So this just got merged and as we’re not meant to talk about the merge on the announcement post I made this thread.
Seems to me to be kinda a weird take, removes all the friction for building machines by hand as now its how many manips do we need this time rather than being a mix of igniters, capitors, manips and matter bins requiring memorization or shift checking the machine/board.
Why should building have friction tho?
The point is that all of these components are just names, they have no unique mechanics or features other than being “thingy that goes in a machine”. There is no flavor or significance to them. They are all even acquired from the SAME places and available to crew in the tool room.
It is like making it so there are 3 variants of plasma that are gathered from the same source and ask for the same 3 when generating an anomaly. The ONLY thing it does is take up more inventory space, it doesn’t even change balance.
If building is gonna have more friction, it should be from unique mechanics, not the bloat of multiple items that are identical in every aspect other than their sprite and name. If anything, add new components to building stuff. Like adding a GPS to a mass scanner console or a health scanner to a health monitor console.
having to print one of three identicle things is not noticable friction, or a meaningful gameplay mechanic
Immerison is why they existed.
If your machine held materials, it had a bin to hold said materials. (less important now we’re on silos, but not all are connected to silos still like in service)
if your machine was altering objects building, taking apart ect it had manips.
All most all machines used power so also had capaitors but the more power draw the more of those they had.
if your machine uses heat to forge it had an igniter
if your machine is holding liquids it’ll have a beaker
sure you can say its not meaningful mechanically but we could say the same thing about Chems. all of them are drugs that cure damage. so we could replace all the chems with either medicine, pyro, drug, or poison. but I think part of the draw of SS14 is the complexity of systems how each job is so in depth, heck I made a guide on botany that took me nearly 6 hours to write and thats just gardening.
It also adds more value to the flatpacker1001 that entirely skips the process of all the small parts of a machine at the cost of using slightly more materials than you’d use if you had made the parts by hand. now we only have one part to worry about folks are going to value flatpacker less as the baseline checking this many of one thing and that many of other things is gone. now I personally am gonna print 30 manips, take a LV coil from the back and when i run out of manips just print more. it simplifys front desk sci work all the way down to; machine frame, wrench, LV, Board, Lv manip, scew, wrench.
I do agree with naomi. Also ss13 has better components matter on how good your machine is.
Removing complexities from the jobs\crafting for sake of convenience is basically removes thing to do. It`s nice in short term but will cause issues in long run.
For example one time there were infinite omni-RCD that could be researched in ss13. Which was reverted within 2 weeks. Because it made cargo and engi department jobs allmost obsolete.
Same was with the safe Super Matter. Made other power sources not needed at all(basically current TEG in SS14). Which was fixed by gas types reactions and other things.
I see same type of issue with current tesla. In ss13 you need balls from tesla to produce enough power and need to build safeguards for it like emitters behind glass. People need to check on it with some regularity because zaps from balls can damage glass a bit. Here you just fire PA once and forget about it
Singulo have same issue. Even on low plasma(red blinking), collectors have enough energy to not loose. While in ss13 yellow means its time to top off and red means “NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOO”
I even saw people implementing lavaland on other servers and removing most of dangers “Because hard”. Which led to cargo bounties and matts buying being irrelevant(You can literally sell one locker of uranium and spam gamba for half of round)
Same thing was with the way sci rework was going to be implemented in ss14. By removing all of dangers from artifacts(basically creating cubicle simulator). But it was changed, which is good
Yes its a bit of a chore, but it whats makes game interesting.
Would bartender liked BoozeMaster 4000?(spin on chem master). Yes at first, would become super bored with his job. Since you also talk to people while making said drinks, but if you had easy click thing with infinite buffer. You would pop that out like fastfood
Would Chef like UniversalFoodFabricator?(insert biomass get any food you want) Yes at first, would remove most of his job interaction. And would make it boring from them. Also would make you feel like glorified plate delivery borg
Same with strong ties between janitor and medical in 13. You need room to be sterile and clean to do surgery. Otherwise you risk infection and poison damage from jerms. Remove those and you have medical that looks worse then public toilet near football stadium with med personal literally ignoring a player tho came to clean(basically denying him his gameplay)
What i am saying. Thing to do and complexities is what makes this game fun. They are also create interactions.
-Like if you give engi machine-board printer. Then one of opportunities for Player-Player interactions engi interaction with sci is pretty much deleted.
-Then you can give sci ability to print or buy RCD without restriction, convenient aint it? Another Player-Player interaction removed
-Give sci all the gas types in cans withing their department. And another one
And we just hit the point on which Sci player dont need to interact with Engi player ever again! Now if you put enough food and water within department. You can actually play Space Station 14 offline edition and ignore everything that goes around. Unless antags blow something up
Basically repeating same “convenience trap” MMO fell into(where everyone play it single player. Without interacting with another player)
What interaction Matter bins and capacitors bring?
