Cybob19

I learned a while ago to not go into a tail-spin with changes NQ makes.... it's a beta, stuff is in flux- changes do happen. I'm prepared to update my ships, but I'd like to know what will be "final" before I jump off a cliff and fix things that may end up changing. I cannot fathom NQ keeping the detection as it currently is- as it's clearly broken... that being said, if they keep it as is and things go live... I'll give it a week and adjust... 

It's like peeps moving to sanctuary on live before HQ tiles were added during a PTS, though unlike PTS where people had to go out of their way to test things(I know so many people complained without actually testing things), NQ has brought the preview of the change to a live audience and now EVERYONE is being forced to see it and deal with it.

Am gearing up for the vertex editor- am excited for it, and have held off on several designs waiting for it to be released... and looking forward to going back over time and giving all my ships a proper v2.

OP used the word causeless. 
While I don’t believe it’s an actual word, I do think their intent is correct. 
 
IMHO tax should only be levied on hexes in the safe zone and could be justified as Aphelia keeping the peace in lieu of NQ developing real NPC enforcers ala EVE. 

Same for space stations in the safe zone they should be taxed in exchange for being eternally “safe”
 
outside the safe zone taxes should not exist at all.  What is reason for them to exist out there in the wilderness. 
 
of course there is no planetary PvP so you could argue that tax will be removed when planetary safe zones are removed. 

Hello fellow Noveans! This is your friendly neighborhood coder, Nikolaus (Ephranor#8746), here with yet another big update to the DU Factory Generator:
 
https://tvwenger.github.io/du-factory-generator/latest/
 
Given a set of items to build, this tool will determine a factory plan from raw ores to the final products. The factory is designed to support the production rates of all intermediate industries. Therefore, this is a factory plan that will maximize production efficiency even after production interruptions.
 
Some new features in version 4.0:
Support for talents! Calculate ore values of produced items Add some missing items Minor bug fixes and performance improvements   Give it a go and let me know what you think! If you have any questions or problems, please let me know. Links to the Github repository and Discord server are on the bottom of the website.
Happy building!

Yes the codex is joke and I'd have hoped that after the lift of the nda we would have gotten a real wiki but that front is kind of sad too. Best options are ingame chat and discord.
 
-166h IIRC (hover mouse over i in MU menu)
 
-So far no rock has dissapeared around my base
 
-Both small and large work everywhere
 
-IDK honestly I get along using only the circle tool, you can reveal close to half the map with some technique and luck using only large circles... ain't nobody got time to fiddle around
 
-yes please seconded
 
-you're pumping 101 out of 113 ore, there is still 12 left that could be sapped
 
-i'd assume it's to balance alts but also there would be no reason not to be friends with your neighbour and that way basically everbody would have max bonus making it less of bonus 
 
-see above
 
-i think base rate refers to the x out of y ore amount, adjacancy boni are added after
 
-good question, i think its how many percent you can do in one calibration and/or how many ground rocks you spawn
 
-not that I know, I would enjoy that option
 
 
 
 

Sorry for double post but one thing I miss dearly / didn't understand of there is a way. I'll take simplified numbers for my example:
 
Say you have a vein of 150l/h and your MU pump 100l/h... Well then first machine you set up will take all the 100l/h and the second one only takes what is left so 50l/h.
 
We should be able to set our schedules ourselves and cap them at 75l/h if we prefer.

Besides one could quickly fix how "aggravating they look" (personally i like them they help me land) by having the colorful parts only light up when you aim at the skittle with a harvesting tool equipped.

Background / Summary
I backed DU early on and have three accounts - honestly, I tried to give my beta keys away to friends, but no one wanted them.  So, I have a character dedicated to mining / refining, one to piloting, and one to industry.  All three have some combination of radar, gunnery, and ammo skills.  Each of them is around 50M skill points.
 
My play time prior to Demeter could be classified into three categories, active, passive, and mindless.  The active playtime involved building, pvp, asteroid mining, or using the markets.  I’m sure most of you reading this know the autopilot time as you scanned an asteroid or traveled to a planet.  This is the passive; dare I say AFK time.   What I call mindless time includes digging around in an unclaimed tile, you could simply zone out, watch a video, or listen to music.  I liked this time, it was relaxing, easy, and still offered progression without any risk.
 
