from a hovering CV to get a view of more area but that is still not ideal. I know we also have the ability to orientate the green box with page up/down, insert/delete and 1/7 on the number pad. However, those controls are very imprecise. Insert and delete only rotate in 90 degree increments and page up/down tend to snap between completely buried or completely above ground. I know that in SP we have console commands to change the position and rotation of structures but that's not an option for multiplayer. I'd settle for the ability to control the orientation of the green base placement box in multiplayer the same way we control copy and paste ability in creative mode. However, what I really want is the ability to place bases with even more precision than that. I'd love to control base placement in the N menu and have a place to type the x,y,z coordinates of were I want the green box and then the ability to change rotation by typing an exact angle. I don't have a lot of play time to wait on stuff, so when I do get a bit I harvest in mass and then run everything through a couple hundred constructors or food processors. I still haven't had time to put in the farms so I'm still working on a smaller farm with 300 plots. I can make about 40 e-rations in one harvest. Our server has a faction bank mod andvl a virtualbackpack mod. Server tack size is 50k. When the server is wiped for the A10 update the bank and backpacks migrate. I keep the faction bank stocked with at least 50k fusion cells and I'm slowly building my own supply and the faction supply of e-rations to 1K each. When I reach that marker I'll start selling fusion cells, hydrogen bottles, oxygen bottles, grow pots and e-rations a my server's main trade station for credits. All of these items require water , food or both. Ironically they sell the best because they require the most tedium to make. I'm essentially operating at a commercial level and not just feeding and fueling myself. I also give a lot of care packages to new players and people I rescue. We lose stuff in PvP too. In addition to being a galactic tycoon...having a large cache of material will allow my faction to be the first to colonize the PVP zones when the server reboots for A10. So galactic warlord too I guess. Credits aren't really the currency people on the server, although the are useful. People use stacks of fusion cells and combat steel to barter with - if we hire other pvpers as mercenaries that is what they will probably want to be paid in.
Drill, flatten and Fill: Drilling with anything from the basic drill to the Epic Drill is ok until you hit rock, then it becomes painfully slow. Sure, it is harder than sand or soil, but it seems about 25-30% slower than it should be. Flatten is bizarre, as it picks what seems to be a random height and goes “and that’s flat”, when it’s anything but. Fill, like his brother Flatten, has a mind of its own, and could be called “Grow random spikes”, as this is what it does most often. I’ve spent countless hours trying to clean up terrain and usually resigning myself to a “close enough” result, that often involves a floating diamond of rock baring a striking resemblance to an iron vein.
Been playing more with Mass/Volume enabled, and the newest greatest annoyance is: Hand loading materials into RepairBays and, more importantly, the Blueprint factory. It takes a long time to feed that BA/CV blueprint. Really, the biggest QoL improvement they can make is linking the Factory and RepairBay to a CC container, as they have done with crafting devices.
Maybe like a 'lock' icon/button you could hit that keeps it in your backpack? That'd be super useful!
I wonder if a change to the order in which they fill the backpack would make all the difference. I forget which way it is right now. Don't they dump your toolbar first and then your backpack? Thus, when you xfer from your corpse your toolbar items are in the backpack and the last ten backpack items are left on your corpse. If they'd fill the toolbar first and then your pack, you'd be back in action... or something like that.
A) You're Aware that this is only for spawning bases, not Building them, Right? B) Why not? It works just fine!
would be nice to get a floating grid like projection that sits a few meters out. you could point higher or lower or change the angle like when placing a block and then hold a mouse click to fill, flatten or remove ground toward the grid.
Banging my head against a virtual brick wall, trying to stuff a 3,3,3 size shield generator into a small CV. You guys need to make smaller prefabs!
I do wish more players would focus on requesting more game option sliders to be added instead of asking for them to gut the game itself to suit their personal needs. With a resource amount slider of 1/2 to 10x, a slider for different xp types like gathering, killing, building, a slider for crafting time (not just blueprint) from normal to -100%, a slider for tool power from normal to 10x the power for faster filling/flattening...a slider for ship speed max may be needed also as I know more than a few people really hate the slow flight speeds and feel their rigs can handle it going faster. Perhaps a slider to also increase the amount of mob spawns also a 1/2 to 5x would be nice. That will remove most peoples personal grinding dislikes and allow for the base game to not be a cake-walk for new players while kicking the door open for all types of gameplay without needing to edit any game files.
Please allow group assignment of signal logic. It’s tedious to individually assign signal logic to each thruster/RCS when setting up a logic control scheme. It becomes DropDownSimulator3000 I’m a heavy user of Sig Logic (especially since control schemes will persist even if I regroup deceives). Thanks!
I'm with ya in spirit! But unfortunately, having observed how their design has unfolded, I do believe that these types of "constraints" are VERY MUCH INTENDED by the designers. They WANT to force players to make bigger constructs with some of the prefabs. That is what I have gathered. Maybe eventually a mod will emerge though! It might even improve game play, as long as other changes existed to balance things out . . .
My least fun thing lately: figuring out how to build in a way that works with structural integrity. I just spent a solid hour trying to figure out how to build a base over a shallow section of lake. I tried supporting the building by building down into the lake bed, but it wouldn't let me, it said there was something in the way (even though there clearly wasn't). So I was putting support beams horizontally reaching out to the shore, but since you can only place so many blocks at once, I ended up wasting tons and tons of blocks trying to reach the shore, but having the blocks collapse on me each time since they weren't reaching. I eventually gave up on the idea all together, despite how nice the area was. It's disappointing that the creativity if stifled in this way. It doesn't really add anything to gameplay, and come to think of it, anytime I encounter it I've been really pissed off by it, like when I'm salvaging a ship and a massive chunk comes off and I lose all the materials. I don't get why this feature even exists, it really adds nothing, and just takes away from many enjoyable aspects of the game.