You need those, so you go to tools. You interact with other people even passively(clown slips, pies you and steal your shoes)
Those thing are empty? You go to Sci and interact with sci players
Sci got no mats to print those? You go to cargo and interact with them
Cargo ordered mats but its one cargo techie? Hey i can help you with boxes, can also grab mine at the same time
Aka. Player interaction into Player intrection into Player interaction. During which you can have RP interaction. From scientist speaking how much they LOVE COFEE or cargo tech discussing their boss.
Each one is player interaction born from simple two non-significant components
You have too much faith in the playerbase to not just walk by each other
Some do. Others dont.
Yet i do not see what is the point of playing online Role Playing game and just walking?
Most of food, drinks, clothing, walls and floors is just different in sprites, same as machine parts. Strange justification.
I don’t really care that much about the RP value of these items specifically, but the justification is weird.
As others have pointed out, it opens up a lot of questions about why other things are in the game. Why do tools exist and not just one omnitool that does everything? And why not replace every caliber of bullet with a generic bullet that every gun uses, since they all are made in the same machine and use the same materials?
personally I would have prefereed if either a new sprite was made that had all 3 represented. or it was collapsed into just capicators. cause why the heck do I need a little robot arm looking thingy in my APC/Substation/SMES
Calling 3 random thingamajigs immersive is a bit far fetched. “This machine changes things you put into it, so it uses a manipulator” while said manipulator is a mini clamp with some wires coming out of it, but it somehow was used to transform matter into something else.
“This machine can contain things, so it needs a matter bin”. You mean the machine is decomposing stuff into atoms and storing it? Or is it just a fancy bucket? Can it not contain liquids and that is why some machines require beakers? (which is more engaging btw)
At least this way it is more clear that it is just a random component, we do not know how the machine works, we could not even theorize how in most cases, let alone build one (and the sprite is not even related to the construction process). But a rando with a backpack can just stuff all the stuff in a frame and voila, a gas recycler!
Now it is as abstracted to be more on par with the rest of the game. When we get these parts to do something unique they can be re-split into singular components. But that would take just as much work with or without these placeholders.
If construction is meant to be immersive it needs more than just 3 generic parts to represent functions.
Not really. Each drink is made with different ingredients, even if they have the same similar effects. And drinks have personalities to them communicated by their sprite and name which players may choose from. Different from a machine component whose purpose IS to be generic.
I think people are not realizing how meaningless it is for these to exist as separate items. They cost the same to make, have the same availability and have the same properties as an item. The only difference is their name and sprite, both meant to be generic, and neither of which will have any presence or effect once used in a construction.
Cool, why do we need more than one food item? I’m sure you can write a lot about it, but it’s just different sprites with the same function.
Because food adds to the roleplay depth of the game. Chefs can prepare menus, people may choose to be vegan, etc. It allows for people to express their characters.
For an item to be in the game it should add to the game mechanical depth or roleplay depth. Items like clothes, food and drink, that are statistically identical, add to the games roleplay depth by allowing for character expression. Items like weapons and chemicals add to the mechanical depth of the game by allowing for systems to be explored.
Machine parts do not meaningfully add to either in their current form. There is no choice, and thus no avenue for roleplay, from matter bin vs capacitor, and there is no mechanical depth, as all of them cost exactly the same and are acquired through identical means. If they had (meaningfully) different costs or aquisition methods this could change, but as it stands they do not bring anything more than 5 seconds of annoyance if you print the wrong one (also not a meaningfully difficult scenario).
As they do not add to the games mechanical or roleplay depth, they are just bloat.
If this is the issue, why not make the matter bins use more plastic, and the capacitors use more glass? Then there would actually be a factor of resource cost that would be different between different machines. That seems much preferable to making them all literally the same thing.
To expand on your point, why do Borg parts get printed separately? Why a chassis, torso, head, and limbs, when they all do the same thing with no variation? It’s all just resources, so why not have a single button press that prints a fully built Borg with wires and flashes already included, since the brain and power cell are the only parts that matter in any way?
It’s not resource cost, because it’s the same for every borg. It’s not RP, because the whole building process is done by a single scientist without any player to player interaction needed. And it’s not for the time it takes to build, because they could just make the printing take longer. It’s probably for the immersion that you are actually building a thing out of parts that make sense and feel real.
Im gonna be honest, i’d want to see differences in the required resources to see them as meaningfully different, since just changing the number required is essentially just either 1 or 2 machine parts, but if one needed say gold theres something more there
Nancok.. there are MANY immerisive systems we happen to be talking about the ones within Sci right now thats why I mentioned them. Bullets as mentioned above.
And yes Matter bins are likely a bin for materials to be dumped in basically as mentioned a bucket and Manipulators look to me like a small decatched robot hand so thats why its involved with manipulating objects.
while true we dont have the techincal level to explain how these sci-fi machines do what they do the existance and the tools gives hints at how they work. notice no one corrected that the matterbin holds the stuff, no one explained how it holds it, does it atomize it? is it like a fancy vending machine where they cut off what they need and shape it? or is it just a fancy bucket? who knows its Sci-fi. but the matter bin sure does hold materials that we do know. I also dont know how windows works. but here I am on my PC.