Prior to Demeter, On average, I spent about 3 hours each day playing DU.  About half of this time was active or mindless mining and the other half was some mix of ship building, industry, or solo pvp.  Occasionally, I would spend an entire session repairing my ship because...well you dicks with the giant towers know why.
 
On an average day, I would generate $46M.  About half was ground mining and the other half Asteroid mining.  This worked out to about $30M / hour of money making activity.

With the advent of Demeter, the mindless playtime has disappeared.  My playtime has shifted to only two categories and the overwhelming majority of my playtime is now active and focused on three tasks - calibrating, hauling ore, and picking up ore from the bonus ground spawn.  The passive time is almost non-existent and involves flying 60km on the same planet.
 
After playing the minigame 15 times, trudging out to some random spot to collect between 2 and 4k ore, and then doing my best impression of a garbage man picking up all the auto-ore from 14 containers, I generate on average $10M over 90 minutes or about $6.7M / hour.  I could probably generate $30M / hour asteroid mining again but that would be at an opportunity cost of the passive ore mining or I would have to fully dedicate my entire 3 hour play time to money making activities.
 
The real takeaway here is that my money making active playtime has shifted from scanning and mining to babysitting autominers and picking up ground ore - both steps down in the level of fun and engagement. Sure, I could go back to asteroid mining exclusively and will likely get to that point but for the purposes of this dsicussion, I focused on really exercising the auto mining system.  
Additionally, to keep the automiers at a reasonable level (not even optimal) I have had to set timers, reminders, and build a spreadsheet to track the decay so I’m hitting the right autominers at the right times and carefully balancing my calibration charges.  While I’m perfectly capable of managing all this, it is quite annoying and doesn’t lead to long term engaging gameplay.
At the current market rates, I’m able to generate about $5M per tile per week.   My tiles are probably slightly above average but are all T1 and similar to most of everything else I have seen around Alioth - so nothing special here.  
 
I have seen several posts of people complaining the taxes are too high and hopefully the next section will help show how to make automining profitable.
 

Setup
I put some of the refunded mining skills into the “on deploy” auto mining skills on my main mining character and had all three characters train to 4 4 3 3 (Calibration Charge Optimization / Efficiency at 4 and Improved versions at 3).  So, as far as investment into auto mining goes, I’m pretty deep but not outside of what most folks can do with a week of skill training.  This gives the three characters the ability to comfortably manage 60+ autominers across 14 territories.   A single character with 10 days of training can easily handle 7 territories - perhaps not at a perfectly optimal level but enough for a good profit margin.
 
While I was fortunate enough to have some scanners already available, I haven't found many territories that couldn't turn a profit with proper management.  The tiles that had 500 of one ore are best as you can get 4 miners working that tile with no leftover.  But most tiles offered at least 3 full miners and some partial miners.  The proximity bonus is key so simply picking a spot that has 7 open tiles will almost always yield a profit.
 
I currently have 14 T1 Territories with 7 being very bauxite heavy and the other 7 evenly distributed across all 4 T1 ore types.  There are 63 autominers currently running with the lowest base rate being 70 and the highest being 125.  With the territory bonus, the optimal rate ranges from 126 to 226 per hour with most clustered at 183 per hour.
 
For production bonus purposes, the tiles are clustered around a center which means one tile gets a 60% bump and all others get a 30% bump.
 
In order to maintain this, I do need to log in every day so I don’t overcap my calibration charges.  My characters generate 5.7 calibration charges per day and if I don’t use them every day, I lose 1.4 charges.  With current skills I can refill between 60% and 72% if I get lucky with the minigame.  If I don't get lucky, it's around 57% which means I need to calibrate when a mining unit decays to between 30% and 50%.  While I may over cap the 100%, I found calibrating when the unit is between 40% and 45% is the safest time.  The tracking sheet below highlight the units that need adjusting.
 
