TL;DRThe current plan is that material quality cannot be increased, to keep rare materials valuable and player trading meaningful, while lower-quality materials stay useful as secondary refining inputs.
I'll start with a hot question. Current plan is no. You won't be able to increase the quality of the material. And there's a few aspects that go into that. Firstly, we would like rare materials and valuable materials to remain rare and valuable. Concern being that if I can take a large chunk of low quality, condense it into high quality, given enough time, players will have high quality everything. And that greatly devalues the future player trading opportunities, where we really want to see the scenario of a player finds a super rare, high value ore deposit. And perhaps on their player base, they set up a shop, and then you have people coming to your shop and buying from you, and you get to interact with them and so on. The second part is there is a need for the lower and mid quality to have greater value. At the moment, because bigger number is better, everyone's searching for the higher quality. So to resolve this, our plan is with the refining updates that you have two ingredients when you're refining. One of them will be a primary — it could be two or more, to be fair — two or more could be secondary. And the quality of the secondary determines how much of it you need, whereas the quality of the primary is used for the refined material. So if it's iron — we always go for the steel example — if you're making steel, primary is iron. 750 quality iron makes 750 steel. Carbon, the quality is not too important. So you can get a massive amount of carbon, however much you need, of terrible quality. Shove it in and get your steel.
Not quantity. It's just for the secondary inputs. You need less of it if it's high quality, but you can still use any quality. So you can farm up loads and just shove it in as secondary.
So there's a purpose for the lower quality. And to be very honest, it's something that we discussed a lot, if we want to go down this road. And as Dec already described, one of the main reasons why we want to stick with this approach of you not being able to upgrade the materials is that we still want you to search for higher grades, that we don't want you to hoard lower grades because at some point you will be able to upgrade. And for that reason, we came up with some solutions of making the lower quality actually worthwhile holding onto, especially then once we have the refining process in.
Yeah, and when you find those really high level ones, we want that to be exciting, we want that to feel like a moment, and if you could just get higher easily, you would dilute that experience.
It seems to me like you're finding a nice compromise here then. For the people who gather casually, there's a path, there's a use for the lesser quality stuff they get, but for the people who dedicate themselves, like "I am going to be a miner, that is my job," because you're going to keep those higher resources more valuable, that effort is going to be more rewarding to those people because they're going to be able to sell that stuff.
Exactly. That is the point. Because with that, we open up the opportunities for players to sell it. If every player is able to upgrade their materials, then we swamp the market with high quality.
TL;DRSeveral initiatives are underway for inventory image quality and responsiveness, with progress on a significant cause of slowness, and the stated desire is to make loading instant.
Yes. So for the images, there's a handful of initiatives underway. There's no anti-aliasing on the images, so that's one of the things we're going to look into. There's improvements to the framing. You'll see some things that are zoomed out or zoomed in compared to the box. There is lighting and shadows. And then for the responsiveness and the snappiness, it's a work in progress. It is our desire to have it instant.
I'm in a number of chats for visibility. There was a big conversation. They found a big cause — not the only cause, there's never only one source for something — but they made a nice big leap in some discovery earlier this week. And I wish I could remember what the heck it was now. But yeah, they're currently making progress.
TL;DRShops currently sell resources only at zero quality because of a tech limitation, and the design is for markets with multiple quality levels, with player trading intended to be the best deal.
They'll end up selling materials that have quality. They won't sell the super high quality stuff, and equally, if you sell good quality to a shop, it'll pay more, but the best deal is probably going to be on the player trade market, because that's where people have the most money.
We'll have a market with multiple quality values. You'll be able to go there and pay more for higher quality and less for lower quality. And the same, vice versa: if you want to sell your own stuff, you'll get more for higher quality and less for lower quality. That's absolutely the design, and we'll get there; we just couldn't get there last release.
But what Dec said, and I want to highlight that, is that we really want to have player trading standing out in comparison to trading with NPCs. So we want to make sure that, sure, you will be finding different qualities from NPC traders, but we want to encourage you to actually trade with players there.
And eventually it'll all be tied together. Whenever a player's trading to another player, we'll be tracking that and adding it to the overall simulation. We've talked about having StarSim, the simulation that knows everything that the players are doing, plus all the things that we're expecting the NPCs to do, so that when players are buying stuff for one price, that is reflected in the NPC prices as well.
TL;DRThe team feels good about getting the first tier of crafting out, praising the team effort and the player feedback, while stressing it is only a first step with much more planned.
We asked Dec to do a lot at the last minute, but the whole team came together. It's the first step. There's a lot more that we want to do with crafting, but just getting that first tier of crafting out felt really good. That first step that we needed to take to get it into players' hands, to start iterating on it — and we've got a long ways to go, but there's a lot of cool features coming.
