Alright, I'm on my way back from Arm's End. It takes a great many boosted jumps to get out there, over 31 for less than a 2kly stretch of the 6.5 or so kly of sparse stars. Fortunately, through divine intervention or sheer luck, there also happens to be quite a few Jumponium-rich systems out there. Unfortunately, one ends up having to collect around 30 polonium, 30 yttrium, 70 cadmium, and damn near a hundred niobium (and many more elements required for jumponium) at the next green system. This is a problem, as I've been hunting for that polonium for 15 hours now and still need to collect 58 niobium. Needless to say, I've had enough of this and if I have to do this any more I may well go insane. Therefore, I propose a solution.
The surface maps of planets are nearly useless at the moment, so why not display what materials are available across the surface and in what frequencies? For example, polonium would be more common in red. The more opaque the red appears on the map, the more frequently it would appear. Another game, Kerbal Space Program, does this quite well:
Building on the last idea, there could be a planetary drill attachment available for purchase in stations. It would be able to, well, drill into the surface of a planet and instead of having to mindlessly drive over bumps and cliffs and crashing into rocks for hours upon hours with the SRV, you'd get a steady input of mats straight to your materials bay.
Of course, there'd have to be some balancing. For instance, maybe you wouldn't be able to filter out tin or carbon or something and it would just take up space in your material storage until you dumped them. Or maybe the drill would be extremely slow, but harvesting materials reliably over that amount of time.
I really don't care how collecting mats from the surface is optimized, but it should be another feature on the list of things that need to be improved. I'm sick of driving around in search of one item for hours on end.
TL;DR
I hate how grindy it is to get materials off the surface of planets and wish there were a more efficient and less tedious way of going about collecting them.
The surface maps of planets are nearly useless at the moment, so why not display what materials are available across the surface and in what frequencies? For example, polonium would be more common in red. The more opaque the red appears on the map, the more frequently it would appear. Another game, Kerbal Space Program, does this quite well:
Building on the last idea, there could be a planetary drill attachment available for purchase in stations. It would be able to, well, drill into the surface of a planet and instead of having to mindlessly drive over bumps and cliffs and crashing into rocks for hours upon hours with the SRV, you'd get a steady input of mats straight to your materials bay.
Of course, there'd have to be some balancing. For instance, maybe you wouldn't be able to filter out tin or carbon or something and it would just take up space in your material storage until you dumped them. Or maybe the drill would be extremely slow, but harvesting materials reliably over that amount of time.
I really don't care how collecting mats from the surface is optimized, but it should be another feature on the list of things that need to be improved. I'm sick of driving around in search of one item for hours on end.
TL;DR
I hate how grindy it is to get materials off the surface of planets and wish there were a more efficient and less tedious way of going about collecting them.
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