Star Citizen Live: Q&A Crafting and Base Building

So this is a big one because we really believe that base building will enable us to really change the universe. The way that players will interact with one another or not want to interact with one another. And it will become hopefully more of the backbone of the game where even if you want to interact with it or not, one way or another, you are always influenced by the gameplay loops of base building. So for example, maybe you're just a small miner and you want to just mine your resources and kind of ship that out and make a nice living out of that. Then for you, it might actually be good to have a small little base close by the mining resources to more efficiently do your gathering of your resources and so on. And the cool thing with base building is that we're trying to keep the possibilities as open as possible so that you can actually choose what you want to do with your bases yourself. So maybe you have these weird bases just tucked away in the universe where it's just like there's no electricity and you just use it to store away some of the stuff you found in the universe. Or maybe it is more of a sprawling trading hub for you and your organization. Or a base just built for the most efficient refining processes or search. Again, the guys know a little bit more about the specific processes. But from a visual perspective, what we're really trying to do is to just give you a beautiful base template that you then can let your imagination all lose. And kind of use it the way you want to use it as a player, even though it might be very different than other players.

Yeah, I think you really hit on it. It's very much a base can be used for whatever you want to use it for. That will provide options for you to do all kinds of stuff with it. And there should be or is likely to be relevant links into pretty much any kind of gameplay that you can think of.

Actually adding to that, it's a growing feature in addition to what we have already, right? So every gameplay loop that we have will also have its representation in the... Not every, but most of the gameplay features that we have will probably have representation in the base building aspect. And the bigger our game grows, the more features I introduce, they will also find a slot in your base.

Even if you don't have your own base, it's still impactful because you'll be visiting the other people who have made their bases and using their facilities. So even if you're not doing the work, it's still an interesting thing for you to use.

Yep, this is a big one indeed. I think I saw this asked 20 odd times. So the plan is that every base, every pot of land, every extraction pot will be visible across all the shards within a region. And then a lot of the functionality of the base will also be available across all the shards within a region. So if I make a base and I set up a shop, people on other shards can come visit and use my shop. The exception is going to be raiding and attacking a base. This can only occur on a single shard and which shard that is is dynamic based on the rule set. The easiest rule is always, is the owner online? Then the raid can only occur on that owner's shard. This means that if I'm on another shard and I rock up with a gun and I shoot the base, it'll prompt me, you'll have to change shard in order to attack this base. Obviously if shards increase, we see this less and less. But the advantage of that is that you'll never be in this scenario where your shard, you're not able to defend your base. You'll always be able to defend your base in this scenario.

There's a few things here. So there's lots of different crafting machines that do their processes a little differently. But most of them will have an internal buffer that lets them hold the results of their process until you're ready to pick them up. That being said, you can also have them directly put stuff in boxes as soon as it's ready. But if you're worried about people nicking it, you don't need to be so concerned because they'll be subject to the same sort of permissions as anything else in your base. So that's like the mag lock that stops people stealing your chair will also stop them stealing your cargo boxes. Unless they have permission to move them, they'll be mag locked to the output grid. Also, there's going to be some machines that will be able to send their crafting results directly to your location storage, whether that be your hangar or a freight elevator or something. So there'll be options.

Short answer, yes. So they will respawn. But it is very unlikely that they will respawn on the land plot that you already have. So if you already have a base, you already extracted it. Every mineral that was below your extractor. It's very unlikely that the deposit will respawn. So what we want to see there is players more moving around in their bases and basically going through to new locations and actually grabbing new resources. And to answer the economy part of this question, yes, that is a huge undertaking that we have to go through here. And that is like we really have to get certain resources out of the system and the system being our game. And that means that we as the system design team and everyone working on that, we really have to work closely with the economy team and make sure that like even everything that we pull out of the system is meaningful. And then we create certain values for certain resources because we really want to have like a player driven economy and we want to have a healthy in-game economy that is driven by our game. And it's a challenge, but we are definitely motivated to resolve that and get that like in a really good state.

