General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System

[Disemboweled Ego]

Once you get away from the main gravity wells the travel times are very short, a minute or two (unless you have to cross the whole system, in which case it's a few minutes more), if you do it manually and aim for the barely-5-seconds ETA. I don't find it tedious or uneventful, but much like driving in racing games—trying to get to the "finish line" against the clock as fast as possible. Takes a bit of skill of setting your throttle just right, keeping the ship on target and finding the optimal path away from the gravity wells that is not too long. Quite zen, if you ask me. Only way to make it better would be diversifying FSD-s and ships to have varying supercruise speeds and accelerations.

What I do other than flying out of plane when needed is untarget the deep space USS to change the supercruise physics and brake much faster than if you had it selected and then tap 50% throttle until I'm as close as possible (ideally less than 1Ls) before targeting it and speeding up to do a SCA fast drop if there's time to even accelerate that much. I think that's as much inputs as you can give it.

I love driving endurance races in games like Test Drive Unlimited (or the old TD2) or The Crew (RIP) and others (haven't gone back to Euro Truck 2 though), but there's much more going on there in terms of inputs and stimuli during the drive. There's not much a hardish-sci-fi immersive space game can do to make flying through space more interesting. A good idea would be to try to minimize the supercruise time and maximize the amount of time you spend in normal space, actually doing stuff. Elite goes the opposite way with USS and has many USS that have maybe 1 mechanical scrap in them and could be fully looted completed before your FSD finishes recharging.

 

[Shurimal]

A good idea would be to try to minimize the supercruise time and maximize the amount of time you spend in normal space, actually doing stuff. Elite goes the opposite way with USS and has many USS that have maybe 1 mechanical scrap

Faster acceleration for FSD travel near gravity sources would be welcome, as would different supercruise profiles for different ships and FSD ratings. Eg an Eagle with A-rated FSD--very fast; a Corvette with A-rated FSD--somewhat slow; a Type 9 with E-rated FSD--painfully slow.

I haven't seen signal sources with just 1 grade 1 material yet (maybe the encoded emissions can have that?)--HGE-s seem to have 3 grade 4 at the worst, but normally 3...4 grade 4 and 2...3 grade 5 ones. In any case, I prefer to gather all my lower grade materials from combat using 4 collector limpets the class 3 ops controller has (and trade up/across once the bins are full, which happens just after 3 or so sorties to a local RES) and visit HGE-s purely for Core Dynamics Composites if I need them for HRP-s or armor.

That being said, the scope of mission rewards should be expanded--more grade 5 materials should be on offer (especially Pharmaceutical Isolators and Datamined Wake Scans) and lower than grade 3 should not be on the tables. That would make collecting them much more accessible. Ideally, I'd like to see the "rolls" mechanic go away and have a fixed amount of materials needed to complete any grade with one application. I think this would fix 90% of grievances with the system, including my one--the later grade 5 rolls giving only a negligible improvement. There are also many nearly useless materials like polonium which is only used for one special effect on mines and some premium synthesis, nothing else. Can't even use it for assassinating targets in Odyssey settlements! That fat could be trimmed.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Faster acceleration for FSD travel near gravity sources would be welcome, as would different supercruise profiles for different ships and FSD ratings. Eg an Eagle with A-rated FSD--very fast; a Corvette with A-rated FSD--somewhat slow; a Type 9 with E-rated FSD--painfully slow

Faster supercruise travel would help but it wouldn't solve the problem, you'd still be hopping between signal sources and spending very little time in each one. Instead of say flying from wreck to wreck in normal space avoiding debris, using various limpets to do things to more intact pieces to get the materials (or just blowing them up more for lower rewards) - there's multiple excellent games based on spaceship salvaging out by now and Elite has all the components to put together something pretty good, it just did the bare minimum on launching those features and never improved..

That being said, the scope of mission rewards should be expanded--more grade 5 materials should be on offer (especially Pharmaceutical Isolators and Datamined Wake Scans) and lower than grade 3 should not be on the tables. That would make collecting them much more accessible.

The fix here (as I suggested earlier in the thread) is to change mission rewards and all other material drops based on what you have so the materials you have the least of have the highest chance of spawning. Perhaps along with also reducing the material caps which has various other beneficial side effects psychological and otherwise.

I haven't seen signal sources with just 1 grade 1 material yet (maybe the encoded emissions can have that?)--HGE-s seem to have 3 grade 4 at the worst, but normally 3...4 grade 4 and 2...3 grade 5 ones.

