First off... credit to FDev for the change in the materials & data storage system in 3.0, having per-item storage caps and the ability to add materials to an ignore list are great features. However, I have a few suggestions on how this system could be made even better for the serious materials grinder (aka me).
By way of background, here's how I currently grind for materials: I go to the HazRes / CZ / HMC planet and shot ships / rocks and collect the bits that come out. I collect everything I can. When I'm full on a given material I go to the material trader and trade UP. Yes, I pay the painful x6 penalty to try to get my G5 levels has high as possible. I know I'll only get x3 if I trade back down, but I don't want to ever be in the situation where I have a G3 or G4 material that I'm maxed out on when there's a juicy material sitting in front of me.
I think of my G5 materials as my "savings account", and truth be told, 100 G5 materials would trade down for 150x G4, 198x G3, 243x G2, 243x G1, and you'd still have 16x G5s left over.
Ok, so how could FDev make my life (and possibly the life of other CMDRs) a bit easier when we're out hunting for mats:
1) I think it'd be great if you could see (and control) which materials are on your Ignore list from your Inventory view in the right panel. I know we can already control this from the left Contacts panel, but in order to know something is on the Ignore list you need to be in its presence so that it shows up at the bottom darkened out.
2) Allow me to control the ignore list based on material grade level i.e. Ignore all G1 and G2 materials.
3) Allow me to control the ignore list based on material type (this makes most sense for manufactured materials since element materials seem to be randomly grouped), but it'd be nice for example to ignore "Capacitors" or "Crystals".
4) Show materials on the HUD radar with a different symbol if they're of a material type that you're maxed out on. I.e. if I have 300 Crystal Shards and Crystal Shards is NOT on my ignore list, then it'd be cool if it showed up on my HUD radar as a different shape than materials that I'm not maxed out on. This would stop me cursing at my limpets for being lazy, and/or me thinking I'm out of range.
5) Show mining fragments as a different shape from materials. Maybe mining fragments could be a diamond shape and mats could stay as the squares that they are. Maybe materials could be squares with a hole in the middle if you're maxed out on that particular materials (see #4 above).
6) Ability to add Canisters of all types to my Ignore list (similar to #1 #2 and #3 above). When I'm farming materials in the HazRes I don't want to be accidentally wasting my time (or my limpet's time) picking up the canisters of Biowaste that my targets drop just before the pop. This causes the next batch of pirates to send in hatch breaker limpets and then I start losing Canisters of my own limpets... None of this would happen if my idiot limpets didn't collect dropped canisters to begin with. Also when I recover my own canisters of Limpets that the pirates stole from me, those canisters of limpets show up in my Inventory as "Stolen"... yeah, stolen from me!!!! But I don't stolen limpets can't be offloaded in Advanced Maintenance -> Restock, and they can't be sold... so you have to use 'em or discard 'em which doesn't seem super fair since they were mine to begin with.
7) While we're talking about Canisters, it'd be great if they could have their own symbol on my HUD's radar too... maybe we could make them an Octogon (you know since Canisters are octagonal prisms anyway).
8) I'm sure many of the above points could be applied to mining. I'm not a miner so I don't know how ignoring fragments works... but yeah, maybe it'd be cool to allow you to set when you wanted for each of the bins of your refinery and then have your limpets ignore everything else. BTW, it's wonderful that my limpets automatically ignore mining fragments if I don't have a refinery. Well done FDev, it's the little things that make life wonderful.
9) This probably doesn't just apply to materials grinding, but it'd be FABULOUS (said in my best Yamicks voice), if the sort order of my Contacts tab on the left panel could be controlled. I have no idea what the sort order is now, but it appears random and it changes every few seconds, so if I'm trying to select something in an active HazRes my selected row keeps jumping and all of a sudden I'm selecting something else -- this is especially true when trying to select something at the bottom of the list. Aside to FDev: I understand that cursor position is probably a UI index and there's an underlying list of items that populate the UI panel, when something comes into or goes out of range the list length changes, but the cursor UI index doesn't. This makes it appear as though the cursor jumps around somewhat randomly and it can be hard to select something. It's also super annoying when you're trying to select something at the bottom of the list (aka something on your Ignore list) because if the 1 item drops from the list then UI index is now one greater than panel list and modulo division (to prevent overflows) means I end up at the top of the damn panel when I want to be at the bottom!!!
That's all... phew, sorry long post. What did I miss. What could make grinding for materials more pleasant? Oh and I should mention, there's the obvious SRV with cargo scoop open should automatically scoop all element materials on contact. Let's call that #0 since it's so obvious.