So what you're talking about there is like the concept of resource sources and sinks, because having your extractor on your base is a source of resources until it's depleted. But then we need to make sure that there's also sinks in for that resource in various gameplay loops so that you don't just well, just have inflation essentially of just a buildup of resources you can't do anything with. So yeah, that'll be a very careful balancing act.

Yeah, interesting answer. You mentioned something that I think maybe not a lot of folks have considered this idea of having multiple or mobile bases. Obviously, you know, folks with the land claims and we'll talk about the land claims in a bit, you know, you build your home, you might stake out your home. This is where I store my stuff and I decorate and all that stuff. But for industrial purposes, while you could certainly build that location up, then go out, gather stuff, bring it back. There is a gameplay style where you then instead create smaller mobile bases and move and move them around as you need to stuff like this.

So you can still have your static home base with your first extractor, but at some point your deposit just runs empty and that you can still leave the extractor there if you like the look of it. But then if you still like the area and you don't want to move away, you can just disassemble the extractor and then decide to, okay, let's buy a new plot or let's move to a new plot and actually find another resource there.

That is a bigger topic because, yeah, so the TLDR or the short version is the mining that we have right now will change more drastically again. And we will revisit like other gathering methods that we have. Like we have mining, we have salvage and salvage will also get like a nice little treat. But let's start with mining. So on the mining side, we basically have to because of the quality that we add to the mineables that you will now find. We talked about that and we considered that, OK, with the mining system right now where we have multiple resources per rock, that doesn't make any sense because you might want to look for quality instead of finding like a specific resource. So we want to make it easier for the player to actually look for the specific resources they need for the crafting processes. So we will basically split up or we break out the randomness in the mineables that we currently have, but have bespoke mineable. So we will find the copper rock, the iron rock, the titanium. So the titanium rock and because what you're looking for is a better quality there. So you will still look for like the titanium rock that basically fits, like has the perfect quality, but you don't have to look for a rock that contains titanium anymore. And here we also want to emphasize or we want to utilize the new plan attack that was also talked about at CitizenCon where we want to make use of the biomes that we get through those. And then have like more meaningfully placed minerals on the planet. So you will find certain materials more likely at a riverside or in a certain biome versus in other biomes. So we are really looking forward to get more control over that. So, yeah, we are internally quite excited about that. And yeah, and additionally on the mining. So we now talked about like the minerals themselves. We will also be more concrete on the mineables that you find based on the profession that you picked. So if you are a ship miner, you will find ship mining deposits. If you are an FPS miner, you will only find FPS mineables. And if you are ground vehicle miner, you will find ground vehicle resources. And if you if you want to use your ground extraction tool in your base, you will find specific materials there. So what I'm saying here is that we don't have the shared minerals anymore that we currently have between FPS and ground vehicle mining. We will have the hard cuts. So everything you will find FPS in FPS mining, you will only find an FPS mining. Everything ground vehicle mining, only there, only ship mining, only there. So this, we will have a clearer separation so that we can actually encourage the different gameplay loops a bit more effectively.

I'm really looking forward to that. It'll mean that whichever kind of mining profession you choose to do, you'll have some valuable unique materials that you can only get with that profession.

It's going to be a lot more different materials as well.

The amount of materials that we will have is crazy.

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There's the thing that I mentioned at the beginning that Salvage will get also a little revisit. And something that I'm really happy and excited to tell you is that we will have some time to revisit it. And what we will do there is I think something that a lot of people already expected for the initial release. And that is in regards to the construction material that you actually get from structural salvage. That is that basically the ships are made out of certain components. And once you basically gather them through that, you will have those materials and then there will be processes to separate them. But this is something that is still being decided of what way we want to go down there.

The thing I really like about this is that it ties it into the dismantle side of crafting. That if you dismantle something, you'll get back some of what it's made of. Same thing with Salvage. Your ship just kind of becomes a portable dismantling fabricator thing.