I've seen 5 proprietary components spawn and the last time I was farming HGEs I had two in a row with no Core Dynamics components spawning at all.

I don't visit enough lower grade emissions to have a good read on this, but I think the 1 G1 mat spawning can happen when other spawns are blocked by debris. Either way looting everything and not being able to jump out because of the initial FSD cooldown has happened to me there and it would be more frequent if you're already full on most mats looking for something specific.

 

[V'larr]

To be fair there's no natural way to gather raw materials as missions don't provide any raw mat rewards - mining is a niche activity and doesn't provide high grade stuff and SRV mining is impossibly slow. The crashed condas or meta alloy sites all require relogging too.

That is rather part of my overall point of the hubris in claiming that Engineering can be done the 'gradual and natural' way in any appreciable amount of time.

 

[V'larr]

There are. Guardian modules are equal to G4 upgrade.

Not exactly, there's only a few specific ones available, they only mimic certain blueprints that are sometimes best avoided. and also have some stiff penalties as well.

 

[V'larr]

What's the hypothesis, since FDev have said variations in the blue mean nothing but a reflection of the underlying terrain?

It's off-topic for this thread, but the EDHM-UI folks are convinced enough there's something to do with shaders & locations of bio things that there's a plug-in for EDHM specifically for that.

 

[V'larr]

I don't give a crap if other players don't consider crystal shard sites to be "natural gameplay".

• They were obviously placed in the game intentionally.
• There lots of them.
• Using them is not a game exploit. No relogging. No weird tricks.
• Using them is not a grind. Its an activity. You go to a site, collect, then leave.
• For an established player it is a very quick activity. A couple jumps in a fleet carrier while making dinner. Then collect and return. If the cmdr already knows the desired destinations.. verging on trivial task. Super easy.
• For a newish player... a descent jump range AspX or DBX and voila... enough raw mats for several G5 ship builds.
• Several systems have more than 1 type of shard crystal (giving different mats), so only need to visit a couple systems.

Is it easy for a new player. No. They gotta learn a bunch of stuff and progress in the game to make it easy. A new player generally doesn't have the ability to purchase and G5 engineer a Federal Corvette combat murder boat.

This is splitting hairs at best, and outright head-in-sand denial at worst.

Nobody is going to find out about crystal shard sites through "natural gameplay", full stop.

The only reason there's no relogging involved anymore is because Fdev threw them all over the planets as part of the Odyssey planet-gen changes, instead of only being at focused POIs.

You're deliberately going out of your way to dedicate time & effort specifically JUST to collect things to make other things to maybe prepare a ship to do a thing you actually want. That's grind.

Obviously an established player who knows what they are doing with Engineering can and should mitigate said grind as much as possible. That doesn't make it normal or fine for everyone else.

You aren't going to get an Asp X with a FSD booster & v1 FSD equipped through "natural gameplay", period.

Continuing to further the claim that ANYTHING involved with the very processes and gameplay you're referring to here is "natural" or "intuitive" is utter nonsense.

 

[V'larr]

It is still one trip to crystal shard sites to recover used-up mats. Whether your bins are 80% full or 40% full it really doesn't matter. When surrounded in a forest of mats, you just collect them.

I generally use whatever raw mats i need for whatever purposes and then just before returning to deep space for another 6 months I fill up my bins. As said above, its an almost trivial task for an established and experienced player.

For new players... they have the learning and progression curve. Like any other game I have played they gotta gain skills, knowledge, and ingame equipment (specialized ships, engineered modules, fleet carrier, etc.). This progression makes the game worth playing beyond 25 hours.

You have gotten your cart before your horse. Engineering 'progession' is not what an open-world shared-universe 1:1 scale Milky Way simulation space game set 1300 years in the future is for experiencing.

This "learning and progression curve" has no merit in and of itself. It serves to gate content & the true game experience behind a barrier to entry. None of the "skills or knowledge" necessary to perform the Engineering grind (with the sole exception of certain Engineer unlock steps, which are generally trivial) is applicable to any other activities you could be doing in the game.

The fact that this grind is so egregious that it dictates inflating your displayed playtime behind "25 hours" is not a commendable point.

 

[V'larr]

I cannot see how the materials gathering aspect of engineering is broken, as it seems pretty simple to me (and I struggle to find solutions to puzzles or assess gameplay to understand it, I rely on others).

