Currently, Star Citizen’s patch 4.8 is open to Wave 3 of testers on the PTU. I believe that I qualify for this but I’m not hitting it up, since we expect it to be released to live ahead of the Drake DefenseCon event starting mid-May; I can wait.

This morning, though, I checked in on the Pipeline updates. Pipeline is a Star Citizen “discovery” service that brings leaks, datamining, and information to the Star Citizen community. Some of it is speculation, but this morning they posted the patch notes from the latest updates on the test server, and those notes contain information about changes to mining.

Previously, On These Blog Posts

I outlined how mining works in 4.7 in an earlier post, but for the navigationally challenged, here’s the rundown:

• Asteroids and ground rocks contain ores.
• Ores are of a type — iron, copper, Aslarite, titanium, and so on.
• Ores found have a quality value ranging between 1 and 1000.
• The higher the quality, the better the stats of a crafted item will be when using that material.

Part of the discontent with the mining system in 4.7 centers around the quality range, as any ore can exist at any quality between 1 and 1000, meaning I could find a rock with iron ore, quality 451, and right next to it would be another iron ore with a quality of 452. When collected, refined, and boxed up, these become two distinct ores: twice the cargo, and twice the materials for crafting as there’s no way to combine, improve, or average ores of the same type with different quality values.

Update: Quality Bands

The 4.8 PTU patch notes this morning state the following changes:

• Increase of “high quality” ores in rocks.
• Slight increase to improve distribution of rocks in in space.
• Quality remains 1 through 1000, however…
  • There are 8 “bands” of ores.
  • Each ore type, when found to exist within a specific band, will have the same quality value.

Here’s an example. I find some iron in a rock in space. Since the presence of rocks and materials is procedural, the quality band that this iron occupies is set at some point (like when I scan and discover, or when I scan the rock to determine it’s quality, as well as through regional repop strategies set behind the curtain). Say that my rock of iron lands in the 400-599 band. Whenever iron lands in this specific band, anywhere in the game, it will always return as a quality of 521. That means whenever I encounter iron, I can get one of 8 different quality values:

• 0-399 -> 325
• 400-599 -> 521
• 600-699 -> 664
• 700-799 -> 710
• 800-899 -> 874
• 900-949 -> 907
• 950-998 -> 970
• 999-1000 -> 1000

This way, I will end up with far fewer one-off boxes off iron. I had been finding a lot of iron in the 200 – 500 range, so if CIG “rounds up” our current inventories using these values — which I hope to gawd they do — then I’m going to end up with fewer boxes, and a bunch of iron with qualities of 325 and 521. That is pretty significant from an inventory management standpoint.

Using the Scale

I haven’t had much experience with crafting mainly because the materials I’ve been able to find have been kind of garbage, and with quality being so all-over-the-map I haven’t been able to accrue enough materials of a singular quality to be really useful, so I turned to SCMDB.net for answers regarding how qualities are used now, and how they might be used in 4.8.

SCMDB.net is a new web tool which helps identify blueprint rewards for missions, mining opportunities, and crafting statistics. Using 4.7 data, I can see that incremental quality values are strongly tied to the stats they impart when used in a blueprint. Looking at the old standby, the P4-AR, using iron with a quality of 250, the “impact force” suffers a -3.75% degradation over stock. The “fire rate” is even worse, at -6.0% below stock.

q500 is the mid-point where the stats mirror what I could buy off the shelf from an NPC, and when we hit q700 iron, the impact force and ROS are +3.0% and +4.8% respectively over stock.

If CIG doesn’t massage the translated values with the new quality band system, then the lowest quality iron — 325 — will impose a -2.62% to impact and -4.2% to ROF. The q710 iron will impart +3.15% and +5.84% to impact and ROF respectively.

If CIG does maintain these values, then we now have hard-coded values if CIG doesn’t add some additional level of variation into the mix. While I appreciate that the single-step quality scale allowed for a massive range of unique crafted items in the game, and while transitioning to this 1:1 statistic application seems like a step down, I still think it’s a good change. Keeping the 1 – 1000 single-step scale boxed CIG into a system where the “best idea they could come up with” was simply “more numbers” to drive diversity. That’s a massive consideration for them to manage from a technical perspective, but more importantly it’s a massive pain in the ass for players who have to find good quality materials, and then find enough of the same quality value to be able to make items. Creating magazines for FPS weapons is one thing, but what about when they release ship manufacturing? Will having incremental qualities make sense then?

With the band system, it’s more simplistic, and actually opens the door to other ideas that CIG could employ to re-claim wider diversity for items we create. There is already a system of add-ons for FPS weapons, and power application in ships affects ship-based weapons, so we can’t forget those kinds of existing levers exist. Because I have this dead horse lying here next to my desk, I wouldn’t be sad to see an “experimentation” mechanic, a la SWG. CIG is already planning a “tier” system for items (tiers 1 – 3) and ships (tiers 1 – 5) with each tier requiring deconstructive knowledge and increasingly difficult-to-find materials, but I don’t think that precludes a system whereby players can acquire additional knowledge that can help them tweak crafted stats. Such a system would not need to be tied to material quality. It could take the form of data pads that could be used as a side-loaded item, or sold or traded. NPCs could grant them to players as rewards, or simply through a “mentoring system”. I hate to throw more work on CIG’s plate, but I think that if the quality band system is where mining and crafting are going to land, then I think the crafting community would appreciate a few additional levers to replace the opportunity for diversity that the band system removed.