Reduce the number of engineering material types

[Rietz]

I've been playing for about a month and completely finished engineering 3 ships, I feel like the materials for engineering is needlessly complicated.
As of right now, we have over 100 different types of materials. A hundred and eight.
And the methods for gathering those are mostly the same, so is there a need for there to be so many?

There is almost zero benefit for having so many different types of materials, but the disadvantages are obvious.

First, while it's normal for people who are already used to engineering, for new players, 108 types of material is incredibly complex. Especially for people whose english isn't their native language.

Second, have you ever been in a situation where you only need to exchange one type of material from the trader but spent a whole minute or two looking through the list trying to find what you need? I have, and it's those moments that makes me wonder: Why? Just why?

So my suggestion is, just reduce the number of material types. Not the amount, just the number of types.
Why do we need 5 grades of materials when 3 is fine? Why need 10 different categories when 5 is enough?

At the moment, we have:
Raw: 4 grades x 7 categories = 28 types
Encoded: 5 grades x 6 categories = 30 types
Manufactured: 5 grades x 10 categories = 50 types.
Total: 108

We can reduce it by more than half and still won't change much in term of gameplay.

For example:
Raw: 3 grades x 3 categories = 9 types.
Encoded: 3 grades x 4 categories = 12 types.
Manufactured: 3 grades x 5 categories = 15 types.
Total: 36

Remove the old G1 to G2, keep G3, G4, and G5. Adjust the blueprint for a bit and everything will be the same, but more streamlined.

EDIT: It seems like most people come in reading this doesn't really understand the suggestion, so I have to make this clarification. Except for the first few who actually understood, the rest just straight up missing the point.

The suggestion isn't about how hard it is to gather materials. It's not about making the game easier. If anything it's the OPPOSITE.
Think about it. Removing G1 or G2 materials means G1 or G2 engineering that used to use low grade materials are now using G3, which means that you'd need MORE material, NOT less. And a blueprint that requires 2 different G5 mats is still gonna require 2 different G5 mats.

NO ONE is complaining that it's hard to gather materials.

With that out of the way, the main point of the suggestion is to make it LESS INTIMIDATING for new comers. That's it. Clear and simple.

 

[Douglas Reynholm]

For raw materials, it increases variation that you may find on planet surfaces. Also allows for a variation of the chemical makeup of a planet and linking those percentages on the system map to actual tangible materials. Having less materials will make the whole engineering aspect too hollow and not deep enough imo (some may argue its pretty hollow anyway). It does force you to go to many locations (such as different planets with different material compositions) to collect the materials needed for an engineering upgrade.

For me specifically, I admire the realism the game strives for, and this is something that adds to that.

 

[Rietz]

For raw materials, it increases variation that you may find on planet surfaces. Also allows for a variation of the chemical makeup of a planet and linking those percentages on the system map to actual tangible materials. Having less materials will make the whole engineering aspect too hollow and not deep enough imo (some may argue its pretty hollow anyway). It does force you to go to many locations (such as different planets with different material compositions) to collect the materials needed for an engineering upgrade.

For me specifically, I admire the realism the game strives for, and this is something that adds to that.

You can always tweak the number of categories for raw materials to match the planets if you want to aim for realism. As for the other 2, encoded and manufactured, there's no benefit to having so many different types and categories.

The engineering system is already hollow, pretty much just a fetch quest. Go to point A, get stuff, bring back to point B.

Having a huge number of different material types does nothing except making it an eyesore. It's just there to fool new players into thinking that it's a complex system, a fancy exterior to cover up for the simple interior.

 

[Douglas Reynholm]

You can always tweak the number of categories for raw materials to match the planets if you want to aim for realism. As for the other 2, encoded and manufactured, there's no benefit to having so many different types and categories.

The engineering system is already hollow, pretty much just a fetch quest. Go to point A, get stuff, bring back to point B.