Given the base rate of 125 for most of the miners, I can usually get 4 full miners on a tile and one partial. On the 60% bonus tile I see around 1.1KL / hr of total ore and my lowest tile currently generating around 500 L / hr.  Optimal generation is around 700 L / hr on average.  I have also found that unless the unit is on a 60% tile, a rate below 90 would be better deployed elsewhere as it relates to spending calibration charges - there is something to be said about convenience so I have a few mining below that rate, but they are lower priority to calibrate.
 
Bonus Ore
Each day I spend about 15 calibration points and get an average of 3k bonus ore which works out to 45,000 L in bonus ore or about $2M income.  Getting the bonus ore is relatively quick but tedious and feels like a chore.  The bonus ore makes up 20% of the weekly income so it is unfortunately required to maximize the tile.  Without the bonus ore, I would still see a profit but it would reduce down to $44M / week (still not bad).
 
Sample Tracking

 
 
Financial Analysis
Initial Investment
Territory Unit: $175k -> $2.45M
Territory Claim Fee: $500k -> $7M
Small Static Core: 12K -> $168K
Basic Mining Unit L: $175K -> $11M
Container L: $300K -> $4.2M
-------------------------------------
Total Investment: $24,800,000
Time to setup: 8 Hours
 
I should note I have a ship with two L containers that handles the logistics.  This ship costs about $15M.
 
 
Maintenance Costs
Nitron Fuel: $70,000 / week
Scrap for those unexpected times:  $250,000 / week
Territory Tax: $1,000,000 / week -> $14,000,000 / week
-------------------------------------
Total Maintenance per week: $14,320,000
Maintenance Time: 90 minutes / day or 10 hours each week
 
 
Income
Raw Sales: $72,000,000
 
 
Balance Sheet (Week to Week expectation)
Expenses: $14,320,000
Income: $72,000,000
-------------------------------------
Net: $57,680,000
 
Given the initial investment of $24,800,000, I fully covered this investment in 4 days and had a first week pure profit of about $16,600,000.  
This works out to a little over $1.7M / Hour of play time in the first week. I expect around $6M / hour of playtime next week
 
Territory Summary

 
Daily Log

 
 
 
Bugs
Can’t access the Calibration menu that tells me things like when it was last calibrated and the location of the surface ore pop if I have no calibration charges Tooltip on Adjacency doesn’t have a % indicator -  should be  “a 30% bonus” not "a 30 bonus" The small 50L of ore are physically much smaller than the normal surface rocks that only deliver 20L of ore The harvest time on the bonus ore is not scaled with the regular surface ore - it takes less time to harvest the 50L and 150L rocks than it does the normal 20L ore The bonus rocks are labeled incorrectly, they show up as their pure counterparts instead of the raw ore label; Aluminum Rock vs Bauxite Rock
Improvement Suggestions
As mentioned in the Q&A, the transition screens on the minigame are painfully slow.  Can we eliminate or speed them up? The current reasonable cap of calibration charges is 9.  You can get more by investing more skill points but 9 feels like where most folks will end up given there are far more interesting skills to train.  I’d like to see this cap at least doubled if not tripled (or removed all together, why cap it?)  If I decide not to play for a few days, I over cap and there is an opportunity loss. Where can I see my current calibration charges?  Or is the Autominer UI the only spot?  I’d like to be able to see the current calibration charges on some character screen. The minigame is prone to RNG which causes a reduction in income for things that are outside of my control.  Could we have some of the mining unit skills affect the size off the tools in the minigame so that if I choose to invest points in those skills, I see my efforts less affected by RNG? The bonus ore is nice for the minigame but it's a chore to go out and collect it.  Can we have it simply deposited into the container The surface rocks offer a performant way to create a small faucet and give new players a way to earn money.  However, the way they are designed is both tedious to gather and painful to look at. Could we instead have larger nodes that leverage the mining talents spawn on the surface and offer the same amount of ore just more concentrated?  We could even add a piece of equipment that allows me to scan my territory to identify these pockets or leverage the territory scanner.
 

See them quickly by pushing O to access wallet then swap over to territory tab,

In the map menu F4, you can change headquarter status by right clicking territories.

