Uiversal Materials Trader

[VR SenseiMatty]

What is it?
It's a Materials Trader that allows you to trade between materials type (Raw, Manufactured and Encoded).

How many and where?
Only one at Shinrarta Dezhra. It must be a unique feature and not available at the beginning of the player career.

How does it work?
First you select the type of material you're looking for (raw, manufactured, encoded) and then you select the material from the classic materials list.
Then you select the the type of material you want to trade in from your stock and then you select the material from the classic list.
The rest follows the classic process. It is meant to be expensive.
See the following table for the trade rates:

Why?
At the beginning of the player career it's important to try all different roles and missions (combat, exploration, trade, mining, scanning ...).
Many of us after hundreds/thousands of hours in the game, have specialized in one or two of these roles and we don't care playing the other ones.
This means that most of the materials gathered during our activities are mainly of one type.
For example explorers and miners have lot of raw materials but very few manufactured ones. Combat pilots are in the opposite situation and they don't bother to land on planets and drive the SRV for this purpose.
But both pilots need both material types when they need to synthesize equipment and recharge.

For example an explorer who wants to spend months in the black needs manufactured materials to recharge the heat sink. Forcing him/her to combat other ships just to find these materials for a good stock before the departure is not the best. On the other hand he/she may have a lot of rare and very rare raw materials collected on the planets surface that would help him to get what he needs, even if at an expensive price.

 

[FNLWA]

At its core it's a good suggestion but the balancing is just as broken as anything FD does. Elite requirement? Six G5 for one G4? Pass. The normal trading rates are bad enough.

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

At its core it's a good suggestion but the balancing is just as broken as anything FD does. Elite requirement? Six G5 for one G4? Pass. The normal trading rates are bad enough.

I agree, the basic trading costs are excessive! I've come up with these values to be coherent with what we have in the game right now.
In my opinion all current ratios should be halved.

 

[Florenus]

In my opinion all current ratios should be halved.

I don't agree. Exchange rates are painfull sometimes, but that's what makes those materials valuable.

For me the whole idea of engeneering is having to work for the effects. Make it too easy, too convenient and it looses all purpose.
Even now, when I engeneer new module, I rarely do it gradually - I usually engeneer it all the way at one sitting (or almost), while it would be more engaging to make it better over time.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

For example an explorer who wants to spend months in the black needs manufactured materials to recharge the heat sink. Forcing him/her to combat other ships just to find these materials for a good stock before the departure is not the best. On the other hand he/she may have a lot of rare and very rare raw materials collected on the planets surface that would help him to get what he needs, even if at an expensive price.

There are plenty of non-combat ways to get manufactured materials - G4s and G5s can be picked up from various signal sources and missions without involving any combat, and some mid-grade manufactured materials can be found fairly easily by driving the SRV in inhabited systems (the "cargo" POIs often have a loose material or two, which can be collected before the skimmers realise what you're up to).

Not every material can be obtained that way, but enough that existing trade within the manufactured type can pick up the rest. (Certainly if it's just a bit of heat sink synthesis you could pick up the bits for that very quickly without combat)



It would perhaps be useful to add a combat-based way to get raw materials. Crashed ship POIs sometimes have cargo racks containing raw materials, so perhaps these could also be released sometimes when a ship is destroyed in space, or by use of hatchbreakers against NPC miners. Or a few of the raws could be added to the mission reward pool.

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

There are plenty of non-combat ways to get manufactured materials - G4s and G5s can be picked up from various signal sources and missions without involving any combat, and some mid-grade manufactured materials can be found fairly easily by driving the SRV in inhabited systems (the "cargo" POIs often have a loose material or two, which can be collected before the skimmers realise what you're up to).

Not every material can be obtained that way, but enough that existing trade within the manufactured type can pick up the rest. (Certainly if it's just a bit of heat sink synthesis you could pick up the bits for that very quickly without combat)

It would perhaps be useful to add a combat-based way to get raw materials. Crashed ship POIs sometimes have cargo racks containing raw materials, so perhaps these could also be released sometimes when a ship is destroyed in space, or by use of hatchbreakers against NPC miners. Or a few of the raws could be added to the mission reward pool.

I will make a quick example... To synthesiye Heat Sink you need Basic Conductors and Heat Conduction Wiring. In 100 hours of gameplay my new CMDR has found not a single one of them, but I'm full of Polonium (more than what I need) and other rare and very rare raw materials. These are just useless to me and I can't trade them for anything useful. I can't even sell them.

With a Universal Material Trader I could trade them with the Conductors manufactured materials and use them in the black to syntesize Heat Sink.