Having a huge number of different material types does nothing except making it an eyesore. It's just there to fool new players into thinking that it's a complex system, a fancy exterior to cover up for the simple interior.

I'd rather have a fancy exterior with a simple interior than a simple exterior with a simple interior

 

[Rietz]

I'd rather have a fancy exterior with a simple interior than a simple exterior with a simple interior

Even if it means that the fancy exterior might chase away potential players?
I already know of at least 3 people who quit the game because they couldn't be bothered with learning how to do engineering in the past 4 weeks.

 

[Northpin]

The engineering system is already hollow, pretty much just a fetch quest. Go to point A, get stuff, bring back to point B.

that's the oversimplified premise for many ingame actions, isn't it?


Regarding the main suggestion, no - i'd rather keep it like it is.
I get the feeling that any changes in materials system can have quite deep ingame ramifications for Raw materials, but for the rest too.
For example, can you bother to check carefully the Raw materials in your right panel? Tiers, grades? Selenium? Zirconium? Boron?
There was a change in Raw materials before i started to play (end of 2018) - and the ripples are still visible in the game

The only changes i'd strive to do would be to remove the need of relogging to get materials, for Encoded especially and to a lesser extent for Manufactured.
Crystalline Shards are really nice as a source of top tier raw materials

 

[Go'Gen]

I'd like to see an in-game button [ FILL BINS ], which would for 10.000 ARX fill all mat bins to the lid.
FDev could make millions billions, but unfortunately they never listen.

 

[Rietz]

that's the oversimplified premise for many ingame actions, isn't it?


Regarding the main suggestion, no - i'd rather keep it like it is.
I get the feeling that any changes in materials system can have quite deep ingame ramifications for Raw materials, but for the rest too.
For example, can you bother to check carefully the Raw materials in your right panel? Tiers, grades? Selenium? Zirconium? Boron?
There was a change in Raw materials before i started to play (end of 2018) - and the ripples are still visible in the game

The only changes i'd strive to do would be to remove the need of relogging to get materials, for Encoded especially and to a lesser extent for Manufactured.
Crystalline Shards are really nice as a source of top tier raw materials

That's why I said it's already hollow. There's nothing special or out of the ordinary about engineering. You literally get a ship, fly to point A, get material, then bring it to point B for engineering, or maybe to point C for traders. It's not even oversimplified because it is what it is.

As for the ramification, well, I couldn't think of one, other than that it makes engineering more understandable for new players. Maybe you could provide an example of negative ramification?
Also, what about the Raw materials in my right panel? As far as I know, they removed a grade and G5 are now G4? I didn't bother with looking at the list on the right panel because it's just a jumbled mess of the same things, just different names. Whenever I engineer something, I literally just open 3-4 tabs on my browsers to make things simpler.

I'd like to see an in-game button [ FILL BINS ], which would for 10.000 ARX fill all mat bins to the lid.
FDev could make millions billions, but unfortunately they never listen.

Thanks for your constructive feedback and thoughtful contribution to the conversation.

 

[avow555]

Engineering is an utter farce in this game and always has been.
It was touted as a crafting system which it most certainly is not.
Frankly it introduced different currency into the game all items that have to be gathered in the most contrived fashion.

 

[Factabulous]

.. no-one tell 'em that fdev are adding more mats when they launch Odyssey, not sure that will go down well ..

 

[Cmdr Ruthberg]

...
For me specifically, I admire the realism the game strives for, and this is something that adds to that.

Yes, the realism in that data is consumed during engineering? Even encoded data is easy to duplicate meaning you would only need to find it once for all future engineering.
Then there's the randomness of the efficiency of engineering meaning the cost in materials will vary from person to person depending on the luck of the RNG. That's not how engineering works in the real world. Additionally how does it make sense that you would need a 160 ton computer for sensors for a big ship when a 1,3 ton computer can do the same job for a small ship? And why do we need two computers for handling SC assist and automated docking when these calculations can be done with even the lousiest smart phone today? It's supposed to be 1300 years into the future. No, there's only one reason for engineering being as complex as it is, adding grind so we'll have to spend more time getting to the fun part. (Combat with well engineered ships and weapons).