See them quickly by pushing O to access wallet then swap over to territory tab,

In the map menu F4, you can change headquarter status by right clicking territories.

Unless players are in excess of 5 HQ tiles nothing will be "wiped".
 
1 million a year? It now costs a mere 75 billions to monopolize Lacobus for a year.
 
Make elements fully destructible? Congratulations you removed the incentive from PVP, now we can only pew pew out of sadism.

Over the time I've had 3 people play with me/ live beside me in the game. 3 times I got them on their feet and taught them everything I know. Lately I've been super forthcoming offering to get their stuff to sanctuary where it's safe forever even if I die tomorrow... It's incredibly difficult to make them give a shit, only the requisition function motivated one out of three to login 30min so we can fly his stuff to sanctuary.
 
Ironically I'd have no issue to make them all agree the game would be better served with a wipe; eventhough I know pertinently how they'd throw the towel after looking the rates of their MU for half a week.

I'm tired of the formally polite yet contentious. If I can't verbally abuse a private business it's tantamount to infringing on my right of expression...Tons of parallels to RL outside. Yeah let us slip in 40 different formulations of "they don't work" and "they don't think", and make a surprised pikachu face if the engagement leaves to be desired. I'd be them I'd also talk to y'all exclusively via distant and monolithic statements... Just take the wipe debate "we can not guarantee a technical issue wouldn't force of to wipe" becomes "wiping for balancing reasons isn't off the table"... I just know that at my own job, I meet a sophist of that kind he can sort his shit out by himself, still gonna clean after the clueless bastard anyway; I'm not going to invest additional effort to stroke their ego with attention, be it positive or negative. I mean has anybody thought how objectively awful a wipe would feel at the current state of the game. LOL everybody really convinced themselves, as if the wales weren't going to put several orders of magnitude between them and the others within a week, even in the current balancing.
 
There is like 60 users at the very maximum one's likely to read over here; 4/5th of them allways bitching. Yet they collectively delude themselves to think they have valuable input. Easily half of the suggestions that have been made recently are half baked and have more glaring issues than what NQ came up with. Visit the discord, the reddit, the ingame chat, none of them are such toxic cesspools.
 
Polls over here have a ridiculous sample size, and a glaringly bad demographic distribution. I'm not saying I didn't wish myself that interactions between  NQ were more of a two-way street. But to think what happens here is just that, is so absurd, it makes me doubt the mental faculties of anybody who believes it.

7 HQ tiles instead of 5 would be nice, but certainly not neccessary, you can easliy make a five tile HQ patch. Honestly doesn't matter to me, I'm good either way.
 
Drop off after 7 days instead of 2. Absolutely NOT! NQ please don't bend to the whiners (again)! This seemingly minor change would have massive impact on the amount of ore people can automine and how many tiles people would optimally need. Over twice as much ore and 25% more tiles needed. Would lead to 25% more quanta sink/sunk. Bad, bad idea!
 
What I do request of NQ is that they implement a basic math tutorial in DU, because way to many people don't have even basic math skills and still complain that the game is broken because they can't do some basic math! That also means you @Creator!

No.

First off, I was allready kind of burned out before 0.23 came out, so 0.23 broke my neck. Yes I can confirm that it also ruined all links on my ship and some lua (not that I was doing anything impressive so I don´t even understand how it could have been broken, but I still haven´t bothered to look at it) which was additional annoyance that arrived at the worst moment. But now I understand how important schematics are to the economy... We were all kind of doing everything at once, each on their own, or at least people without an org were.
 
A few things I´ve read and like to adress:

So the claims that you can´t sell ore or only at 0.02 are ridiculous, I sold hematite at 64 shortly before the asteroid update, granted it was probably at an all time high but as the economy is developping the prices are actually starting to make sense - buy and sell orders were allmost the same price for a hot second. I could see the prices rise with sustended volumes and correctly predicted very close to peak price, knowing 0.26 would increase supply again. It would be cool though to be able to hide those insulting 0.0x buy orders.