Effectively stuff is scattered around just waiting to be gathered, often in various ways. Some stuff is harder to find than others. And it can be traded.

It has been said that there is a lack of information in the game. The way I see it, is that the in game info (tutorials, codex etc) is like learning a job at a college, which gives you the basic grounding. It is not until the work place (game and forum) is entered, and you get exposed to the actual job and work with others who provide lots of additional info (such how the easiest way to achieve x is by doing y, or this place here is where z can be found). When entering that place we do not have all the skills/tools at our disposal. They will come with time and effort.

Steve

Having to sift through years of often-deprecated or misleading information strewn about the forums, reddit, steam, youtube, discord, and whatever else - the equivalent of poring for hours through walls of text and spreadsheets - should not be a normal required skillset to sit down and enjoy a game.

Learning a job at college is a life's undertaking and there's a reason people most often aren't doing it as a pasttime - it's not fun (and it's not even guaranteed to succeed, but that's an IRL discussion that's far out of scope for this thread).

 

[V'larr]

Once you get away from the main gravity wells the travel times are very short, a minute or two (unless you have to cross the whole system, in which case it's a few minutes more), if you do it manually and aim for the barely-5-seconds ETA. I don't find it tedious or uneventful, but much like driving in racing games—trying to get to the "finish line" against the clock as fast as possible. Takes a bit of skill of setting your throttle just right, keeping the ship on target and finding the optimal path away from the gravity wells that is not too long. Quite zen, if you ask me. Only way to make it better would be diversifying FSD-s and ships to have varying supercruise speeds and accelerations.

The loot in Morrowind was semi-random, too, leading to repeated save reloading before opening a container if you wanted to get the "best stuffz". Skyrim had random loot, too, but rolled the dice at the entry to a dungeon, making reloading pointless—but attacking a merchant, then reloading to reset their inventory is a common exploit to get the rare enchanted item you're after. And in Oblivion repeated reloading if you didn't get the Sigil Stone you wanted when closing Oblivion Gates was the best way to get the "good stuffz" for enchanting weapons or armor.

Every game has boring, repetitious ways for getting "stuffz" that players have figured out to be the most "efficient". That's the way it is.

There's also no point to doing any of that in Skyrim when you can simply craft better things or obtain uniques that will be better than anything you can loot, and you can do both through naturally engaging with exploring the game world and interacting with the characters and objects in it, with no outside game knowledge necessary. There's nothing intrinsic about the game content that is gated behind save reloading or obtaining that loot in order to access any other part of the game content. It's not the same thing or "the way it is" at all.

 

[SteveWW57]

Pre engineered gear was surely the right step. Why did they have to make it a random fomo first come first serve limited offer though? A deep hate for players accessing game content?

Given the sheer number of stores, there are a vast number of opportunities to find what you want - but some effort is required. The odds can be tilted if searching for a single specific item by only going to the most likely place to find them.

Steve

 

[SteveWW57]

Did someone say that mining was a "niche" activity?

To gather mats you can mine asteroids which produces stuff to sell and raw mats. Mining will support BGS activity when the station wants mined mats.

Then there is surface mining of those rocks/meteorites that you come across.

And if you cannot be bothered with those methods, there are always the crashed Anacondas with crates of raw mats just there for the taking.

Steve

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Did someone say that mining was a "niche" activity?

To gather mats you can mine asteroids which produces stuff to sell and raw mats.

It's niche in that it's not something many do as their primary/only activity and seems to be something some people do only when they need credits (over other moneymaking activities).

It also only reliably provides G1 mats and in low quantities so doing it primarily for material gathering isn't viable. Would be nice to have a different type of prospecting limpet that changed this but as it is now it's not advisable to go laser mining for materials.

And if you cannot be bothered with those methods, there are always the crashed Anacondas with crates of raw mats just there for the taking.

Which require relogging, (very likely) out of game resources to know about those and a tolerance for repetitive tasks.

It's really cool to find the crash site (esp pre-DSS with just coordinates) and explore it for the first time, but not the other 49 times to get full on a material.

 

[Shurimal]

Instead of say flying from wreck to wreck in normal space avoiding debris, using various limpets to do things to more intact pieces to get the materials (or just blowing them up more for lower rewards)

There actually is a precedent--after the Damnation's fiasco in HIP 22460 there were these big debris fields with tons and tons of up to grade 3 (IIRC) materials laying about. Only problem: whenever you dropped in them 60 seconds later a bunch of very angry Thargoids warped in and whooped your Asp... I would really, really like to see these debris fields with some occasional pirates/scavengers in the Bubble, for example after a war has finished in a system. I think at one point there were some debris fields with pirate spawns in some systems, but they only had few materials and low value commodities/salvage to collect. Haven't seen them for a few years, though.

