The troubles with Quartz
Captain_Pyro
Germany Join Date: 2015-05-31 Member: 205116Members
Germany Join Date: 2015-05-31 Member: 205116Members
Comments
Like for example more resistant glass (not as strong as the enalmed glass of course) that doesn't weaken too much the base's integrity.
Also what happened to the whole your actions impact this world crowd and followers. I mean really you now want infiinite resources and to boot have them in every bio, so easy to obtain.
I surely hope the devs hold to their vision and do not implement things like this or this game will just become a boring sim city underwater sandbox. BLAH!
One answer is to have slowly respawning resources to compensate for the lack of the inaction. Also, the player should be able to mine for resources. Mining could be as simple as sifting sand with a machine to screen out minerals. When you think about it, it's kinda ridiculous that players can only find minerals on exposed seabed.
A mining equippment would be ideal, my suggestions in this case would be the following: a sonar capable of allowing you to have a probabilistic view of the materials you could get by drilling in the area you scanned and then an automated drill that executes the excavation and brings up the materials from inside the crust, and to make it more challenging the devs could add some gas vents that could damage the drill or blow it up.
The sonar would give something like a list:
Material and percentual possibility.
Titanium %40
Copper %20
Quartz %40
Diamond %1
etch...
depending on where you are.
Could not agree more... I was only against spawning more open nodes for Quartz. Since well the map is going to enlarge and there is already a ton of it in the shallows to build mini city bases.. Also and more importantly the world is supposed to feel our impact on it... So I did not like the notion of respawning.
However other methods of extraction as you suggested fits perfectly to the world and lends itself nicely to the exploration and adventuring aspect as well.. Love this idea.
I do realize this is a testmap and this is feedback regarding said testmap. I can't know how the team plans on expanding the map, but i know that in it's current state it lacks some things and i want to let them know, so they can adjust if need be.
I'm not too much of a fan of the actions impact the world. But collecting stuff of the ground is not exactly what i count as worldshaking actions. I had discusions like this in the reddit board of minecraft and most people seemed not to enjoy needles chores that won't improve your gaming experience, like searching for leftover pieces of quartz with kilometers of distance between them. I'm not about being lazy; i'm crazy diligent. But this is simply no fun no more.
Well Drakuel i see what you mean and i agree with addying a cause-effect system, however a lot of people including me desire quartz to be respawning slowly because it's basic to a very wide range of items, most notably temporary ones, like the power cells.
Or the devs could simply elude the problem by allowing the power cells to be rechargable with renewable power and allow you to extract quartz from the sand too.
And i never thought about the drill as a luxury it would be basic after reaching a certain degree of development, the diamond head could be a good idea for an upgrade though, so it would reach deeper and extract more materials, and last longer.
Now Captain is right in saying it is a mindless chore, but just doubling up your rate of spawning is not what changes it from mindless to fun, no find ways to make either the receipe for things more complicated so it takes 1 quartz but 1 of this and 1 of that to make whatever or find more fun and interesting ways of achieving it, versus just going to the same spot every 10 minutes and grabbing it.
Mmmmh you made your point clearer now thank you
Just one thing, with power storage i meant the ability of taking the empty cells and recharging them, like at a recharge station and then put them back in their sockets.
With this the quartz usage would drop significantly already.
oh and the drill could look like this more or less, it could require titanium, copper and power cells to work and you could be able to repair it with the welder in case it breaks.
Wait, what? What do you mean this is a test map? I thought they were adding biomes in as they got them done, and building out from the Aurora.
I agree even more!
But i was talking about the problem i see in quartz in general. I think the drill and the sand sieving are great ideas. Respawning resources isn't exactly my favorite solution for this either.
Yeah, nice! Or be more power efficient (i'm all about dat power efficiency)
Oh, i imagined it as a handheld tool, like the propulsion canon or the seaglide. So it wouldn't work automatically and just spit out some materials now and then. 3x3 Inventory slots, heavy. Even tho there is not enough of some stuff, this is a full, new mechanic tree were talking about. If this is worth the effort, it has to be bound to some manual labor.
Well i don't think having the drill as another portable tool would be a good idea, drills need to go very deep down in the crust to hit the veins and pools, and i don't think that something portable could do that.
And at any rate it would be just a modified terraformer in the end.
Level 1 would be a dedicated drilling/sifting equipment area it would require constant power and for about the overall time as 3 uses of the fabricator it would "mine" one non-quartz item with all excess sand being moved along the wall in sifting tubes to specialized "crystallization" chambers that would slowly turn 4-6 transformer "material" units into quartz.
Level 2 would be storage/fabrication. Any lockers or other possible storage containers made or placed inside the room would be automatically used to store mined materials through the use of miniature bots, much like the constructor bots, that would carry the items to the storage units.
Such a structure would be rather large and would require a LOT of resources and as such it should require as much or even double the resources of building a Cyclops to be constructed, meaning that you would have to require the necessary materials to build the item buy traditional means, working out the "easy" acquisition of mass resources.
The power consumption would also be rather heavy-handed. Once we know more about other power generators and their power output a hefty but reasonable power consumption would be defined.
So did I, Quartz has not been something I have had an issue with... Copper on the otherhand... damn RNG
Funny you mention copper. I started to craft beacons, storage cubes and bateries, because i don't know where to put all the copper i find. Sometimes i wish, limestones would hold more titanium than copper.
Is it RNG? That'd be interesting to know.
I like the idea of quartz respawning by growing, but not it coming back in the same spot over and over. That takes away from the searching for it. I also don't want farms, unless they are a really end game base module that is really expensive, and takes a long time to produce anything. There should still be SOME challenge to getting quartz, just a bit less than there is now.
Although, here is an even better idea.
Quartz only forms under the following conditions:
- Inside silica-rich molten rock during cooling and solidification
- Within pegmatites during and following the pneumatolytic processes
- In mostly watery solutions of silica under various conditions
Perhaps players could extract volcanic glass from cooled magma (additional use for the Exosuit drill?). The formation of crystals in magma can happen in days, as opposed to millions of years in a solution. Also, mining rock features should be implemented - instead of just whacking open nodules.These are good ideas, and also rather easy to implement. So how about:
- Non-respawning nodes of quartz on the seabed & caves that show no volcanic activity (no longer at least)
- Respawning quartz on volcanic spots around the map (safe shallow geysirs, lava caves & other spots)
Meaning you have some basic amount of quartz to get things going in the beginning, but to maintain the machines that need quartz to operate, you might have to dig deeper. Not sure how this idea plays along with the devs ideas about the energy economy of the game. A decisive thing regarding that will be whether you can charge the Cyclops from your base or not.