Shortly after posting the previous insight into the 4.7 PTU situation, I went back into the game and acquired some store-bought materials to kickstart the crafting process.

Materials

I checked UEX Corp, a resource, trading, and item database, for where to find Hephastanite, Iron, and Aluminum for sale from NPC shops. The closest one-stop-shop was the Pyro Gateway in Stanton which sold all three. I hopped into the Hermes and hoofed it over there, bought several SCU of each, and went back to Area 18.

P4-AR Ammo

The good news is that ammo is ammo. A bullet doesn’t vary much in terms of quality; moving at that speed, a hot dog would penetrate a human body, so I didn’t have to worry about the quality of the materials I was using.

The only downside was that the recipe requires 2 SCU of both Hephastanite and Iron. I had spent several thousand aUEC to acquire a goodly amount of both, but was only ever able to make 6 mags. I can go through 6 mags of P4-AR ammo in about 45 seconds.

P4-AR

This is where the questions arise. Store-bought materials are currently q0. I guess that’s OK, but what I wasn’t expecting was that using q0 materials didn’t make a an item with base item stats, but rather an item with inferior base item stats. q0 materials reduce the ROF by 97 rounds per second, the impact force by 7.5%, and increased the recoil kick by 40%! Those are abysmal numbers right there for such a ubiquitous weapon.

Results

For ammo, buying off-the-shelf materials is a terrible stop-gap option, considering that in-game shops will still be selling ammo. For what I spent on materials I could have bought several dozen magazines of P4-AR.

While we all knew that using higher quality materials would improve our crafted items, I did not expect that a baseline, q0 material composition would degrade an item below the baseline. Thinking about it, I guess it can be explained away; if I were using aluminum foil instead of refined aluminum, the resulting item would be crap.

What concerns me is that there will be times when a player loses a granted item, or even an uninsured pledge store item — it’ll happen, don’t roll your eyes — and will want to get it back. At that point they’ll have two options: source the materials themselves, or buy them.

Sourcing materials for higher-tier items like good armor or specialty weapons is going to take a while, and will probably involve going out to Pyro because it’s the carrot to CIG’s PvP stick. Finding the right materials of quality which will undoubtedly be spread out across asteroids, ground vehicle mining, and hand mining is going to be a massive deal-breaker for a lot of folks because of the effort involved.

That leaves buying materials. There will certainly be corps that will sell materials, but to get enough to do that will require an all-hands effort considering how little SCU a mining op produces. On top of that, corps will want to keep the best quality materials for their own factories, and no one can blame them. If anything, we’ll probably find low quality materials on the market, being sold by small potato operations who value the (a)UEC over the the materials themselves. In the end, a player looking to get their items back through crafting are going to have to suck it up with perennially inferior versions of the originals.

As always, though, what’s on the PTU now is subject to change as players work with it, complain, and CCIG takes notice. Personally, I’d like to see a low baseline quality value like, say, q100, as the true baseline — I assume it’s already in the game, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see it myself. Then, players can get q100 materials from the NPC shops to give them a basic item. Sometimes I’d like to carry the ability to create ammo when I need it rather than have to fly to a station or POI where I know I can buy it. Loading up a fab with enough materials to make ammo in between missions would be fantastic. To that end, I’d also like to see resources go further; maybe that could also contribute to the quality of the finished item, where using less than the baseline amount will result in an item of lesser quality — for those times when you really need something, and need it now. Ammo is going to be a bottleneck, though, as 2 SCU per item is just…insane. The amount of materials needed to create what I could buy for pennies is way out of whack, but I guess it depends on how CIG wants players to roll.