I’ve already written about the situation regarding the removal of Squadron 42-cecntric packages from the buyback queues, but wait! There’s more! Another drama in Star Citizen centers around mining, crafting, and a recent Star Citizen Live talking about that pipeline.

How it started

Prior to 4.7, mining was a just means to a financial end. Players who wanted industrial gameplay could obtain a mining ship like the Prospector, Mole, or GOLEM, a ground vehicle like the ROC, or carry a hand mining laser to go out, find some rocks, and extract the ores. Early iterations required that some of these materials needed to be refined, which involved stowing a ship at a refinery station and interacting with a terminal screen to determine which materials you wanted to refine, and which process to use; the process mattered as it would determine the time and price to refine as well as how much of each refined element a player would get in the end.

Once the materials were ready, they’d be loaded into a cargo ship and taken to a TDD office in one of the major landing zones or maybe an outpost on a moon and sold.

How it’s going

In 4.7, crafting tier 0 was introduced. This brought a bunch of changes not to the mining process per se, but to the particulars and the proposed “end game” of mining.

Mineable items now have a quality value from 1 to 1000, with the higher value being the “better” material. Players extract and refine these as they previously would but rather than sell the proceeds, the refined materials are intended to be used in the crafting of items. Currently, only some personal weapons and armors are available to craft, but we can expect more blueprints to be included in each patch going forward (my assumption, not a specifically stated schedule by CIG).

CIG says that they don’t want mining to just be a way to earn cash. The mining to crafting pipeline should inform player interaction by allowing those with materials to sell to player who craft, and allow players who craft to sell to players who do none of the above.

Where it’s falling down

I have always been interested in mining, salvaging, cargo transport, and crafting in Star Citizen even when some or all of those systems were in their infancy, so the issues with the current system and where CIG have stated they will, will not, and might go are salient to me. When 4.7 released I was immediately out in the Prospector, looking for the best materials I could get in order to craft the few items I could make.

The first issue is that mining isn’t about mining, it’s about discovery. Finding mineable objects involves flying or driving to an area in space or on a moon and pinging with the active scanner. This reveals objects in the vicinity. I can then use the passive scanner to get a signature value. This value is unique for each type of mineable object and is represented by a number. The scanned value is a multiple of that material’s number, and represents the number of rocks I can expect to find. Discovery is a massive pain in the ass, though. A typical mining session is mostly about finding rocks that are worth working on, and once found, it’s a matter of finding out if the ship I have can actually break those rocks. More often than not, I find rocks that I do not want or which have quality values on the lower end of the spectrum.

Assuming I can break the rocks, the next issue is the quality scale. Ranging from 1 to 1000 with every possible increment in between, there is no consistency in what I find. I might get some iron that has a percentage of Q201 material, but also a percentage of Q567 material. I find another rock right next door with iron, but in several other quality values. I cannot tease out the Q567 from the Q201 so I have to take all of it which fills up my bags and cuts into my time in the field. This is further exacerbated by the refining process, in which each quality set is treated as it’s own bundle, and later in the collection and shipping process, in which each quality set is placed into it’s own crate. I’ve moved dozens upon dozens of small-form boxes, each at 50% or less capacity, spanning a whole range of quality values of the same material, and there’s nothing currently that I can do to mitigate the grunt-work necessary to move those items from refinery to storage.

The last issue is using the materials. The meta is, of course, to have the absolute best materials available for crafting because the better the material used, the better the stats will be for the final product. In Stanton, the qualities of available materials is artificially low as a means of pushing players into high-risk areas for higher-reward qualities, but considering how much of the material is of lower quality in general, the items that can be made are barely worth making. Also, there is currently no player marketplace, so the only reason for crafting is to make items for myself and my friends. Once everyone has been outfitted as best as possible, that’s it. Crafting is done.

Star Citizen Live

The recent SCL didn’t do CIG any favors when it came to assuring the community, if the rancor on Spectrum is any indication. Honestly, I was a little cheesed off myself while watching.

First, they said that there were no plans to allow refining to improve the quality of low-quality materials. This is a common ask from the community, and one player on Spectrum fired back that the whole point of actual refining is to discard impurities in pursuit of better end products. To “refine” literally means “to free (something, such as metal, sugar, or oil) from impurities or unwanted material” in a bid to increase the quality of the result. Now, CIG’s reasoning is that if they were to allow that to happen, players could stockpile low-quality materials to eventually create higher quality materials, negating the need for players to brave dangerous areas and possibly negate the need for player exchanges. I agree with the latter, but the former is the pivot around which all of these decisions are being made, in my opinion.

To potentially mitigate owning a stockpile of low quality materials, CIG plans on allowing players to use them in the refining process as catalysts. The example they give is on how to make steel: the main material will be iron, and the secondary material will be any quality of carbon. The quality of the iron determines the quality of the steel, but the quality of the carbon will determine how much carbon you need to provide as a secondary input. Essentially, both iron and carbon will be needed no matter what, but this design seems to exist solely as a way to “burn off” certain low quality material…but only material that’s useful as a secondary material. Low quality iron will still create low quality steel, and unless I can use iron as a secondary material, I’m still left with junk quality iron if I can’t refine it to a better quality. Problem not solved.

In terms of addressing the massive amounts of individual quality values, CIG kind of ignored the impetus and offered a rather tone-deaf response to the questions on the subject. Rather than talk about considerations for addressing the overbroad quality spectrum and our inability to hone in on specific qualities or even ranges of qualities, they talked about allowing players to combine inventories into different boxes. I’m not sure how this will work, though. Does that mean I can combine “iron” into a box, but with different qualities therein? I’m assuming so, and while I think that’s a good take it doesn’t solve the fact that players seem to be ending up with 0.25CSCU of Q201 iron here, and 0.03CSCU of Q398 iron there, and no way to discover other deposits of Q201 or Q398 deposits in the wild so as to bolster the quantities in our inventories to make so many small quantities of different qualities useable.