 

[Rietz]

.. no-one tell 'em that fdev are adding more mats when they launch Odyssey, not sure that will go down well ..

I knew they might add more mats, which is why this suggestion exist. In a couple more expansions, you're gonna have lists and lists of hundreds of different mats that is literally just the same things, gathered the same ways, but with different fancy names.

 

[Northpin]

As for the ramification, well, I couldn't think of one, other than that it makes engineering more understandable for new players.
And what about the Raw materials in my right panel? As far as I know, they removed a grade and G5 are now G4? I didn't bother with looking at the list on the right panel because it's just a jumbled mess of the same things, just different names. Whenever I engineer something, I literally just open 3-4 tabs on my browsers to make things simpler.

Yea, my point exactly. Too simple usually means shallow.
And you seem to be disappointed about engineering being hollow but you want to make it even more hollow, right?

As i said i kinda like it as it is now. And if you check some engineering blueprints, the choice of components kinda makes sense.
Crazy, isn't it?

Anyway, things only appear as hollow and simple, but they never really are... as you can see below

But where is that quote from Ian Doncaster, right... here it is:

You could just paste it from last time. And it's an interesting tale of how changes in game design can leave "leftovers" in the implementation.


Anyway, the problem is that there are four separate material gradings for raw materials.

The original "geological" grading was introduced in Horizons in 2.0 and determines which planets have which materials. This only has four grades. All planets have all G1 (except metal-rich, which only have Iron and Nickel). They then have 3 G2, 2 G3 and 1 G4 - the 3-2-1 rule of early planetary exploration. This was nice and simple.

When engineers were introduced in 2.1 data and manufactured materials had five grades, so Frontier "spread out" raw materials over five grades as well for engineers. So the engineering grading system has five grades of raw materials - G1 is the same, G2 is some of the G2 geological, G3 is a mix of G2 and G3 geological, G4 is a mix of G3 and G4 geological, and G5 is the remaining G4 geologicals. Generally the materials which end up higher than their geological grade are the harder ones to find (Arsenic is G3 engineering) for various reasons. Frontier considered redoing the planetary materials so that the geologic grading was 5-grade as well, but explorers noticed in Beta and complained about it a lot, as it invalidated all their previous surveys (and this was before 2.2 made surveying easier, so to find out what materials a planet had you had to land on it and shoot a lot of rocks)

In 3.0, Frontier introduced material traders. Because of how they work, they need a rectangular block of materials - a requirement never envisaged for the original raw materials ... but there were only originally 5 G1 materials on the geological scheme, and lots of G2 materials. Neither existing scheme was suitable. To beat the raw materials into a rectangular shape with minimal deviation, Frontier:

• used the geological scheme as a basis
• added three mining-only raw materials (Rhenium and Lead at G1, Boron at G3) ... a way to add new ones without breaking the 3-2-1 rule.
• moved Selenium from G2 to G4 (the material trader massively overpays for it)

So at this point, there were three separate schemes, introduced at different times for different valid reasons, and not reconcilable. Unfortunate, but not really fixable without doing something more unpopular (invalidating old exploration data, making engineering harder by replacing easyish G4 raws with G5 manufactureds, or inventing a lot of extra mostly useless raw materials to take up space on the trader grid)

But... for no obvious reason, the display grade of a material in the right panel of your ship doesn't consistently use any of these schemes. Polonium and Technetium are both G4 geologic and trade, G5 engineering ... but Polonium is G5 right-panel and Technetium is G4. Zirconium is particularly bizarre - G2 geologic and trade, G3 engineering, but somehow ends up as G4 right-panel. This one is hopefully just a bug.