Researching schematics sounds like the worst idea, a similar update made me never play Empyrion again: instead of demanding grind, or alternatively brains and a little less grind, locking schematics to talents is telling the player "you won´t craft this before a year from now no matter how much effort you put into it". I´m also not sure if I´d want "you only need one schematic of each" because that sounds like we will be back to how the economy was before but with extra steps for beginners. I allready found it non-sensical todo dedicated production streets before 0.23 but allmost everybody was doing it since it meant less micromanagement, even if they were far from keeping it running 24/7.  What would be cool would be an element actually called schematics bank, that acts for the whole core, because  reading 20 schematics that all start with the same words is anything but fun.


And as to souriceau´s post: it is a fair summary. But one could also do a summmary that puts things into the perspective of: actually the delays on them reaching their goals have been extremly reasonable since beta launch. Yes the latest roadmap is a bit lackluster but guess what, it only goes until fall, which is pretty soon actually. They started with the hard parts, I´m confident they will be able to tie it all together. Wether the court of public opinion will still look favourably upon NQ once it´s finally done is another question though. But it´s a very hardcore game being made for adults but requiring amounts of time no adult actually has anyway. Still I have faith it is going to be the best product among it´s competitors.

It always amuses me when adults, males (white males, let’s be honest)  create cute little dramas in teacups. 
 
Never heard of AC or ATOM or Legion until this thread.
 
lots of big talk and macho, pseudo militaristic group names and members spouting strong words when it’s probably double digit active users at best. 
 
also the derogatory nature they have towards those who don’t like fighting in a digital computer game means that IMHO, they deserve zero respect in or out of game. If they call non PvPers carebears, the non-PvPers should just label them what they are: sad, lonely men looking to find some compensation release or satisfaction in a computer game, far away from the emasculating reality in which they apparently live. 

 

No.

First off, I was allready kind of burned out before 0.23 came out, so 0.23 broke my neck. Yes I can confirm that it also ruined all links on my ship and some lua (not that I was doing anything impressive so I don´t even understand how it could have been broken, but I still haven´t bothered to look at it) which was additional annoyance that arrived at the worst moment. But now I understand how important schematics are to the economy... We were all kind of doing everything at once, each on their own, or at least people without an org were.
 
A few things I´ve read and like to adress:

So the claims that you can´t sell ore or only at 0.02 are ridiculous, I sold hematite at 64 shortly before the asteroid update, granted it was probably at an all time high but as the economy is developping the prices are actually starting to make sense - buy and sell orders were allmost the same price for a hot second. I could see the prices rise with sustended volumes and correctly predicted very close to peak price, knowing 0.26 would increase supply again. It would be cool though to be able to hide those insulting 0.0x buy orders.

Researching schematics sounds like the worst idea, a similar update made me never play Empyrion again: instead of demanding grind, or alternatively brains and a little less grind, locking schematics to talents is telling the player "you won´t craft this before a year from now no matter how much effort you put into it". I´m also not sure if I´d want "you only need one schematic of each" because that sounds like we will be back to how the economy was before but with extra steps for beginners. I allready found it non-sensical todo dedicated production streets before 0.23 but allmost everybody was doing it since it meant less micromanagement, even if they were far from keeping it running 24/7.  What would be cool would be an element actually called schematics bank, that acts for the whole core, because  reading 20 schematics that all start with the same words is anything but fun.


And as to souriceau´s post: it is a fair summary. But one could also do a summmary that puts things into the perspective of: actually the delays on them reaching their goals have been extremly reasonable since beta launch. Yes the latest roadmap is a bit lackluster but guess what, it only goes until fall, which is pretty soon actually. They started with the hard parts, I´m confident they will be able to tie it all together. Wether the court of public opinion will still look favourably upon NQ once it´s finally done is another question though. But it´s a very hardcore game being made for adults but requiring amounts of time no adult actually has anyway. Still I have faith it is going to be the best product among it´s competitors.