But as an additional note, there will be some materials that you won't get back in the crafting process. So you will use some materials in the crafting process that are, let's say, volatile or in some way exclusive. So if you would then structural salvage your recently crafted vehicle, you might get some of the material not back at all. Like if, for example, bad example, but for an example, if you used antimatter in the crafting process, you won't get that back. You will just get back aluminum or copper and stuff like that. But those exclusive materials you won't get back in the reverse process of crafting.

Yeah, like we discussed earlier, we really want to make sure that players are able to kind of make the base their own and to also use the base for whatever new systems or existing systems that we have out there and gameplay loops, right? So for example, a hunter's lodge, you might want to tint it in a specific way with the buildings and so on so that it blends nicely into the environment so that it doesn't stand out or get any attention of other bypasses flying by. Where if you are building more of a trading hub, we want you to be able to kind of like, again, tint the buildings, maybe put logos on the sides and really kind of advertise like, oh, this is my location, come here, trade. And yeah, I really have different ways of integrated. We have a lot of beautiful planets that have very different biomes and colors and structures, and we just want to make sure that we are providing a nice palette of different tints and customizables to kind of make it fit within every biome, every planet where you want to build your base. Something that we showed in base building as well, again, that a lot of people caught up on is that a majority or a large portion of the buildings will also be able to be connected to one another. So we're looking at, we have generic buildings, and then the player can decide what they want to do within that building or how they want to tint it, and then those can be connected to corridors and other buildings and linked together or to a hangar, and you can build your own little infrastructure with that. Well, I think it's really, we're really excited to kind of see what players are going to do with those options.

Yeah, so there's indeed with the introduction of base building, there's a lot of possibilities out there for us. For now, we're very focused on establishing this high-tech visual very well. We have a specific set in mind in which we want to release with. After that, like we've always already or Declan discussed in his presentation, and already hinted at is that there is more functionality to come that we also want to look at, like for example, branching and trading and so on. And after that, it's really going to be a question about what kind of, do we want to expand the current high-tech set with new functionality, or do we want to start building a new set with a new aesthetic? But that is something that we first want to see how players are going to react to the initial set, and then from there, we'll make informed decisions based on the player's reactions.

Yeah, I understand where the question comes from. So one of the options that we will have with Decorative ER, the mode in which you get to decorate your place, is that you'll be able to kind of mag lock your furniture into place, and therefore only you or certain people with the right credentials are allowed to move the position of that object. In the future, there will be ways to disable the mag lock, I believe, but I'll have to look at Declan about this.

It will depend on security.

Again, for the initial release, we're still focusing on just letting you build your bases, and then in a future patch, we will start to really go into PVP, and then the mag locking discussion will definitely be addressed there as well. For now, we just want to make sure that people get to create their bases and that they have a possibility to just have a little bit of a safeguard with the beautiful things that they've collected over the universe and how they want to put them down. One of the ideas that we were also playing with, and we'll hope that maybe some players are daring enough to try it out, is perhaps have a ship trading base where you have your specific showroom ships there or something. But, yeah, you need to be daring that they're not getting nicked, I guess. Or, yeah, again, stuff for the future as well.

Yes, yes. Again, we're trying to make it very dynamic and open so that different bases can cater to different players and different player experiences. So you'll be able to build small bases and maybe even slightly larger bases, but it might take a while by yourself. And then, of course, you can just team up, and you can, together with the front, really quickly build a smaller base or really start to try to literally take things to the moon in the future. But you'll be able to build larger structures. We'll be recommended to do that in groups.

I think I saw some people discussing whether they would be able to sell services on their base, though. Yeah, I think that'll be pretty cool that you can build up some infrastructure and have people pay to use it.

Okay, when you say sell services, my mind went to a different place. What are you talking about?

I'm talking about, you know, I've built some really high-tier crafting machines, and I'm just going to let people come to my base and craft stuff with the best machines.