It was nice seeing the avalanche of feedback. You saw some people, they wanted XYZ to be improved. You saw people crafting guns that were 900 quality. And then there was a helmet that was bugged that I had to fix, which I was a bit annoyed by. It was very nice to see it go out.
It even helped internally, because the people working on it were all motivated to get this feature in really good quality, because they themselves are either a fan of crafting or really a fan of tying things together in our game. So that definitely helped a lot.
TL;DRInventory bloat is to be addressed with quality-related work plus management tools like folders grouping variants, merging containers with averaged quality, and splitting containers without changing quality.
There's a couple of things in the works for the quality itself, which will help with the bloat. And then, as you mentioned, the crafting guide — there's some inventory adjustments and management tools. The first one is kind of like a folder structure. So if you have 20 variants of copper, they'll be inside a folder. You click the folder and then you'll see your 20. So as you're scrolling through the freight elevator, your inventory, it'll look much cleaner until you want to dive in and see all the details. The second one is merging and splitting. So merging: people have half-empty boxes they're holding all over the place. If they're low quality or you're not too bothered about keeping them separate, you could just stick them all together. The quality would average out based on the SCU weights. And then splitting is kind of the obvious opposite, where you take part of the box into two boxes. And that's crucial for player trading, right? You don't want to put all your high quality ore up for sale. You want to take half of it and put it up for sale, or maybe you want to share it or sell it.
So this is more about, if you have a 16 SCU crate, you convert it into two 8 SCU crates or into several 1 SCU crates. So you basically split up the volume into smaller chunks. So in comparison to the merging, this will leave the quality unaffected. It just creates new containers holding the same material.
TL;DRMining modules and gadgets will be craftable at some point, with ship components being added to the craftable catalog, and the intent is that most gameplay-affecting items become craftable.
Yes. A lot of items that we will have or we already have in our game, all of them will be craftable at some point, and we will make sure that every item that is craftable actually is affected by the quality of the materials that you use for it, so that there is a meaningful reason for you to actually craft those items. And for 4.8 we are already expanding our catalog of craftable items. So we are expanding it to ship components, and those will also be affected by the stat improvements that you get from the quality. So you will be able to craft — correct me if I'm wrong, Dec — power plants, coolers, life support generators. Weapons — weapons we disagree on — shield generators. Shield generators are there. What am I missing?
The refueling one's an interesting one. We probably won't get stats for that, but because there are some refueling changes, there will be some craftable refueling elements.
I'm going to roll you back on the statement "all of the items will be craftable." I want to say most of the items. I know somewhere there is going to be some limited edition Vanduul Kewpie doll or something that we give out as an Alien Week thing, and somebody's like, "No, that was the only time you get that."
There's probably websites that have datamined it, so I'm going to get this wrong, but I think there was about 300 and something in missions, and then there was roughly about 1,000 that didn't manage to make it into missions, which were like tint variants.
And I know there are some still coming online. Next week we release 4.7.2 with a bunch of new missions for Nyx, and some of those missions reward new unique blueprints that aren't in the system right now. So some of those blueprints that are in the 4.7 branch don't even come online until next week when 4.7.2 comes online.
TL;DRBlueprints currently come from missions, with planned sources including reputation milestones, one-time-use physical datapads that can be sold or gifted, and NPC shops for common items.
At the moment, it's just missions. The plan is reputation, so when you reach a reputation milestone, you can get a blueprint. Datapads is a big one, so there will be a datapad that has a blueprint on it, and then you can download it, and that's a one-time download. Or you could sell it to someone else, gift it if you want to.
So just to add on that, it's a physical datapad that you can find. So it's something that we can place in inventories, that we can place in armor pieces from NPCs. So something that you can physically pick up.
Treasure hunters. A whole new treasure hunter profession of people who go out there and do contested zones and collect blueprints to sell to other people.
Yeah. But as Dec already stated, important note there is they are one-time use. So once they are consumed, the blueprint is then imprinted to whoever used the datapad. So if you already got the blueprint on the datapad, make sure that you make some money out of it, I would say.
There's also NPC shops, so more common stuff that we're not too bothered about there being an adventure to go and find, like a decoration. You could buy that blueprint in an NPC shop.
So items have different tiers. The default blueprint you get is tier one, and then you could research it to tier two. And tier two will require different materials. It'll have access to a different banding of stats, which are higher than tier one. And in order to get to that tier two, you have to complete the research task, which we kind of just alluded to — do X, Y, Z, initiate your research. Once it's done, you've got access to tier two. And then you can go to tier three for most items, and then ships go up to tier five.
So it's a tech limitation at the moment, where if we want a red version of a blue helmet, we've got to make a new entity, and the red is bound to that entity. And so in order to craft that red helmet, you need a blueprint for that red one specifically. That's not the long-term goal. The long-term goal is a paint-like system, but the paints aren't physical. So it's, in a very British way, a digital license to apply the paint.
