New planet/gameplay thought

[MercilessFisting]

Put into play a gas giant type planet.  As well as add in ship based gas "mining" modules.  the negatives, constantly corrosive gas surrounds the ship forcing the use of the repair module. The lower you go or depending on the area you go to, the damage will increase necessitating the use of more repair modules or preferably higher tier modules.  Add in skills for all applicable areas.   Would almost require the use of an AGG to maintain a proper height while on planet and mine.  Ships that stay in too long get destroyed if abandoned or not repaired.  The reward could be an entire new area of industry, or a way to easily mine straight to polymers, fuels, etc.  Low visibility, high risk, high reward.  could both help move the market and put a nifty new mechanic in the game that should in theory create a lot of player generated content.  Cloud City anyone?

 

[Lorna_Sicling]

Oh - sign me up!

[Warlander]

I think that this type of idea is quite possible.

 

First it requires a wind system like you would see in a lot of gold type games with one exception. Typicall you are in a fixed postition so the current just blows horizontally when it reads that the wind is coming from the nw at 7kmph. On the ground that would be fine but if you are flying that is another story and there needs to be a vertical wind current as well.

 

If they use the gyro they already have and then make it so that there is a planetary wind system that everyone is bound to that is more horizontal then vertical in nature but has a range of min/max wind that could occur that day for both axis of hortizontal/vertical wind you could essentially create headwinds that slow you down, tailwinds that make you more fuel efficient and faster, cross winds that blow you off course, or up/down drafts, and even turbulence in a sense.

 

If a gas giant type planet like jupiter were simulated there are wind speeds up to 384 miles per hour. The wind in DU does not need to be that crazy but it should add on a layer of complexity with the destructive element system to make it risky for any crew to go to a place with a super high risk vs reward payout. Even if you hit AGG and think you are good you should still be blown around or bob due to the winds pushing it or up/down drafts potentially bobbing you out of the AGG 1000m start of gravity. Nobody should be safe.

 

And once you have a wind system going they just need to adapt the atmo burn to the wind speeds to simulate erosion if for instance you managed to land on Jupiter despite the 384 mph winds your ship would likely be containtly pelted with debris if there was ever any solid core or proto mantle. SO if you are contantly being pelted on most other planets. By using the atmo burn system you can use it to apply a dot if the wind speed gets high enough to start causing damage and should glow some color like white or yellow if it is being wind damaged and the metal being sand blasted unless it is either under the water table or being stored within a static core hanger which takes the wind damage instead of your ship as a real survival mechanic on other planets.

 

Once they have wind down it should not be too hard to create 3 transitional weather patterns of clear/cloudy/stormy as a que for both the weather system but also that the cloud layer should be an obstacle instead of just some nice little puffs on a perfectly clear day, no wind, no rain just 100% perfect optimal conditions. If it added a rain filter that didnt necessarily have drops or anything but cut your visibility in the lower atmo. This is also the basis for what you suggest with gas giant colored filters and low visibility.

 

But if you can simulate basic wind, raion, and eriosion and the need for shelter then also the other factor should be heat or cold. If you have the sun and Alioth for instance has a 5 hour day/night cycle you could also in theory create a temperture system too so that it only warms up during the daytime and cools down at night. If you measured the heating rate by the proposed SU distance from the sun as the rate of heating in game along with adapting the atmo burn system then you could potentially create planets like mercury which is basically nothing but a giant ball of iron but far to hot to ever land on or venus. And since it gets colder you could also use the atmo burn as a frostbite type system where the longer you are exposed to cold you will slow down your actions as your character freezes to death. The heat/cold could also affect performance or mealt your spacecraft in minuites to hours in planets close to the sun or take longer to warm up the engines, performance, or electronics performance on further out planets.

 

And then there is also acidic planets, different electro magnetic values and other measure that could disrupt things like the AGG from being able to lock, or no air for atmo engines, gravity that is crushing, Or that the water is acidic, the voxels are magmma/too jagged to land anywhere without first exposing your people to deadly risky clearing and prospecting of the land while taking acid rain, sub zero temps with

 

Not to mention radoactive elements as well causing havok to certain systems or lifeform

 

I also think there is a need for air/gas voxels that we should have to fill inside the holow spaces to define air locks, breathing for mining under the water table and rquiring the use of oxigen on planets without air. But also different air voxels for different gasses and color filters is essentiall how they would bring a lot of these systems in. You could also have things like fog through that as well.