Yes, absolutely. But I'll talk about the current plans. So first of all, there's different kinds of blueprint. And most of them will be upgradeable through research. Different kinds of blueprint will get different benefits from researching them. So like a refining blueprint will get more efficient. So you get a better yield of refined goods for raw input. Or like a repair blueprint might be able to repair a little bit more effectively, stuff like that. But the one that everyone's probably asking about is the creation blueprint, which lets you make new stuff. And a higher tier one of those will let you craft the higher tier of the relevant item. So let's say you've already got the tier one blueprint for a gun and it has stats like fire rate and recoil. You'll be able to see on the crafting UI the stat range for those stat types. And the exact value that you get when you actually make the gun will be dependent on the quality of the resources that you put in. When you upgrade the blueprint to tier two, you'll see the tier two version of the gun and those stat ranges will be shifted. So it'll have a higher top end and a higher low end as well. It'll be on average better. But the actual number that you get is still dependent on the quality of the materials you put in. Of course, the higher tier blueprints also need you to bring more advanced materials to them. And related to that is that these blueprints have aspects, we call them. It's kind of like parts of the product. So like the barrel of a gun or the grip of the gun or something like that, which will influence different stats of the item. So if you put materials into the grip part of the gun, the quality of those materials might impact the recoil, but it's not going to impact the rate of fire. And this becomes especially interesting for the very highest tier of creation blueprints because then you'll get a choice of what materials to put in to certain aspects, and based on the choice you make, it will influence different stats. So you might be able to choose between improving the recoil or the reload speed, depending on which material you put in. Yeah, and then I guess the only other kind of blueprint that's interesting for upgrade is the upgrade blueprint itself. Because research and upgrade blueprints are not quite the same thing. But if you use an upgrade blueprint to increase the tier of an existing item, none of the existing stats or materials on that item matter anymore. It's just the new materials that you put in or the upgrade will affect the stats. And the important reason for this is so that whether you craft an item straight at tier 3 or craft it at tier 1 and then upgrade to tier 2 and then upgrade to tier 3, the resulting item will be the same if you use the same materials.

So you can't skip a step if you have the blueprint.

Yeah, if you have the creation blueprint, you can skip, and you skip straight to whatever tier you want. The upgrade basically only exists if you already have the item and you don't want to spend all of the resources to make a whole other copy of it. You just want to spend the smaller amount of resources necessary to turn it into the higher tier one.

And that upgrade blueprint, I assume one of the ingredients, is the original item.

Yes, yes.

And so you were speaking, you're speaking primarily of guns and items, but this system, one would assume is also applicable to the ships as well.

Yep, absolutely. And not only ships, also ship components. It's like something that we really want to make sure is that we don't want you to go through the process of, because you crafted your tier one item, you then have to disassemble it to just craft a tier two item, right? So that is like nonsense. So we really want to enable players to have their item and then use the upgrade to actually still have the item, but then the better version of that.

This is where we start to see the differential between not just individual ship models, but within the ship model itself. And when some decisions are made that affect the baseline of a ship, the one that folks can buy in Astro Armada or whatnot, those decisions don't happen in a vacuum. They have to account also for the potential upgrade path that is coming with crafting. If a ship is a certain way where you're like, well, I'm not really a fan of it in its base configuration, through time and effort on the player's behalf, maybe you can take a ship that you weren't totally happy with and now make it into something that becomes your daily driver.

Yeah, this calls back to the heavy balancing effort that Torsten was talking about earlier, that one of the big challenges is going to be very carefully balancing all of the different possibilities that you'll have access to with crafting. Because instead of just one ship with these values for these thrusters, the ship hull can change and the thrusters can change, multiple tiers of them, quality scaling, lots of potential for variation. So, yeah, we will be paying very close attention to this.