TL;DRSalvage turns debris into RMC, which no recipe uses yet but future blueprints will, and disintegration is meant to yield processed materials matching what the ship was made of, with some loss.
Salvage consists of two different methods of how you convert the ship debris that you found into material. One side is RMC, and right now I don't think we have any recipes making use of RMC. We don't yet, no. In future patches, we will have blueprints that actually will make use of RMC. So RMC will be used as a craftable material there. On the other side, the construction materials that you get from the disintegration process: right now you get the construction material. That was never the intent. We always wanted the materials that you get from disintegrating the ship to be based off what the ship is actually made of. So an example is, if you find a Vanduul ship, you get a Vanduul material out of it. If you find a Gladius, you will get some GT alumnide, which is the Aegis material, from it. So you get these processed materials in a certain quality, which the ships were made of, and then you can process them and re-utilize them for the crafting process. So like everything that we dismantle, the goal is that this also applies on the larger scale, which is the disintegration of ships. So that means that the materials that you basically recycle from them have the quality that they were made with. You lose some amount of the material, but at least the materials that it was made of, you can repurpose them with the quality that you found them in.
And just a note on those, the Vanduul materials, those will be exclusive to this collection method, so to speak. So they'll be a high value in the salvage game.
TL;DRSome boss-associated missions and blueprints already exist, and the team definitely plans blueprints from boss-fight missions and loot; the Apex Valakkar fight isn't in the game yet and was reworked.
The datapads would be great. I think for 4.7 we did introduce — I might be throwing Elliot under the bus here — I think we introduced a couple missions for the Omandi and the Apex Valakkar. So there's boss-fight-ish associated blueprints at the moment. But the datapads and blueprints will be the good use case there.
Associated with the missions that you can complete for boss fights, as well as the loot that you can collect around a boss fight. Yeah, we definitely plan on that.
Well, we got something together that was playable, we tested it, and it wasn't good enough, so we made some changes. That's how you make a better game.
To be fair to you, there's also quite a few non-combat ones that we don't have planned yet because it's a different process, especially when it comes to food and drink.
It has improved features. So proximity loot is very nice. You can take the one SCU StorAll with you, and you can just hoover up the loot as you go. It needs to be snappy, though. It needs to interact quickly. It needs to be instant. So we're aware of that. And we are proud of the features that it's gone out with, and we are continuing to work on the interactivity and the responsiveness.
Yeah, it's nice to see an improvement to the inventory system. It's frustrating to see some of the things that we wanted to get fixed that didn't make it into the build. It's frustrating to see some of the performance limitations that we haven't been able to solve yet, but we're actively working on it. It'll continue to get better.
Yes, just the whole thing scaled up as far as the inventory icons. And then not in 4.8, but related to that, is we will have the support for widescreen, for dynamically sizing the inventory panels, and you'll have the option to scale up and down the icons yourself. And if you scale them all the way down, they just turn into a text list instead of a series of icons.
For 4.8, we went with the larger icons, just to make it more visible. And then the scaling is coming, and also the improvements to the actual rendering of those icons.
So we have the rotation of the icon within the inventory box. And if they're broken, that's my fault, because I set those up. Don't tell Ian this, but I put the undersuits the wrong way around, so they're facing ass-front.
Well, to be fair, they won't have stats. Eventually they would — stuff like weight. But it's just nice to craft your own backpack. So we're adding that blueprint in.
I think we're very proud of it, and we love the feedback we receive. It's great seeing people interact with it. And we'll continue to iterate, continue to build upon it. It's a big feature. It's going to be a long-running feature. So we're excited to have it out.
Get out there and try it if you haven't. Start playing with it. Give us your feedback, because we're going to be working on it actively for quite a while, and there's a lot more features to come and a lot more iteration to come, and I'm really excited about where it's going.
TL;DRA copy of every land claim exists on all shards in a region so none can be claimed twice, shop inventories are shared, and raids happen on one dynamically chosen shard where attackers and defenders get transferred.
Hello, within a region (e.g. Europe) a copy of every land claim / base will exist on all shards, so the same land claim cannot be taken by two different people.
Assuming the owner has opened up their base to the public, you can access their player-run-store on any copy of the base, or use their crafting / refining facilities if you have permission to do so. For the stores, the inventory of what's for sale is shared across all shards.
However, when it comes to raiding a base, this can only occur on a single shard. Which shard this happens to be is dynamic depending on the circumstances, the easiest example is: If the owner of the base is online and at their base, then the shard they're on is the only shard where this base can be raided.
If you attempt to attack a base and you are not on the correct shard, then you will be given the option to transfer to the correct shard. Likewise party or org members arriving to defend would be transferred to the shard where its kicking off so they're able to help.