 

[Brrokk]

That is rather part of my overall point of the hubris in claiming that Engineering can be done the 'gradual and natural' way in any appreciable amount of time.

Not hubris. The day before yesterday I dropped in to a HGE which I happened to notice, to see what was there. It was Imperial Shielding. I couldn't collect it though, because I was already 100/100.

 

[Shurimal]

There's also no point to doing any of that in Skyrim when you can simply craft better things or obtain uniques that will be better than anything you can loot, and you can do both through naturally engaging with exploring the game world and interacting with the characters and objects in it, with no outside game knowledge necessary

I'd argue that out-of-game knowledge is required for Skyrim if you want "the best stuffz". There're some neat items hidden away that you have only a slim chance of stumbling upon if you don't know about them beforehand. Also, due to the levelled nature of some uniques (like Dragonbane) it's not a good idea to get them at lower levels (IMO a pretty bad game design), but you wouldn't know it without outside knowledge. There are also some enchanted items that have a slim chance to appear at merchants, and only at certain levels--eg Steel Boots of Muffling (only items that have this enchantment on them) that you can only realistically get from Riften (the blacksmith there has a higher chance to have enchanted items than others--again something you probably won't figure out without out-of-game knowledge) at around level (IIRC) 20 and that have no guaranteed location in game. I think I have found them only once or twice over 10 or so playthroughs.

Another example of game design that hides an important mechanics is Metro 2033 and it's hidden "karma" system that affects the ending. You wouldn't even know it was there without out-of-game sources.

Elite is not unique in this aspect, that there are mechanics you have the best chance of figuring out using out-of-game collective knowledge of the community.

 

[Brrokk]

There actually is a precedent--after the Damnation's fiasco in HIP 22460 there were these big debris fields with tons and tons of up to grade 3 (IIRC) materials laying about. Only problem: whenever you dropped in them 60 seconds later a bunch of very angry Thargoids warped in and whooped your Asp... I would really, really like to see these debris fields with some occasional pirates/scavengers in the Bubble, for example after a war has finished in a system. I think at one point there were some debris fields with pirate spawns in some systems, but they only had few materials and low value commodities/salvage to collect. Haven't seen them for a few years, though.

Up to about a year ago you could drop into a signal source, see the goodies, but before you could collect them pirates would appear saying, "Well, our trick worked". That was fun. I'm not sure if it still happens.

 

[Jack Winter]

Sometimes I wonder how many ships do you people engineer?

Do you all have 8 corvettes each with 8 skill boosters or what?

Wouldn't making mats much easier to come by, or even make engineered modules buyable for credits result in being able to get anything right away, instead of having to make priorities as to what ship to get and how to engineer it? I did feel a certain amount of accomplishment once I added the 8th engineered skill booster to my corvette.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

Up to about a year ago you could drop into a signal source, see the goodies, but before you could collect them pirates would appear saying, "Well, our trick worked". That was fun. I'm not sure if it still happens.

The threat levels are an indication of that - degraded signal source threat 0 is just mats, threat 3 may have some goodies and/or dangerous cargo (toxic waste...) and pirates waiting to spring their trap.

 

[Shurimal]

Up to about a year ago you could drop into a signal source, see the goodies, but before you could collect them pirates would appear saying, "Well, our trick worked". That was fun. I'm not sure if it still happens.

The threat levels are an indication of that - degraded signal source threat 0 is just mats, threat 3 may have some goodies and/or dangerous cargo (toxic waste...) and pirates waiting to spring their trap.

There are also Threat >0 Distress Signals that can have pirates drop in. Too bad that there is no reason to go to the distress signals opportunistically--you need special equipment you probably don't carry "just in case" for them. The multi-limpet controllers also get it wrong--the rescue one doesn't have collector limpets which are the most useful ones when you fly around doing missions (including SAR missions) and whatever. The ops controller gives 4 collectors, so it's the standard equipment on my PvE ships for that reason, but hatchbreaker and recon ones go almost always unused whereas especially repair limpets could be useful even outside of distress signals. And the universal controller can only be fitted on ships that can't land on outposts.