Tritium Availablity in Colonia, What Happened?

CMDR Jayce MacLeod

CMDR Jayce MacLeod
Greetings,

I've been currently on my way to Colonia with my fleet carrier. Today, I wanted to review my options to purchase Tritium for my return to the bubble, via sites like Inara. However, I am dismayed that there is almost no Stations that are selling any sizable amounts of Tritium any longer. Just a few weeks ago, these same stations were plentiful in their stores of Tritium. What happened? Is this part of the upcoming fix tomorrow?
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
What happened was Frontier in 3.7.3 fixed the bug where station Tritium reserves regenerated at infinite rate.

Then everyone bought it all.
The bubble's economy is big enough that it's in no danger of running out of Tritium even with finite regeneration speed ... Colonia's economy is small enough, and the local demand so high, that even if it regenerated as fast as Hydrogen Fuel does, there'd still not be any around.

There is no "actually, supply and demand is a terrible idea, free Tritium for everyone" line in the 3.7.4 patch notes, so I'm guessing this won't change tomorrow ... but it will probably be easier to mine locally after the patch, and you can get a bit at a time from mission rewards from the stations which sell it.
 

Nadreck

N
They're calling it the Tritpocalpse. A problem with mining it, coinciding with a dramatic crash in availability at stations (cheap tritium in the Bubble, and any tritium at all in Colonia).

Some people are assuming it will be fixed, but without evidence. IIRC, FDev have only admitted to a mining issue, and have refused to comment on station supplies.
 

CMDR Jayce MacLeod

CMDR Jayce MacLeod
Terrible. I wouldn't have bothered with bringing my carrier had I known they would pull a stunt like this. I guess I'll just hope for the best for a positive change soon. I am planing on Staying in Colonia for a month or so. I'f im needed in the bubble sooner i'll just fly back with one of my ships and ditch the carrier in Colonia. Thank you all
 

Snowymonk

Snowymonk
Nadreck said:
Some people are assuming it will be fixed, but without evidence. IIRC, FDev have only admitted to a mining issue, and have refused to comment on station supplies.
Click to expand...
it would be an illogical shame if the Colonia markets didn’t recover to something better than it currently is.
There is a Fleet Carrier vendor there and (at the moment) no way to purchase fuel for the carriers.

Ian Doncaster did post some compelling arguments for Colonia to stay Tritium poor. In this instance, I hope he’s wrong
 
Last edited:

Dillon Fallon

Dillon Fallon
I've noticed a few carriers starting to be decommissioned and I assume this is part of the reason. Who wants to move it a large distance and be stuck mining small quantities in the middle of nowhere?

Thing is with Colonia though, your max jump is only going to be 70ly, unless you're going off into the black. If you're staying around inhabited systems, that 1000t is going to last you a while anyway.

I'm in favour of Ian's point on supply. The whole region has a population that's probably less than some cities today. It makes sense to me that it can't support that many carriers (says the Colonia based carrier owner).
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
CMDR Jayce MacLeod said:
Having to manually mine 10k with of Tritium to return home is nonsense - it would be more time efficient to just decommission my carrier and buy another one back home in the bubble
Click to expand...
Though even if Tritium was for sale, that would still be the cheaper way to move it - 400M+ for 10k of Tritium, or 200Mish for decommissioning/recommissioning fees.

Dillon Fallon said:
Thing is with Colonia though, your max jump is only going to be 70ly, unless you're going off into the black. If you're staying around inhabited systems, that 1000t is going to last you a while anyway.
Click to expand...
And you can pick up 30t at a time from mission rewards at the various refineries, which will get you another few local jumps.

Dillon Fallon said:
The whole region has a population that's probably less than some cities today.
Click to expand...
A pretty big city - about the size of London - but still, ~750,000 times smaller NPC population than the bubble, and ~4,000 times smaller economy [1]. The catch for the Tritium supplies is that it's got between 1/100th and 1/200th of the player activity, so those do run out.

[1] This is both because smaller population systems are more economically efficient in terms of surplus/capita, and because certain Colonia region stations have incredibly large production bonuses (presumably to reflect that it's all new-build). It's about the right economy size for other purposes.
 

CMDR Jayce MacLeod

CMDR Jayce MacLeod
Schmack said:
This forum is in a perpetual "wait for the update" starting block position, since inception.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it looks like im going to have to wait until FDev fixes this. I have no realistic way of returning home to the bubble at this point, unless I decommission and rebuy.

For now, My Carrier, the USS Columbia, is in the Colonia System. I've put up a buy order for 15,000 Tons of Tritium at 175% markup - That will remain until a fix is in for station stock. Feel free to sell me any Tritium you want until such time.
 