 

Earthquakes are also a necessary addition to the game. The best way to do it would be to add some kind of unstability metric to a tile that goes up the more it is mined or by the number of hollow space is created underground from mining. As it is mined or mined out the unstability % rises until it is added to some kind of earthquake que type system used for talents. The system itself then would have some kind of timer or exp used as the % for the most damaged tiles and then just reset everything in it. It should have some kind of % metric on top of that to suppliment and add some kind of random rage of mats so people arent just wrecking tiles for earthquakes to reset resources. But I do feel like the more times the tile requires earthquakes the high chance that mats reset there until they do which should then reset the metric for resource respawning back down to 0% and built up again over time. That way it is completely random and makes sense instead of just respawning.

 

I think meteors / asteroids could actually be possible to simulate asteroid / meteors. There should be some sort of way to take a Dynamic core and just make it a giant blob of metal, rock, etc in that core so that it is mobile and treat it like a space ship that is a meteor (XS, S, M) or an asteroid (L, XL+). NQ could then ad a spawn point somewhere in the "asteroid belt" where they spawn from and then just have a system that uses part of a type of auto pilot script that does not account for any form of braking once it hits 30k kmph and races towards some random planet or moon waypoint. I would also give it some kind of random spin so it looks somewhat natural and then let it crash into whatever it hits. If that ends up being a tile a player owns then they get a free gift of like 4kl-100kl ore of some random type. If it is un-occupied then once the core blows up from the impact it should instantly spawn a magic blueprint tht spawns a voxel crater to the approproate size.

 

With Territory Wars coming you could also have these random asteroids drop on a player base and blow up a base if they want to be really punishing in a survival sense but I would imagine everyone would be mad if they came back to a crater of a base. If it was completely random it would be fair I suppose but still potentially game ending. But if actual protection of elements listed above were a requirement for survival or keeping ships or items from erosion or whatever should be a thing. Perhaps building underground keeps your base from being destroyed it it only destroys the surface

 

Conclusion:

 

I think that most of this arbitrary grind NQ has added along with the soul crushing limitations of items/talents/gameplay could be avoided and overhauled to be more fun if these survival mechanics added real danger to the game that was 100% survival based rather than the 100% easy mode non stop wholesale striping via perfect steady optimal mining conditions. But resources would drastically need to change to account for everything listed above in terms of how much actual ore you can obtain from say a 4kl node of iron for example.

 

There should be factors like depth, gravity, density, purity, hardness, etc that are all factors in how much is potentially really there.

 

If for example:

• The deeper the ore the more weight and presure and heat it is under which should make it much more dense and take more to mine it but also to get more out of it even if it was just the base 4kl node.
• Each metal should have a hardness value independent of the grab speed the negates a small amount of your talent
• Each ore should have a research into making all ore give more quantity through this route
• Add purity to nodes so that as you mine it should have a % purity which also has a small chance to instead of raw ore to hand you either ore ore pure ore without needing refinement.
• There should also be 5 grades of purity like parts now have via schematics. Not just for raw ore but pure ore as well that these new grade schematics should provide. Not to mention the extra refinement it should need for basic unpure iron ore.
• There should be layers to planets at least 5-10km of stone, or the core of the planet/moon.
• This stone should have random grades of hardness to slow players down from mining to justify the talent additions to mining to get more ore from less nodes.
• There should be 4 basic layers to a planet that simulate the core, lower layer crust, upper curst, and the sediment layer. Things like limestone should make up the upper crust while the harder denser granite etc is below ground and makes up the planet rather than being a limited node based approach when the worlds should have near unlimited amounts built into the world generation.
• The core should be 5-10km thick and active or solid. If active its magma, if solid its like an everlasting gobstopper with infinitely dense hard materials that should take ten years to get through all the gobstopper layers to more priceier ores the further into the center of the core you get that are even more dense then the outer layer that one full swing of the mining grab would likely act like a smooth tool then a mining tool but still give the same amount of mats since you are smoothing for mining rather than grabbing chunks.
• recycling broken or salvaged broken parts and mealt them down back into ore.
• Being able to mine in other ways like sifting or an industrial sleuce to gain traces of metals or gemms through sifting sediments like dirt, sand, and snow.

 

Like I said the danger is the real missing half of the game that makes it all worth while and power many of the things NQ wants to do but does not want to go that far and instead goes the mass grind sink / money pit route because they dont know how to do anything else but opperant conditioning in a game which should not play like WOW with destructive elements because they cant make content fast enough in a sandbox where we are supposed to just be given tools to do that. It sad really since it is suppoed to be about player effort and skill without the limited stangling nature of the talent system.