Fixing the display grade to be one of the other grades (I think the "trade" grade would be the best choice) would at least make things a bit clearer.

Or this one

We currently have four different classifications. And I fully agree with you that this should be simplified - however, the simplest possible without other changes which will also cause bigger complaints than the occasional bit of display inconsistency does is three, not one.

Getting to a single classification would be extremely difficult. The three necessary classifications at the moment - and it would certainly help if the display classification was at least consistent with one of these! - are:

Geological: this is the oldest classification, and has four grades. It determines which planets the elements appear on according to the 3-2-1 rule - each planet has 3 G2, 2 G3, and 1 G4, and all the G1s (except metal-rich, which only have Iron and Nickel at G1). Getting rid of this classification in favour of another classification would change the minerals found on each planet, invalidating all the work explorers have done over the last few years cataloguing them. This would be extremely unpopular.

Engineering: this is a five grade classification determining where the raw material sits in engineering recipes. This could be switched back to a four grade classification, which would make raw materials less valuable in general for engineering, and mean that manufactured or data G5s replaced them in the G5 recipes where a raw is currently in the "5" slot. This would make high-grade engineering somewhat slower and more difficult (as raws are much easier to collect in bulk than data or manufactured) and would likely be at least somewhat unpopular.

Economic: this is a four grade classification (technically five, but the fifth grade is completely empty) determining how the material traders react to it, and how much of each material you can carry at once. This could use one of the other classifications, but the problem is that there aren't an equal number of materials at each grade in those classifications, and material trading requires that (or you end up with materials which you can only cross-trade for). They already had to invent three new laser-mining-only raw materials (which are pretty rare even if you do a lot of laser mining!) to make it a rectangle, even after moving Selenium to G4. To make this match the geological grading would involve introducing four more new raw materials, none of which could be obtained from planets, none of which would have any current use, and three of which would trade with Selenium (i.e. Selenium could only be cross-traded for raw materials which you might actually want). Matching economic to the engineering scheme would be even more full of holes. This would, in general, make raw material trading less straightforward, which would be at least somewhat unpopular.

Getting rid of the fourth separate display classification and making the display consistently one of the others - probably has to be economic - would on the other hand be a very sensible thing to do


The broad problem is that the original geological and engineering classifications massively pre-date the idea of material traders, so they didn't know back then that the material types list had to be rectangular ... and the original engineering recipes (which only lasted a few months) were fairly irregular in terms of material usage so the engineering grades were retrospectively added on after engineering had been developed. It's not good - but all the alternatives seem worse.

 

[Rietz]

Yea, my point exactly. Too simple usually means shallow.
And you seem to be disappointed about engineering being hollow buy you want to make it even more hollow, right?

As i said i kinda like it as it is now. And if you check some engineering blueprints, the choice of components kinda makes sense.
Crazy, isn't it?

Anyway, things only appear as hollow and simple, but they never really are... as you can see below

But where is that quote from Ian Doncaster, right... here it is:



Or this one

Well, I'm disappointed that it's hollow, so I thought about what would make it more interesting. I asked myself, what is engineering for? What is its purpose? It's to upgrade your ships. And why do you want to upgrade your ships? To make it better so you can do OTHER things. Wow, crazy revelation, isn't it?

And so, I came to a conclusion that, so instead of spending too much time and resources to make it more interesting, why not just accept it for what it is, and make it simpler so you can just go ahead and be done with it to get to the fun part?

And as I said, what I proposed is just an example. The numbers can be change all in accordance to the game itself. I mean, why have both, for example, Military Grade Alloys AND Military Supercapacitors when the way they're gathered is completely the same? Why have 3 different types of Encoded materials when they're all from doing missions?

As for saying that engineering is not hollow and simple, if I'm not reading the quotes wrong, it all has to do with the...display? And the biggest problem were the display inconsistency?
Basically according to him, it's nothing serious and it's just an interesting bit on how adding traders into the game leave behind some "leftover" side effects.
Not sure if it has anything related to engineering being not hollow and simple, to be honest.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Not sure if it has anything related to engineering being not hollow and simple, to be honest.