Last edited:

Just Paul

Just Paul
What happened? It's all gone, all of it.

crying.jpg
 

Nutter

Nutter
Ian Doncaster said:
What happened was Frontier in 3.7.3 fixed the bug where station Tritium reserves regenerated at infinite rate.
Click to expand...
How many votes did this bug get then? I never saw any Open letters about the supply of Tritium, well not untill Post 'fix' anyway.

AFAIK, there was no bug, just a mahoosive Nerf Bomb which totaly wrecked quite a few areas of gameplay and mechanics.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Nutter said:
How many votes did this bug get then? I never saw any Open letters about the supply of Tritium, well not untill Post 'fix' anyway.

AFAIK, there was no bug, just a mahoosive Nerf Bomb which totaly wrecked quite a few areas of gameplay and mechanics.
Click to expand...
I'll put you down as another vote for "supply and demand is silly, we should hunt down all the people saying Elite's problem is not enough economic realism with pitchforks", then. :)


There were many complaints by the "earning money is too easy" half of the forums about the bug where LTD demand instantly regenerated. Relatively few about Tritium doing the same, because LTDs were where the money was, but there were a couple of posts here and there.

It turns out that the "LTDs have infinite demand regeneration", "Tritium has infinite supply/demand regeneration", "Agronomic Treatment has ..." and "Consumer Technology has ..." bugs were all, in fact, the same bug [1]. So when Frontier by "popular demand" fixed the first one, the others went too.


In the bubble, it's all fine - there are so many Tritium producers that there was about 250 million tonnes of Tritium when they fixed it, and there's still about that now - supply is stable and in no danger of running out. In Colonia there are six producers and nothing short of infinite supply regeneration would be sufficient to keep up with demand.

So then we're back to a basic thematic game design question of "should it be possible for interesting situations to emerge from player actions, or should the game be sufficiently heavily railroaded as to avoid them" ... to which the answer of the forums in any specific case has been "Choo choo! All aboard!"


[1] Which might seem obvious, but ... bizarrely, not the same bug as "Void Opals have infinite demand regeneration", which remains in place. I have no idea what possible internal system could have produced the results seen in the 3.6, 3.7 and 3.7.3 releases for which commodities did or didn't have infinite regeneration.
 

Nutter

Nutter
Ian Doncaster said:
I'll put you down as another vote for "supply and demand is silly, we should hunt down all the people saying Elite's problem is not enough economic realism with pitchforks", then. :)


There were many complaints by the "earning money is too easy" half of the forums about the bug where LTD demand instantly regenerated. Relatively few about Tritium doing the same, because LTDs were where the money was, but there were a couple of posts here and there.

It turns out that the "LTDs have infinite demand regeneration", "Tritium has infinite supply/demand regeneration", "Agronomic Treatment has ..." and "Consumer Technology has ..." bugs were all, in fact, the same bug [1]. So when Frontier by "popular demand" fixed the first one, the others went too.


In the bubble, it's all fine - there are so many Tritium producers that there was about 250 million tonnes of Tritium when they fixed it, and there's still about that now - supply is stable and in no danger of running out. In Colonia there are six producers and nothing short of infinite supply regeneration would be sufficient to keep up with demand.

So then we're back to a basic thematic game design question of "should it be possible for interesting situations to emerge from player actions, or should the game be sufficiently heavily railroaded as to avoid them" ... to which the answer of the forums in any specific case has been "Choo choo! All aboard!"


[1] Which might seem obvious, but ... bizarrely, not the same bug as "Void Opals have infinite demand regeneration", which remains in place. I have no idea what possible internal system could have produced the results seen in the 3.6, 3.7 and 3.7.3 releases for which commodities did or didn't have infinite regeneration.
Click to expand...
OK so lets just say nobody thought of the imapct of nerfing LTD mining and Markets then?

Without fuel everything grinds to a halt, fuel scoops of course are the perfect answer and fueling our ships has never been a issue. The problem here is design, which as far as FCs are concerned, is the fact they never changed the scope from Squads. FDev love a good grind and the only reason a Trituim Depot exists was for the squad grind.

When they released carriers for all, they should have dumped the squad grind and added a scoop for either the Carrier or Tanker ship. This would have involved dev time, seeing as the team are working on EDO that dev will never happen.

I'm confident the patch will still make owning a Exploration carrier a ball and chain grind fest. Would love to be proved wrong though
 

Nutter

Nutter
FixMeNow said:
The update will fix the mining issue, you can pray it will fix the supply. This is FD after all.
Click to expand...
To be honest if I can Mine less than I explore then we might be nearly there, there is no 'supply' in the black anyway. Right now the ratio is bonkers, mine for 8 hours to jump 1k ly is a non-starter.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom