Fabrication Rework Concept
Last year while discussing a bunch of big things that might happen in Cogmind's overhaul, the use of Fabricators came up and Pimski, among others, had some interesting ideas and summary in the relevant forum thread. Since then I've thought about it off and on, but never really came up with a compelling solution for what I agree with is an area that could use improvement. Well the topic has been sitting in the Beta 11 list as something to still look at more seriously, and yesterday I reviewed the "cartridge" concept but didn't feel that would quite be the best way to approach this. Still no good alternatives though so after spending some time writing notes to distill what was really going on here and what kind of direction we might prefer, I went to sleep.
This morning at 5 AM I woke up and all of the following just started popped into my head, so I got up to write it down and I think I like it. So here it is, in pure Kyzrati note form, the idea for something that could partially replace the fabrication system to achieve some desirable goals...
Anyway, I haven't started working on this yet, and this is the first draft so I'd definitely want to see what I think of it later and make adjustments if necessary, but it's good to let stuff like this sit for a bit and I thought I'd share it here in the meantime :)
("acquisition" in particular wasn't yet considered very much, as that's less important than the underlying system itself)
Note that Patreon seems to reencode images instead of maintaining their original size, so I've also attached a copy to this post.
Comments (6)
What if instead of pulling matter from a distribution network, fabricators had a matter depository? Heavy builds can carry more matter while fast builds can gather and deposit matter incrementally, which will mean hacking recyclers or engaging in combat. Thematically it makes sense that the interactable fabricators are more "lightweight" while megafabricators and such pull from a distribution network.
You would probably need to adjust fabrication matter costs for balance, but I like the idea of having more uses for matter.
Definitely agree with the problems identified with the current fab system. The proposed system seems like it might work well, looking forward to seeing how it pans out.
Well I'm not sure I'd classify the existing situation as "problems," since some people might even prefer the current system over what it's eventually transformed into, but it could perhaps be improved *overall* as a result. This is more of a balance change that would reduce potential power in a few situations and increase it in others. So far it's likely a form of this will be introduced, but purely as an experiment at first because after more thought on the subject there is a lot of potential for it to actually be worse :P
This has me really excited! I always did think fabricators were either borderline useless, or amazing to have depending on your build, aside from the hauler trojan with b11. Excited to see how this plays out.
Yay, excited is good :). Only just put this info out there but so far reception is positive. We'll see how it goes--I'll be waiting to see if/what people have to say other than "awesome!", and review the notes again when I get back to deciding when to implement changes. Should be near term, but if it looks like this could take a while to do I'll probably leave it for X8 since there's already a decent amount of stuff ready for X7 and I'll just pack a few more bite-sized things into that first instead so that it can get out the door before too long here. I'll say that even now as a non-hacking combat build you can still get some decent use out of fabricators, either through preloaded schematics (if lucky, but yeah don't count on it), using them for their, uh, "brute force potential," or by at least building the occasional basic part on a lower-level fab, like your storage unit, for example. This would certainly readjust all that, though, kind of leveling the playing field between different build styles as far as part control goes...