As the original author of those quotes, I think the point they're trying to make by bringing them up is that reducing the number of raw materials would have undesirable side effects, and I think that's probably true.

On the other hand, I fully support reducing the number of data and manufactured materials. There's far too many, and a lot of them are barely used as it is - Basic Conductors are literally only used for Heatsink synthesis, Improvised Components are only needed for one G5 blueprint, etc. etc. At least the raw materials all have a wide range of uses!

The way I'd do it is probably...data, they could keep:
- wake data
- surface/USS scan data (one of firmware / encrypted)
- ship scan data (one of shield, emission or archives)
(One of each data source remains)

Manufactured they could keep composites, capacitors, chemical/mechanical and shielding and still have all the broad distinct sources of materials.

Probably go down to four grades of each of those, too - scrap G5 materials, and replace them in recipes with extra G4s, as some already have for raws.

Adjust mission rewards to be able to give any material type.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes, the realism in that data is consumed during engineering? Even encoded data is easy to duplicate meaning you would only need to find it once for all future engineering.

I think the idea here is that it represents different specific pieces of data of that type.

The engineer demands exclusive access to it to ensure their own research benefits from it, so you can't give it to someone else (enforced by quantum stuff, I guess) and you can't give it to them again either.

Similarly, raw and manufactured materials - they could obviously go and buy some iron if they needed it, but what they want is a piece of iron from a known source for study of isotopes or similar. Equally they could pick up shield emitters by the thousand from industrial sources, then beat them with a hammer until they became worn shield emitters ... but it's not the same as seeing the unique patterns of wear on a shield emitter that was on a freighter for years and poorly maintained before its demise.

 

[Gauntlet]

The only changes i'd strive to do would be to remove the need of relogging to get materials, for Encoded especially and to a lesser extent for Manufactured.
Crystalline Shards are really nice as a source of top tier raw materials

^^ This ^^ We have the locations to fill our boots with top grade raws this is still a significant investment in time but its all possible without relogging and is engaging gameplay. I'd really like something similar for manufactured and data. Perhaps for data and mats you could farm data points/black boxes/materials in the wreckage field of a combat aftermath, not the 1-5 mats we find in HGEs at the moment but zones where 10-20 ships were destroyed and each has materials to gather from

 

[Rietz]

As the original author of those quotes, I think the point they're trying to make by bringing them up is that reducing the number of raw materials would have undesirable side effects, and I think that's probably true.

On the other hand, I fully support reducing the number of data and manufactured materials. There's far too many, and a lot of them are barely used as it is - Basic Conductors are literally only used for Heatsink synthesis, Improvised Components are only needed for one G5 blueprint, etc. etc. At least the raw materials all have a wide range of uses!

The way I'd do it is probably...data, they could keep:

• wake data
• surface/USS scan data (one of firmware / encrypted)
• ship scan data (one of shield, emission or archives)

(One of each data source remains)

Manufactured they could keep composites, capacitors, chemical/mechanical and shielding and still have all the broad distinct sources of materials.

Probably go down to four grades of each of those, too - scrap G5 materials, and replace them in recipes with extra G4s, as some already have for raws.

Adjust mission rewards to be able to give any material type.

I can see that's the case for raw materials as they're closely related to planets' composition. As for the others, I can't really tell.

That said, since I'm not a game developers, I cant be sure of how complicated the system is. But as someone who started the game with 3 friends and having all of them quit after they hit the steel wall of seemingly complicated engineering, I'm think that it could use a little steamlining in term of the number of different material types. Especially when some of them are just copy and paste with different naming.

Your suggestion is way more detailed than mine because I still can't remember which material is which 3 engineered ships. To me, engineering is just the soulless process of opening a spreadsheet, looks for the locations of the G5 materials, go grab them and visit the traders.

