Today we’re going to be exploring some of the economic changes that are planned for the upcoming Fire and Fortune release. We will be covering three main areas - the commodity economy, mining and ores, and substantial changes to Player Owned Bases.
What’s in the value of a credit?
The first and most immediately noticeable change we are going to be making is to prices. If a character’s ship, equipment resale value and credits exceeds $2 billion, the character file will be corrupted.
To address this, all prices, payouts and player credits are being divided by 100. If you previously had $1,000,000 in your account, you’ll log in to a $10,000 balance. This division affects everything, from commodity buy and sell prices, ships, equipment, NPC bounties, FLHook commands, missions, etc.
This should make the character value cap effectively a non-issue, as you would need to store the pre-adjustment equivalent of $200,000,000,000 (200 billion) before running into corruption issues. This perspective shift takes some getting used to - for example, trade routes will have single digit profit per second ratings, a nanobot will cost $2, and you might expect to hear "20k or die" from pirates.
The value of your money will not be affected at all by this; proportionally your credits are still worth exactly the same.
A new kind of commodity economy
The commodity economy has been redesigned from the ground up, thanks to the new Econominator™ tool. Some key objectives for this redesign are:
Making sure all bases in the game have economic integration, avoiding dead ends for trade.
Making base economies intuitive, with supply chains reflecting the base type, function and infocard.
Allowing trade routes to emerge organically from logical commodity assignments, rather than routes being specifically designed.
Ensuring commodities have distinct identities that fit Freelancer's vanilla 'feel', and removing those don't.
Integrating mining, commodities and Player Owned Bases into a single cohesive system.
Creating an economy that is easily managed and flexible to change.
In the past, updating Discovery’s sprawling economy was one of the most work-intensive aspects of the mod. This meant maintaining a pricing database for an enormous roster of commodities, with painstaking manual fine-tuning to ensure changes didn’t accidentally create broken routes.
This created a fairly high barrier to entry for economy contributors and often meant new stations were added to the mod without any economic data. The process is now far easier for economy contributors to get involved with. You simply assign commodities to a particular base, and add one of four flags:
Producer: this base will sell this commodity for its defined base cost.
Consumer: this base will buy the commodity, with the price scaling by distance from the closest producer.
Reseller: this base is a consumer, but will also sell the commodity.
Fence: this base is a consumer, but with a slightly lowered profit value - these are intended to be drop-off points for cargo piracy.
Once commodities are assigned to a base and the appropriate flag is set, the Econominator can be run. This will automatically set prices based on proximity between producers and consumers. For mined products, it will treat mineable fields as a producer and calculate based on mining speed. This also allows us to quickly update economic data to reflect system layout or design changes.
Regular commodities have provisionally been set to 5c/s, or 500c/s in today's money.
For transparency, this is the current assignment document we are using to track commodity placements and flags. This is a work in progress, and feedback is appreciated. We are still actively making changes, with outstanding tasks including:
Finalizing ‘reseller’ flags,
Reviewing the placement of resources needed for POBs,
Applying ‘fence’ flags (will be done last, potentially post-release in a hotpatch).
The current mining and ore system has always been a band-aid, with high value, player-mined ores being sold in different regions for hundreds of times the value of a unit of its refined output. Fire and Fortune will be taking a different approach to ore pricing, and introducing the concept of the ‘High Risk Commodity’.
Ores:
These are now 2-volume commodities, and intended to be mined and sold locally within a region. This will have a profitability rating closer to commodity trading. This means NPC sale points will typically be placed within the system, or in an adjacent one. Specific placements will depend on system layout, distance to field and how ‘interceptable’ miners are at a particular location.
Some ores have been removed and others are being repurposed for mechanics that will be explored in a future post. The final list is as follows:
Aluminium Ore.
Azurite Gas - repurposed.
Silver Ore (formerlly Beryllium).
Copper Ore - new.
Gold Ore.
Helium-3.
Iridium Ore - repurposed.
Military Salvage - repurposed.
Molybdenum Ore.
Niobium Ore.
Platinum Ore.
Premium Scrap - removed.
Pristine Ice - reverted to Copper.
Raw Hydrocarbons - removed.
Uncut Diamonds.
Uranium Ore - removed.
Xeno Relics - repurposed.
Non-Ore Mining:
All fields containing Water, Hydrocarbons, Toxic Waste and Scrap Metal have been activated, standardized and are now viable mining sites. These commodities will primarily be useful in the revised Player Owned Base economy described below, but can still be productively mined and sold to NPC vendors.
Mining Arrays:
Arrays will now be mounted in a ship’s cruise disruptor slot, meaning you retain a full set of weapons while mining. This does mean you will only receive drops for one array hitting rocks at a time, and we are reevaluating field drop rates accordingly.
Deployable Mining Container:
The mining container is a commodity that can be purchased from most stations. Dropping it while in a mining field will deploy a storage depot. Mining with the depot selected will store up to 2,500 volume of mined goods inside it; if this is exceeded, the goods will be jettisoned into space.
In this sense, the depot primarily works to reduce clutter by consolidating dropped ore, considerably reducing strain on the server. Destroying the depot will drop the Mining Container commodity, and any items still stored inside it. The depot will despawn on its own if you leave the system or log off.
As a result of this change, if a player has dropped more than 25 free-floating containers of cargo in space, they will begin to despawn every 7 minutes. This is intended to further limit strain on the server.
