Elite Dangerous - Trailblazers Update 3.2

Hi there everybody. I’ve completed a large agricultural settlement last week and after the Thursday maintenance it has become operational… apparently. When ai dock there’s no more the "construction services" menu but the correct "local services". Problem is that the commodities market is completely empty.

Did anyone experience this? Or is it normal that a settlement takes its time to start producing goods? By the way, also the "sell" panel is empty…

I clearly recall in the other three stations / settlements I’ve built that the commodities were there as soon as the facility was operational.

Thanks for any possible insight
 
I'll probably get some hate from this but here is why I think we Shouldn't get the ability to adjust weak links

1. I feel like this all boils down to "I want my system to be the best at everything but your BGS is preventing me from maxing everything out". For that I would like to point out that there is no great npc golden system with loads of everything because for the most part the other systems follow the same set of rules. The BGS causes population to trade with itself and lower both supply and demand as would happen naturally realistically, we only buy the surplus. As a result most systems do only specialize in two economies (as shown on the galaxy map) and may have lower supplies by having high security (military bases). If we are allowed to break these rules player made systems would cause other systems to be inferior and ruin the natural BGS caused by casual and learning players.

2. If you really want a system with an economy building that has only one economy you can already accomplish this by placing two civilian ports on the correct planet (one will receive no links). After that you need only boost your development level to boost your yields. You can even create a rainbow economy like this if you find a system with every planet type.

3. There needs to be some challenging aspects about planning when building a system to encourage imagination and cleverness causing pride in ones work. Much like how engineering is so it falls in line with the spirit of the game.

4. I have said this before but we are system architects not system kings/queens so we shouldn't get a say on which stations trade with which.

All in all I have been to a few player systems and I have seen quite a few with great supplies despite having multiple building types so I believe complaining more is the min/maxing speaking. I would recommend we see how things like development level effect our production as it seems to be able to overpower demand once you really start developing your system.
 
The BGS causes population to trade with itself
The thing about this is, I don’t think that “weak link” economies are actually a thing in the BGS/markets of the pre-colonization/NPC systems. Take an Agriculture/Refinery system for instance (I have been using one as a supply station for colonization with my carrier). There can be several refinery economy stations throughout the system, with usually refinery hubs on the same planet as the station orbiting or on the planet… but the agricultural port orbiting a water or Earth-like world in that same system has zero refinery products and those are generally not consumed by agriculture anyway.

There can even be colony or military ports on those same planets (on the surface, I mean by that) without much of an effect from those hubs. So the colonized system economy rules have nothing to really do with how old systems or their BGS rules work.

Now… is it realistic to a certain sense that you would supply in-system than to go look outside of it? Probably, yes. But this is a bit ‘meh’ to most players who are rather building security stations and similar military infrastructure for their security effect rather than the military economy. Or agri for standard of living in systems where it’s otherwise low/risking to be negative, etc.

And maybe that’s meant to introduce some additional thinking into planning, fine by me, but the best (and possibly only) way to do it is just “Brute force it with raw influence numbers on a sufficiently large planet, keep interfering weak links to a minimum, and hope it works out to keep supply of everything - or mostly everything - intact”. Not exactly that clever if you really think about it, just encourages more leaving behind/abandoning of potentially decent systems with many smaller 1-2 slot bodies.

I also still hold on my position that it is less the weak links and more the forced planetary economy which does not turn off when you do eventually specialize an economy into something. It should serve as a baseline that you can take a station into but by no means be a hard-locked influence that can by no means be toggled off, even if you place refinery hubs on a high metal content world with volcanic activity (or space farms around a water world, which will not toggle off the tourism it also provides to ports). And they are set at such a strong baseline level, even muting them out with a brute force approach can only go so far.

What this results in instead is… people will just seek out other places to build in instead. At this point for refinery builds, anywhere with plenty of rocky bodies that lack geological signals. And you can only really specialize an ice world into industrial (or a hybrid industrial/extraction) if you wanted to do some light roleplay around pulling out whatever is locked up in their frozen crusts, because it’s always going to provide that baseline industrial influence and at an extremely strong level. And extraction is not an economy which gets a port with a baseline except for the asteroid base, which has its own placement restrictions (for obvious reasons).

Why I suspect the planet economies can’t be “switched off” (so to speak, rather than any hitting switches by the ‘architect’) is because they were implemented as a form of strong link behind the scenes but with high base characteristics, and so they’re also boosted by whatever boosts the economy types they are… but that’s another subject.
 
Hi there everybody. I’ve completed a large agricultural settlement last week and after the Thursday maintenance it has become operational… apparently. When ai dock there’s no more the "construction services" menu but the correct "local services". Problem is that the commodities market is completely empty.
Was it a "Fornax" type settlement? Mine has had the same problem for a long time and I wonder if it's another case of
Colonisation - Resolved a specific type of High Tech economy not producing or consuming commodities. (Issue ID: 74785)
but with the Fornax rather than the Chronos being the broken one.

