I'm going to make another post about the raw material trader because it has been a problem since the first beta and nothing has changed. It is broken.
Like really, really broken.
To demonstrate my point, I have taken a screenshot of the raw trader and changed the material rarities to reflect what they actually are in the rest of the game. I have also gone through most of the blueprints that use elements and drawn arrows connecting lower grade elements with the higher grade elements that commonly replace them in blueprints.*
https://i.imgur.com/IqsM9ut.jpg
*My parameters for this were any element that is used it the next grade of the same blueprint. When more than one element were used per grade in a blueprint, I looked at other blueprints to decide which element of the first pair preceding which of the second. Sometimes there would be large gaps of 2-3 grades without any elements, and in this case I usually just ignored it, but in one case I denoted this relationship with an orange arrow.
Utter nonsense. An example of the utter failure of this system is OC power-plant G3. It uses Selenium. G4 uses Cadmium. G5 Tellurium. Now lets say you are rolling a powerplant, but you get a few bad g3 rolls and run out of selenium, but you have plenty of Tellurium and cadmium. You go to the material trader, and find that it costs 6 of the VERY RARE Tellurium to get ONE STANDARD Selenium, and 36 of the RARE Cadmium to get 1 selenium. And the funny part is, as you can see from the graph, this is not an edge case. This is EVERY CASE!!!
It would be very simple to fix this. First I would make lead common and baron standard instead of both being very common. Then I would change the categories and ranking to be:
https://i.imgur.com/mvPaL8a.png
With arrows:
As you can see, this system actually makes sense and keeps elements used in the same blueprint in the same category, for the most part. It also preserves element rarity unlike the old system.