The final major pain-point brought up during SCL was item degradation. I’m fine with our items falling apart so long as there are ways to repair them to keep the working as long as possible, and I think that this is where CIG is going with this system. Once a crafted item falls apart, another crafted item is needed. Simple, effective, and proven in other games. However, I get that a lot of players who have been playing without degradation in the game are loathe to have it added in, because it feels like it’s taking away a “lack of concern” and replacing it with another simulated system we need to babysit. We’ve got food and water already, radiation on occasion, and eventually we’ll need to patrol the repair status of our weapons, armor, tools, and ships…and for those folks with a lot of weapons, armor, tools, and ships, that could be a full-time job.

Where we’re going

I firmly believe that the problem with the mining and crafting plans laid out in SCL are a result of a narrow-minded focus on “risk versus reward” at all costs, with every other consideration ignored.

Jared made a wiseass remark in the video, echoing a common sentiment in the community: “I wish you’d made Star Wars Galaxies. Just make Star Wars Galaxies, please”. People are asking for this because SWG’s scanning, harvesting, and crafting are considered by many who engage in that type of gameplay to be the GOAT. The problem isn’t that CIG doesn’t want to cop another game’s design, but that they’d rather cop EVE Online’s design where the more valuable and useable the material, the deeper into low-sec space a player needs to go. Some people support this; I do not, as it makes no sense from a real world perspective that any corporation would cede valuable materials to lawless gangs while vehemently defending systems having the lowest quality raw materials.

Something needs to be done about the whole game loop because right now it’s not satisfying and it’s not going to be usable at scale. For a solo miner, finding useful materials is going to be difficult to impossible. I think the highest quality of rocks I’ve ever found have been in the 600 range — which is a problem but is not the problem — and there have been a few different values within the 600 range — which is the problem. While being in an org can help average out and speed up discovery and acquisition, being in an org does not increase chances of finding good quality materials, or enough materials of the same quality. It’s a crap-shoot right now, is tedious, and as a result, painfully boring.

CIG’s position on refining is particularly short-sighted. They have already said when referring to other game systems that if a player accepts increased risk, they can get increased rewards; if a player desires less risk, they will be able to achieve similar rewards, but it will take longer and require more effort. However, they seem overly concerned that stockpiling a massive amount of low quality materials will “devalue” the effort put into discovery and acquisition of higher quality materials if players could just refine lower quality mats upward. That’s an example of “less risk, a harder, more extended path to the same reward” if I’ve ever heard one.

My solutions

So as not to bitch without offering solutions, here’s a few that came to mind,

Discovery

Probes. Allow players to launch probes into an area. A probe-launching ship could be an exploration ship, of course; that’s a game loop CIG hasn’t touched yet, and this could be an absolute slam-dunk of a feature as probe data could be sold to other players. Probes could be crafted, with better mats making probes with longer range and wider scan area.

A probe would work like SWG’s resource scanner. It could pinpoint all of the rocks in an area, their materials, and their qualities. Lower quality probes could label an area as maybe having rocks that fall into a certain quality range, while advanced probes could record information like resistance and stability of discovered rocks so players know which ships, mining heads, and gadgets to bring.

This would speed up discovery by orders of magnitude. The downside is that CIG would most certainly also allow these to be used to find players in wide-band asteroid fields, because it all comes down to PvP with CIG. I would counter that probes of this kind should only register mineable items, with all other items — ships, debris, and other stuff I can’t consider at the moment — showing as “unknown”.

Quality

The 1 – 1000 range has got to go. Instead, maybe have each 100 steps represent “a major quality”, and each sub-100 value represent a “minor quality”.

A 600 series rock would be “6 on a scale from 1 to 10” and encompass 600 through 699. When used in crafting, this would impart the major stats to the item. Smaller increments, like 621 or 675, could be used for minor stats of the item, or to boost major stats on smaller increments. However, it should only be the major value that plays into crafting, allowing all 600-range materials to be used in a single crafting slot.

Refining

Building on the previous suggestion, allow refining to “normalize” minor stats. Here, putting a bunch of 600 quality iron with various shades of in-between into the refiner would average out the minor value within the 600 range. If my refinery job was heavy with lower-end 600 quality values, then the average would result in, say, an entire batch of 621 materials. Conversely, having a refinery job heavy with higher-end 600 quality materials could result in a net of 689 quality materials, for example.

This would satisfy players who believe refining should be allowed to affect the quality, while allowing CIG to maintain distinction. If they’re hell-bent on the catalyst route, then, the catalyst used could determine whether the presence of a low-quality value would dominate (i.e. “round down”) or if the presence of a high-quality value would dominate (i.e. “round up”).

Degradation

I think I might be OK with this one, really. During SCL, it was mentioned that a power plant might have “a week” of use before it reaches zero functionality. That doesn’t mean “a week” of unattended time, but rather “a week” of full-on usage, so if a player doesn’t use a specific ship for a month, then that power plant suffers no degradation. That 168 hours of continuous use before a power plant needs to be replaced. Of course, repairing the component would extend that time, and I would like to see preventative maintenance extend that time. Not indefinitely, but to a point where I feel that I got a good amount of use out of the object and don’t feel like I’m repairing it just because CIG needed a material, time, and money sink.