The "warp problem" is that travel isn't dangerous, only expensive. But its not so expensive as to tempt anybody into cutting corners and going somewhere on foot rather than paying $ to warp. In fact the "safe" option is more convenient, getting you there in seconds. The cheap option involves a boring hours long trek across empty space that could easily turn into a terrible disaster. And because of the timelines involved, you may have gone to the john, or to go wack off, or take a walk, or cook dinner by time something actually happens. 
 
In a balanced game, the safe option would be more expensive, and less convenient than the dangerous option. That way you tempt people into cutting corners and generating content. And you reward people who can handle themselves in tough situations. 
 
The "warp problem" would be fixed if planetary pvp was implemented. In that case, taking a direct warp path to a pvp planet would be the most foolish, dangerous thing to do. But the problem with that is that planetary PVP is almost certainly pretty far down the development pipeline. That means travel into what should be PVP territory is just safe, and will be for the foreseeable future. 
 
That's the "warp problem" and its probably a lot easier for the devs to move the warp points out of the safe zone than to implement planetary pvp. Which means asking the devs for that kind of thing makes sense to do. And bringing it up is a reasonable ask. As opposed to say, demanding planetary PVP happen right now.

There is a warp problem? I'm serious here, what is the problem with Warp?
 
If you mean that warp endpoints are currently in safezones which will be removed once Planet side PVP starts, how is that a problem? 

Defending those priorities you show how you place a minor detail of game play in the same level of redefining the pillars to make the game viable. 
 
In fact, you are so disconnected from reality that you dont even see that if the game fails, investment ends, servers close, you wont be able to kill those helpless and undefended freighters and noobs anymore. 

Seriously, why are you still here?  You ask for more communication, and you get it, but it's not good enough for you?  There is some truly exciting news about the game in those three posts and you don't have one single good thing to say?  They give you some concrete intentions and plans and you say it's just fluff and filler?  Are you a paid troll? Move on with your life if nothing NQ says or does make you happy.  Can you be more miserable?

Forget about any complex designs you might have for automated miners, the clear solution is to just make Rock Roombas that vacuum up all the infinitely respawning ores on the surface. Mechanically identical to whatever you were planning, but much more entertaining than some bog-standard drill on a tripod.

Frankly, that was the one thing I thought made sense for NQ to amend from the original plans in this blogpost.
 
Territory warfare will be very complex to do and NQ needs to get that right or at least pretty much right from the get go in a live service game. Inserting a cycle to test the core mechanics on space based "territory" (which I guess will be space stations) seems to me to be a sensible compromise as it's probably easier to "fix" any issues in a relatively isolated setting like that.
 
I get that there's many trigger happy players but I also expect NQ needs to minimize the risk of running into big issues with many variables that can cause it to go wrong. In the end combat PVP is supposed/expected to serve a purpose and not be a goal in itself in the context of the game so this seems like a sensible step to me.
 

Yeah but all the discussion about a wipe on our side is around the idea that people think we "need" a wipe to level the playing field.
 
All the discussion about a wipe on NQ's side is about whether they might, at some point, actually need to wipe because of technical changes to the game.
 
They left the door open because it might be necessary.
 
But they've never even entertained the idea that they might wipe to level the playing field.
 
 
 

Why do ppl still see this as a solution... 
The is the only safety net noobs have... 
 
If industrialists cant beat those "1 buy 10000 sell" orders then how will players not interested in crafting play the game? 
 
Jesus. Would it be that hard to use your head for a 2 minute thinking before posting this? 

There will be no wipe. You seem to forget ever so slightly, how much time has been spent on DU among the community. Wiping is not an option, going into BETA you signaled to the player base that whatever we do from now on matters, GIANT station and multicore bases have been constructed which are impossible to put back together with blueprints. Items stored in boxes won't be transferred screwing up big indies and storages, there is no possible way to preform a wipe that would be more fair than the universe we have today, sure some might have exploited for riches, but guess what, riches don't last forever, only hard work keeps you rich. By wiping, you're removing negligible advantages from exploiters while destroying the honest players hard work. Only a small minority of players who've suffered through the last months of DU (who are a minority of the original player base) will take a sucker punch like that and "start over". Come up with sustainable solutions to whatever problems may arise instead of even thinking about wiping a persistent universe.