 

[Sensei Jacksama]

I've been playing for about a month and completely finished engineering 3 ships, I feel like the materials for engineering is needlessly complicated.
As of right now, we have over 100 different types of materials. A hundred and eight.
And the methods for gathering those are mostly the same, so is there a need for there to be so many?

There is almost zero benefit for having so many different types of materials, but the disadvantages are obvious.

First, while it's normal for people who are already used to engineering, for new players, 108 types of material is incredibly complex. Especially for people whose english isn't their native language.

Second, have you ever been in a situation where you only need to exchange one type of material from the trader but spent a whole minute or two looking through the list trying to find what you need? I have, and it's those moments that makes me wonder: Why? Just why?

So my suggestion is, just reduce the number of material types. Not the amount, just the number of types.
Why do we need 5 grades of materials when 3 is fine? Why need 10 different categories when 5 is enough?

At the moment, we have:
Raw: 4 grades x 7 categories = 28 types
Encoded: 5 grades x 6 categories = 30 types
Manufactured: 5 grades x 10 categories = 50 types.
Total: 108

We can reduce it by more than half and still won't change much in term of gameplay.

For example:
Raw: 3 grades x 3 categories = 9 types.
Encoded: 3 grades x 4 categories = 12 types.
Manufactured: 3 grades x 5 categories = 15 types.
Total: 36

Remove the old G1 to G2, keep G3, G4, and G5. Adjust the blueprint for a bit and everything will be the same, but more streamlined.

The different material types is good because it encourages you to try different forms of gameplay. Example hybrid capacitors are found while destroying ships in combat zones while data materials can be harvested from data hacking faction installations and planetary geological/biological POIs will yield good amounts of raw matt's. Those of course are not the meta way of relogging constantly that most players do but would be the way I believe fdev originally intended those to be gathered.

I believe personally the biggest problem is the ratio of traded materials. Right now for a G5 manufactured matt you need to trade 6 units of the same level material to get 1 piece. That's littleraly insane. I brought it up during the first AMA event and they agreed with my opinion and said they'd look into it. Who knows if anything will ever happen though.

 

[Northpin]

As the original author of those quotes, I think the point they're trying to make by bringing them up is that reducing the number of raw materials would have undesirable side effects, and I think that's probably true.

indeed, i do think touching the raws might have some undesirable effects

On the other hand, I fully support reducing the number of data and manufactured materials. There's far too many, and a lot of them are barely used as it is - Basic Conductors are literally only used for Heatsink synthesis, Improvised Components are only needed for one G5 blueprint, etc. etc. At least the raw materials all have a wide range of uses!

Yea, but we have 60-70 distinct blueprints spread over 5 categories comprising a lot of equipment types
Plus a ton of experimental effects and quite a number or resynth types.

And each of those requires different combination of materials, from different lines of materials and making up for more or less believable blueprints
for example: efficient beams requires materials from Manufactured (Heat), Encoded (Emission) and a Raw material. Kinda makes sense, isn't it?

Reducing the number of materials would make the whole process quite cartoonish instead of being rather close to a space sim with unique crafting recipes
Sure, they could probably revamp the hole system, remove pointless blueprints and their unique materials. I mean who is ever going to use Reinforced Drives or Blast Resistant Hulls

But OP is not asking for that.
He just want to open less browser pages when he wants to engineer a ship (Inara can help here by keeping track of your materials, your wanted blueprints and materials needed)

Alternatives could be to either get materials while playing and mildly (that is G3, maaaybe a G4) engineer ships when he has materials or organize material hunt expeditions and make sure he has all materials, all the time, in sufficient numbers.
My approach is to go for the latter. My G5 stashes never drop below 25-30 materials and I usually keep them in the high 75%+ and i get lower grades from trading down G4/G5
That is simply because when i want to engineer a ship - i just want to do it and have everything at hand