Base wear and tear over time
Amtheminer
Join Date: 2020-02-14 Member: 257893Members
Join Date: 2020-02-14 Member: 257893Members
After a while your base will start to get dirty, then rust will form causing the hull to loose integrity in which you must either cut it off via lazer cutter or by slowly chipping it away with your survival knife or thermoblade. If left for too long the rust can weaken the hull so much it becomes a rupture that you repair with a repair tool. The deeper you are the faster and more commonly rust grows. the inactive lava zone and the lava lakes are the only places this doesnt occur. Green brine will speed up the procces by 2X and blue brine will slow the procces by 2X.
Comments
Great idea.
Only once the devs found out what really works, they should consider to make it an automatic game mechanic. Because I might not like it on observatories or it might require to keep track of another useless status / number.
So the crusty textures would revert to brand new when you repair the base?
Sounds like this is a good basic idea.
Should be easy to to implement as all your doing is adding a texture override based on items h.p.'s. The code doesn't even have to remember as the base code already tracks integrity for damage and flooding.
You would have to add damage over time to trigger the change.
So you either need something on top of hitpoints (secondary hitpoint system) or a completely new system.
Using an armor or shield value on top of hitpoints would be a common example for a secondary hitpoint system. It means that most damage types simply bypass the armor/shield and attack the hitpoints directly, except for the wear. Crusts would then be similar to Leakables, just using the armor/shield fraction rather than the health fraction to calculate the number of visible crusts. 'Repairing' the crusts might then restore these 'armor/shield points'.
But you might run into problems displaying this value, just like you usually don't see the hitpoint value of your base. And unlike hull integrity problems that occur only when you're right next to the base, such a wear effect might damage a base far away.
Which would then lead to something more similar to an energy system for materials. I.e. there are special 'power consumers' and your base starts at a certain power level. This value slowly drops and when it reaches a certain treshold, texture overlays are added (instead of flickering lights) or it actual starts dealing damage. You would then have to display this 'material energy' score in your control room.
However, neither of the above system takes into considerations whether your base is fragile or heavily reinforced. So you might want to consider the use of a hull integrity coefficient (the degree of wear) instead. In other words, a moonpool wouldn't always substract -5 from your total integrity... depending on the wear, it might even add -10 instead.
The question is then, whether this should be limited or not. I.e. would a +100 hull integrity base eventually take damage as well? Such a system would also have a similar issue of displaying the coefficient. You might only 'guess' that a certain level is 'safe'. And 'repairing' the wear might than require something different than restoring an armor/shield value or resetting an energy level.
More generally spoken, there are certain considerations:
Should wear affect each single compartment?
Should it be similar for every base piece?
What about foundations usually being invincible?
What about wall modifications, like windows?
What about attached items like flood lights?
What about above sea level bases; should they create crusts or or a different effect (maybe icicles) although they usually don't count for hull integrity (due to the lack of water pressure)?
All in all, I wouldn't really say that it's 'easy to implement'.
I would much more prefer damage from hostile creatures/environments with options to prevent this damage like the concept of the (nonworking) Alien Sonic Deterrents in the base game which would use up a lot of power as buildable base pieces or exterior/interior modules.