1. I feel like this all boils down to "I want my system to be the best at everything but your BGS is preventing me from maxing everything out". For that I would like to point out that there is no great npc golden system with loads of everything because for the most part the other systems follow the same set of rules. The BGS causes population to trade with itself and lower both supply and demand as would happen naturally realistically, we only buy the surplus. As a result most systems do only specialize in two economies (as shown on the galaxy map) and may have lower supplies by having high security (military bases). If we are allowed to break these rules player made systems would cause other systems to be inferior and ruin the natural BGS caused by casual and learning players.
I agree with the principle that we shouldn't be able to min-max systems too much, but disagree that this is the solution:

- this isn't how the NPC system BGS works at all. NPC systems often have a wide variety of Odyssey settlements which don't hybridise (or boost, for that matter) the economies of the ports. NPC stations over ELWs tend to either be Agricultural or Tourism, not a weird four-economy hybrid.
- there's still a system design possible which (given certain reasonably common prerequisites) min-maxes economic production and provides high quantities of industrial, high-tech, agricultural (export only), extraction and refinery markets while allowing high security levels and the presence of large ports. The system will look very weird by NPC standards and is somewhat more costly to build in the first place but it works if that's what you're after.
- more generally, the original design encouraged building of random Odyssey settlements and hubs because they were a cheap way to get tier points, might help port economies, etc. so even a min-maxer would produce an interesting system to visit or live in. The new design strongly discourages building most settlement/hub/installation types if min-maxing, leading to less interesting systems.
- since the population boost in Update 3, min-maxing is hardly necessary anyway, since even a small system will produce far more commodities than anyone ever needs (though this is also true of most NPC systems) and small single-station systems are of course a lot easier to keep to a clean economy type.
- the hybridisation if you don't min-max has a tendency to gray everything out: all your markets produce roughly the same stuff and consume roughly the same stuff, which risks having no-one to trade with at all
- hybridisation is really easy to do and messes with "normal" mission generation in a bunch of subtle ways, so min-maxing isn't just about getting a good commodity market but also about getting fun missions
 
Was it a "Fornax" type settlement? Mine has had the same problem for a long time and I wonder if it's another case
It's a Ceres agricultural large settlement, but in fact it seems the same kind of issue. I'll see if it solves by itself or I'll have to open another ticket. If I understand correctly your issue is not solved yet, too, in the Fornax type, right?
 
You guys have made very good points and I think I understand the situation better. I apologize for not explaining my view on npc systems very well I only wanted to reiterate that these systems usually only focus on one or two economies. However keep in mind that since there are many buildings that provide things like security, standard of living, development etc. without giving a weak link of the associated economy type it is entirely possible to not hybridize while still gathering your chosen system essentials (you may just have to build more than usual). This use of different unique buildings i.e government, medical facility, comm stations is what I referred to as clever planning and shows a system has good infrastructure roleplay wise. On the subject of planetary influences perhaps we were meant to search for a system that fits our wants instead of strong arming every single system into whatever we want. Each planet type normally has 2-3 economy types it can support without it cannibalizing itself with the exception of agriculture (which is probably why it has so many boosts) so if your trying to brute force a refinery on an ice planet then maybe you should either find another system or reorganize your system to better adapt to the hand you were given. For example would you rather build your farm on a mountain or open plains next to the river or start your mine from the caves or the island offshore.
 
Each planet type normally has 2-3 economy types it can support without it cannibalizing itself
The issue with some of the planetary economy sets remains, in part because they are always hard-locked to either a specific one, or a set of several that don’t always coexist happily.

Water world? Tourism and agriculture. The system won’t be “smart” if it detects a space farm in orbit with the starport and rescind tourism to stop it from destroying eg, fruit and vegetables supply (my Orbis lacks them even after building said farm, and while it was a conscious choice to build it as the primary port where only one orbital slot in addition to that was available… why am I not able to remove tourism by specializing in this case? … so the only way to further try “fixing” that is with weak links).

Rocky world with geo signals? Always refinery + industrial + extraction. Refinery eats some industrial and most or all extraction imports. Industrial eats the refinery imports into making most non-bulk goods and some of the “cheaper” large quantity supplies unavailable, and possibly some of the extraction produce. It becomes even worse when that rocky moon has bio signals to add agriculture and terraforming* to the mix. Again. You cannot get rid of the extra economies by attempting to specialize into one of the three in that set, only brute force them (or ignore completely with the dedicated industrial ports), and that is not a good thing.

At the very least, the game should ‘know’ that when you’re trying to build a “supported” economy in the sense that it matches with one that the planet feature set has as an override. Otherwise, if you’re putting asteroid bases on over by that gas giant with some nice rings, what are you going to do with all the rocky moons? Just dump a bunch of Odyssey settlements or hubs on them and never anything else because their inherent refinery (even if they have geological signals) would annihilate the supply of an extraction-focused surface or (non-asteroid) orbital port/outpost you’d like to build?