By way of background, here's how I currently grind for materials: I go to the HazRes / CZ / HMC planet and shot ships / rocks and collect the bits that come out. I collect everything I can. When I'm full on a given material I go to the material trader and trade UP. Yes, I pay the painful x6 penalty to try to get my G5 levels has high as possible. I know I'll only get x3 if I trade back down, but I don't want to ever be in the situation where I have a G3 or G4 material that I'm maxed out on when there's a juicy material sitting in front of me.
I think of my G5 materials as my "savings account", and truth be told, 100 G5 materials would trade down for 150x G4, 198x G3, 243x G2, 243x G1, and you'd still have 16x G5s left over.
Ok, so how could FDev make my life (and possibly the life of other CMDRs) a bit easier when we're out hunting for mats:
1) I think it'd be great if you could see (and control) which materials are on your Ignore list from your Inventory view in the right panel. I know we can already control this from the left Contacts panel, but in order to know something is on the Ignore list you need to be in its presence so that it shows up at the bottom darkened out.
2) Allow me to control the ignore list based on material grade level i.e. Ignore all G1 and G2 materials.
3) Allow me to control the ignore list based on material type (this makes most sense for manufactured materials since element materials seem to be randomly grouped), but it'd be nice for example to ignore "Capacitors" or "Crystals".
4) Show materials on the HUD radar with a different symbol if they're of a material type that you're maxed out on. I.e. if I have 300 Crystal Shards and Crystal Shards is NOT on my ignore list, then it'd be cool if it showed up on my HUD radar as a different shape than materials that I'm not maxed out on. This would stop me cursing at my limpets for being lazy, and/or me thinking I'm out of range.
5) Show mining fragments as a different shape from materials. Maybe mining fragments could be a diamond shape and mats could stay as the squares that they are. Maybe materials could be squares with a hole in the middle if you're maxed out on that particular materials (see #4 above).
6) Ability to add Canisters of all types to my Ignore list (similar to #1 #2 and #3 above). When I'm farming materials in the HazRes I don't want to be accidentally wasting my time (or my limpet's time) picking up the canisters of Biowaste that my targets drop just before the pop. This causes the next batch of pirates to send in hatch breaker limpets and then I start losing Canisters of my own limpets... None of this would happen if my idiot limpets didn't collect dropped canisters to begin with. Also when I recover my own canisters of Limpets that the pirates stole from me, those canisters of limpets show up in my Inventory as "Stolen"... yeah, stolen from me!!!! But I don't stolen limpets can't be offloaded in Advanced Maintenance -> Restock, and they can't be sold... so you have to use 'em or discard 'em which doesn't seem super fair since they were mine to begin with.
7) While we're talking about Canisters, it'd be great if they could have their own symbol on my HUD's radar too... maybe we could make them an Octogon (you know since Canisters are octagonal prisms anyway).
8) I'm sure many of the above points could be applied to mining. I'm not a miner so I don't know how ignoring fragments works... but yeah, maybe it'd be cool to allow you to set when you wanted for each of the bins of your refinery and then have your limpets ignore everything else. BTW, it's wonderful that my limpets automatically ignore mining fragments if I don't have a refinery. Well done FDev, it's the little things that make life wonderful.
9) This probably doesn't just apply to materials grinding, but it'd be FABULOUS (said in my best Yamicks voice), if the sort order of my Contacts tab on the left panel could be controlled. I have no idea what the sort order is now, but it appears random and it changes every few seconds, so if I'm trying to select something in an active HazRes my selected row keeps jumping and all of a sudden I'm selecting something else -- this is especially true when trying to select something at the bottom of the list. Aside to FDev: I understand that cursor position is probably a UI index and there's an underlying list of items that populate the UI panel, when something comes into or goes out of range the list length changes, but the cursor UI index doesn't. This makes it appear as though the cursor jumps around somewhat randomly and it can be hard to select something. It's also super annoying when you're trying to select something at the bottom of the list (aka something on your Ignore list) because if the 1 item drops from the list then UI index is now one greater than panel list and modulo division (to prevent overflows) means I end up at the top of the damn panel when I want to be at the bottom!!!
That's all... phew, sorry long post. What did I miss. What could make grinding for materials more pleasant? Oh and I should mention, there's the obvious SRV with cargo scoop open should automatically scoop all element materials on contact. Let's call that #0 since it's so obvious.