I think long time players can remember the very first outpost that ever appeared in 3.0 were almost always up on stilts because they couldn't deform the terrain. How well will our stuff blend in with the terrain? Yeah, so you'll be able to kind of again with the tinting you'll be able to pick certain tint palettes that work better with the biomes that are located. You can also put buildings around trees and stuff. If you put the building on top of the trees it will get rid of the trees with the nice precision placement mode through the construction ER mode. You'll be able to find a nice position and to kind of get some trees to maybe cover a little bit of your building as well. We'll see how that goes. Because we also have the construction drones that need to fly in and out so we'll have to we're taking those things in account. But you'll be able to kind of blend it in pretty well if you want and additionally we'll have some buildings that actually will be able to kind of reduce the signature of your base as well to kind of further kind of hide your base if you want to or in the other way like really make it stand out in the base or in the environment. But yes the idea is that we will have different tint palettes that fit with the different biomes that can be found on the planet.

One would assume there has to be some level of terrain manipulation though. Is that entirely automated by the system or will any of that be in player control?

The idea is that we don't want to fully allow the players to customize the terrain to their liking because that would take away from the value of scouting for a good location. So there will be buildings that will do a very light terrain manipulation just to make sure that the staircases work and so on. But the majority the best solution that we'll provide is the use of foundation tiles, the big concrete slabs that people get to place down and then on those they'll be able to put their buildings down. Those will deform the terrain so if you have a plot of land that is not particularly flat for you to build connectable buildings then the idea is that you would put down a foundation first and then from there on you'll be able to connect your buildings on top of there.

Alright, I suppose there's two ways to look at this. You've got your seller and the buyer if we look at the seller then you've either required your items or you've crafted them and you want to put them up for sale you can do that by placing them in a freight elevator listing them on a connected terminal or make a physical shop and then there'll be a moba glass app where you can say hey I have T3 bombs for sale everyone come and grab them before they're gone. And then as the buyer you browse the advertisements on this new trading app, go to the base and purchase them or if there is a very particular item that you want you can put in a buy order and you'll say I want this item this many of them, these stats deliver it to this location. Obviously that will cost more because someone has to accept that and then do the delivery but it means that you get a very particular item that you want.

So it sounds like one of the major components of base building will be this next major step forward in player trading that folks have been waiting for. Like right now there isn't a super easy system of I'm going to give you this and you give me credits in return. So it sounds like most of that comes online for the first time with base building.

Yeah and it'll be interesting to see actually the spread between local shops and people who band together to make big market bases where it's shared and hundreds of people can come and sell their stuff.

Yeah, so there's a lot here. I'll kind of walk through just plots of land in general and then we'll talk about how the land can fall into that. So when you go to acquire a plot of land to build on there's a couple choices you need to make straight off the bat. We have a general plot which allows you to build anything and then there are prospecting plots which are a little bit smaller they're cheaper and they're more geared towards mining. You'll see like a square layered on the terrain and that's basically your current selected plot of land. You can grab a face of it make it a rectangle, make it a bigger square and this is you selecting the surface area that you want and the cost scales up with the surface area. If you were to purchase a one by one kilometer and then another one by one kilometer it would actually be more expensive because the cost will take into account the total surface area you own on the planet. Where the beacon comes in is that you kind of skip this initial UEC cost for purchasing a plot. You just use the beacon and you have your plot of land. From then onwards if you bought with UEC or used a land claim beacon there'll be a reoccurring UEC tax and if you fail to pay that tax over a period of time you'll begin to lose rights to your base and eventually you'll lose complete ownership of the land, complete ownership of the building. They could be looted, someone else can buy up that area. It's very important that we avoid this concept of like a dead base. We don't want people to be able to just go AFK either for a year even though they stacked up billions in their account. We still don't want them to be able to have a dead base. We want to free that up for the players. In addition to that there will be some limitations where you can buy plots for land and use beacons. We're going to have for one of them National Park both in lawful and lawless areas and this it's a no build zone and this allows us to reserve land that's pristine for exploration, it's pristine for resource gathering and so on. When you have your plot of land there will also be an exclusion zone around it where no one else can buy or build so you can't get boxed in. That is a high level summary I suppose of the current plan for land claims and plots in general.