What is the upgrade system? How are we expecting this tier system to work?

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.