I don’t find that very interesting… and the large majority of [gas giant] moons are always rocky, with high metal content moons being a very rare exception in my experience. I don’t want to build refineries in all of those systems.

*Asterisk for the fact that “Terraforming” is also applied by biologicals without real thought or discrimination in whether the planet/moon actually meets terraforming requirements, as per the system map, so it’s a bit of a weird one to have attached to biological signals instead of the actual “This planet could be terraformed” qualifier.
 
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Morning - just a thought; would be in keeping with the population growths of a system to see some material changes to the sites we are building as architects. Case in point I have a colony settlement with two lovely domes and trees (sadly cannot walk amongst - hint - hint Devs) and a population of 15M or something. That colony should throw up more domes or towers as the population hits certain milestones - e.g. 25M, 50M, 100M etc. Stations could have additional external modules and so on. Would make for far more unique sites to visit as all would look abit different.

Oh and can we for the love of Braben, please, can we decommission sites put up in error during this supposedly Beta. Thankyou!
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
@Paul_Crowther :
The linked issue mentioned in my earlier post has now been closed as FIXED. Please re-read the description: it is about transferring ON-FOOT MATERIALS between the carrier, not CARGO. It is NOT FIXED, the in-game UI is broken and manipulates the incorrect materials when you have a quantity of 0 on your character.
This bug has been in the game for over 3 years. The issue has been getting constant votes over that time to push it higher and higher in the issue tracker. And now, after all this time, it's going to get closed and forgotten about because someone thought it applied to a completely different bugfix relating to transferring CARGO.

Please watch this video (taken from the issue report) for a clear demonstration:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZazpBdPQ-XA
If you want to easliy reproduce it: transfer ALL of any on-foot material to the carrier, and SOME of any other material. Close/re-open the menu and try to transfer the material that was fully emptied back from the carrier. The UI will pick some other random material to transfer instead. This isn't a server-side issue, it's the client.
I can confirm that. The issue with on foot materials transfer is definitely not fixed and it seems an incorrect issue was closed down on the tracker.
 
I have contributed some musings directly on that ticket. There are two settlements on your moon and one of them IS working properly so perhaps this is a slot thing?

But looking at Demand it's a miracle anything got labelled agriculture, the demand is all Industry-led as you'd expect for something built on an Icy Moon. And it's tidally locked too which nerfs Ag.
 
This is a very minor thing, but I have noticed that starting from some update (can't remember which), every time I approach a surface port, at least one of those large ones, the ATC tells me "terrain alert, climb immediately!" regardless of anything, ie. no matter how slowly I approach. This didn't happen before (I don't even remember when was the last time I heard that. Now I get it every single time.)

Is anybody else getting this too?

All things considering this is probably the most innocuous bug in the history of the game, but nevertheless.
 
This is a very minor thing, but I have noticed that starting from some update (can't remember which), every time I approach a surface port, at least one of those large ones, the ATC tells me "terrain alert, climb immediately!" regardless of anything, ie. no matter how slowly I approach. This didn't happen before (I don't even remember when was the last time I heard that. Now I get it every single time.)

Is anybody else getting this too?

All things considering this is probably the most innocuous bug in the history of the game, but nevertheless.
I have never had that
 
This is a very minor thing, but I have noticed that starting from some update (can't remember which), every time I approach a surface port, at least one of those large ones, the ATC tells me "terrain alert, climb immediately!" regardless of anything, ie. no matter how slowly I approach. This didn't happen before (I don't even remember when was the last time I heard that. Now I get it every single time.)

Is anybody else getting this too?

All things considering this is probably the most innocuous bug in the history of the game, but nevertheless.
yep - happens to me a quite a lot ; 30% maybe? I just presumed something crossed the landing pad when I tried to land
 
This is a very minor thing, but I have noticed that starting from some update (can't remember which), every time I approach a surface port, at least one of those large ones, the ATC tells me "terrain alert, climb immediately!" regardless of anything, ie. no matter how slowly I approach. This didn't happen before (I don't even remember when was the last time I heard that. Now I get it every single time.)

Is anybody else getting this too?

All things considering this is probably the most innocuous bug in the history of the game, but nevertheless.
I don’t think I have ever heard that message in game at any time.
 
I don’t think I have ever heard that message in game at any time.
For the most part you hear it on higher G worlds on a manual approach if, say, you use downward thrust when you’re close to the surface and approaching the pad.

… but I have had it trigger situation-appropriately when I was actually coming in a little hot.
 
For the most part you hear it on higher G worlds on a manual approach if, say, you use downward thrust when you’re close to the surface and approaching the pad.

… but I have had it trigger situation-appropriately when I was actually coming in a little hot.
That's the thing: I'm getting the alert even on 0.1g planets, no matter how slowly I approach. And it's every single time.

I'm getting it at least on those big surface ports (the ones that are circular) and if I remember correctly, also at colonization surface construction sites.
 
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