End Game Resource Gathering & Automation

Taiphoz · May 2016

Mining
At the start we swim around with our knife and smash rocks, cool. soon we upgrade to a seaglide and we can then cover more ground and smash more rocks, more cool. Over time we upgrade further to a seamoth and now we can essentially smash every rock cool, then we get the cyclops and our rock smashing gets a little industrial as we fill the cargo hold's in the moth and cyclops taking full loads back to our base very very cool.

What next ?

I know were getting the next step in the form of mining rocks with the Exo Suit which will alloow us to farm resources even when we have smashed all the easily accessible rocks and picked up all the easily found crystals, so the Exo suit will be a very cool addition, but I was thinking that it's still going to be a limited resource since the rocks it eats will be limited as their removing terrain deformation so the exo suit wont be able to just dig to bedrock getting stuff on its way, logical right ?

So I'm thinking that in terms of progression by the time you obtain an exo suit you'v done this Fist > Knife > Seamoth&Knife > Seamoth + Cyclopse & knife > Exo Suit which is cool, I think the final step in our ore gathering progression should be an automated ore gathering laser, this would be build just like the new reactors, taking up the middle of a room and shooting a laser down out the bottom into the sea floor, this machine should produce random resource over time.

It could have upgrade slots to increase its speed, cargo space, and focus, for example if you need Titanium then you might craft something like a Titanium Scanner Chip which increases the chance for the system to pull out Titanium more often, this would open up a load of crafting recipes for each filter which sounds a lot, but it could be made simple with something like Glass+Chip+Titanium Ingot = Titanium Scan Chip, only thing that would change for each of the chips would be the raw resource used in the recipe.
Fabricating & Storage Progression

First The Fabricator is cool but it could use some progression and I have a fiarly good idea how it could be done via upgrades.

First of all we have the flat fabricator, this is cool we all love it, eats some power sucks in your items and spits out a thing, cool, so what could be upgraded about it, how about getting it to fabricate more than one thing at a time, so an upgrade could allow this, in terms of UI we would click the thing we want to craft and a number would appear beside it indicating how many we want, left click it again and were now making 2 of something, click again and now were making 3, right click and were back to making 2, this would then come with a BUILD icon at the top or bottom of the ui list that pops up and clicking this would start the process.

This would let us craft load of glass for example in a single click without having to keep clicking through, a small upgrade to the system but an upgrade none the less.

So now our Fabricator progression looks like this.

Fabricator > Queued Fabricator

What if we could upgrade it further with storage,this would be two fold, the first would be a small say 4*4 waterproof locker sized addition to the base of the fab where it would spit out its things provided there is free space, and it could be able to look into the inventory of any storage objects placed within 1 meter of itself, so you could so something like [Wall Locker][fab][Wall Locker] and the fab would be able to see all the content of both wall lockers that are immediately next to/touching the fab. this combined with the queue upgrade would make crafting a joy.

Fabricator > Queued Fabricator > Storage Fabricator

This could then give rise to range upgrades to allow the fabricator to look further away for inventories to pull items from, range should never be more than enough to cover a single room.

The Final stage of the fabrication progression would again see us build a Mass Fabricator which would come in the form of again something like the new Reactors, taking up the middle of a room giving the player a central place to fabricate things, I imagine the device having 4 sides each side with space for a specific task, for example one side of the device would of course have the terminal you would click to open the fabricator UI, Another you might be able to upgrade so that you can get access to the upgrade station, the other two sides would be for storage interfacing and a display showing what's currently being fabricated.

The Second Storage
Storage Progression is fairly good at the moment but with the above in mind I think it could be far far better.

So at the moment our progression looks kinda like this, Lifepod > Waterproof Locker > Wall Lockers & Lockers , these are nice but one of my gripes with them is that when you fill a room with them as we all do you end up covering up all the wall space leaving no window viewing, not a major issue but one that's easily fixed by giving us (think army foot lockers) floor level storage bins which hold more than a Locker and cost appropriately more to build, they would be about the same shape as the bench allowing us to put them along the walls without obscuring our view while giving us a little more storage room.

So our progression would now look like this, LifePod>WaterProofLocker>Wall Locker & Lockers > Storage Bins

And the final stage of this progression would be Deep Storage, this again would follow suit with the mass fab and reactors design it would take up a full room be in the middle have a single terminal giving players access to the things it holds and it would be up-gradable, the default mass storage should be able to hold 512 slots which is about the average slots that people can cram into a room with the lockers we have at the moment, via upgrades we could increase this total storage further.

The Crucial point with this is that once you build this along with the Mass Fab then the Storage side on the mass fab would show you all your loot, the mass fabricator would be able to access your mass storage for crafting input and output of items.

So our storage progression would then be.

LifePod > Water Proof Locker > Wall Locker and Locker > Storage Bins > Mass Storage

Final thoughts, all of this would of course consume power to function putting a steady drain on your power chain, if your base lost power you of course would not be able to fabricate things, as is the case now but you would also not be able to access things in your mass storage chamber which sounds bad but its actually a good downside to offset all the benefits it gives you when it is powered.