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Mining famously can be done poorly to catastrophic results. Humorous, but catastrophic results. Are we thinking anything along those lines for refueling? Is there going to be a way to mess up refueling so badly?

TL;DRRefueling can go wrong through bad piloting that damages the arm or ships, or through rushing the transfer so the nozzle bursts or ignites, while pressure and heat risks are planned for later tiers.

Dan TrufinRefueling Developer

There's two ways you can mess up refueling. First of all, if your pilot is crap, he will collide with the ship he's trying to refuel. He will hit it with the arm. There's so many things that can go wrong here. He will either damage the arm or damage the ship or damage the Starfarer. The other part where it can go wrong: if you're trying to do it faster, as in speed up the process once the ships are connected, and you don't know what you're doing, that nozzle can either burst, it can eject fuel into space, it can ignite, it can cause a lot of problems. We're also looking now, as a higher tier, at how to store more fuel. So you might not want to fill up your tanks all the way to the max and high pressure, especially if you're going into hot areas, unless you have a tank that is made for those high temperatures. So there will be certain conditions in which, if you have a highly pressurized tank, yeah, you will refuel faster. But if you enter a hot zone, if the pressure starts increasing, that fuel becomes unstable. You might blow your ship up. So we're looking in this direction too, but probably not for the first release. First, we want to do the basic stuff. And then, same as with mining, we keep building and building. That being said, with mining and refueling, while not directly connected, the idea was always that you mine, you refine, and then you can use whatever you refine to refuel. So that is kind of the entire chain, but that will be coming also a bit later.

Calling All Devs›Refuel and Repair·
Published on this date.2 Apr 2021