High Risk Commodities:
This is functionally the replacement for ores as they currently exist. High-risk, high-reward commodities include contraband, refined ores and some other thematic goods. These commodities are defined by an extremely high base value and higher credit per second rating than standard commodities. You can expect High Risk Commodities to have a base value of at least $30 ($3,000 in today’s money).
High Risk Commodities are available for sale from NPC dealerships, meaning there is an infinite supply. However, purchasing these goods from a dealership means you are taking on a considerable amount of risk due to the amount of credits invested in a full load of cargo. Intercepting these cargoes will be extremely valuable for pirates.
There are no resell points for these commodities, meaning you have to obtain them from a producer (or a player…) and ship them to a destination consumer in another region. We hope the refinery system will facilitate a thriving player economy, with refined goods being offered for prices that undercut NPC dealerships.
Player Owned Bases - supply chains and new modules
Economic Reintegration:
POBs are being reintegrated into the mainstream economy. This means POB specific commodities are being removed from the game, and construction and supply recipes rebalanced to make use of regular commodities.
The immediate effect of this is that POB supply will again be subject to local prices, which will vary throughout Sirius. This means it will be more expensive to maintain bases in very remote areas that are far from the production source of commodities. We will try to ensure that most basic commodities used by POBs remain accessible in most regions, however some regional variability and scarcity is intended.
Given that this is a significant change, there will be a ‘cooling off’ period once the patch goes live where maintenance is switched off. The post-patch grace period is intended to allow people time to work out supply options and viability. We expect that this period will last roughly a month, and we will be taking feedback on commodity availability and module balance through that period.
We will be removing or automatically converting old POB commodities to their new equivalents using the below table.
Argentium Silver - Silver.
Armaments - Munitions
Bio-neural Arrays - Bio-neural Processors
Cobalt Ore - Cobalt
Critical Temperature Alloy - Super Alloy
Energy Field Equipment - Energy Field Equipment
Fusion Diodes - Nanocapacitors
Gravity Field Stabilizers - Nanocapacitors
Heat Sinks - Construction Machinery
High Performance Alloy - Super Alloy.
Hull Segments - Ship Hull Panels.
Industrial Hardware - Industrial Materials
Iridium - Iridium.
Magnetic Superconductors - Superconductors.
Nanomembrane Filters - Xenobiotic Filters.
Optronic arrays - Optronics
Plasfoam Conduits - Removed
Plasmotic Metamaterials - Removed
Platinum Ore - Platinum
Quantum Arrays - Quantum Multiplexors.
Reinforced Alloy - Basic Alloy.
Robotic Hardware - Robotics.
Tungsten - Copper
Shield Modules:
Shields (or at least damage reduction) are now being incorporated as an intrinsic feature of POBs, rather than requiring a separate Shield Module. Shield Modules have always acted as a ‘module tax’, given that there are no interesting gameplay decisions surrounding whether to build a shield or not - they have always been mandatory for your base to survive.
This additionally means that fuel upkeep for shields is being removed. While the idea of laying siege to a base to drain its shield could work in principle, in practicality this has never been a viable approach. Bases have always been killed by brute-forcing DPS through the shield, with the management of shield fuel being little more than occasional busywork for the owner.
Fuel will now play an important role in the refinery and manufacturing system instead, and a revised approach to siege mechanics will be announced in the future.
Player Owned Bases - the refining system
New refinery and manufacturing systems are being introduced for POBs. This post will only be exploring refineries, with new equipment manufacturing options being covered in a future post. All of these modules fundamentally work the same way:
Refinery modules are currently unique. Only one copy of a particular module will work at a time. Two gold refineries won’t work at once, but a gold and scrap refinery will, for example.
Each refinery module comes with a crew requirement, usually 50 scientists. These contribute to upkeep the same as other crew members. We have also removed scientists as a consumable item for various recipes, as it would seem odd for your refinery staff to be chopped up to build a jump drive factory.
Each module offers 2 recipes (as well as variants using different fuel types, where applicable). These are a basic tier recipe, and an advanced tier that requires additional input commodities to produce goods more efficiently or quickly.
Once a recipe is activated, it will run repeatedly on a loop until it exhausts the necessary input commodities. Processing can be manually canceled, and will also cancel if there is not enough space for output commodities.
Modules receive a Bonus if the POB has a qualifying IFF. The Bonus applies a 15% reduction to the quantity of input materials needed for a recipe. This means you will need less ore to output the same amount of refined goods if your POB belongs to a faction that mines that ore.
For recipes using fuel, you can choose between H-Fuel, MOX and Promethene. Where H-Fuel is refined from an Ore and the others from standard commodities, you need half as much H-Fuel as other fuels. This means processing with H-Fuel is highly efficient - the reduced amount of cargo to consume means more recipes can be completed in a day.
First, we have new modules aimed at managing your base’s upkeep. These modules allow you to generate food, oxygen, fuels and repair materials using mined resources.
It was mentioned above that all water, hydrocarbon, toxic waste and scrap metal fields were being reactivated and standardized - this is where they come in.
Commodities that are listed in brackets are optional inputs for the Tier 2 recipe. These give you more output, and a recipe that processes goods quicker.
Hydroponics Bay: Water (+Fertiliser) = Food Rations + Oxygen.
Production bonus: Freelancer, Synth Foods, Zoners.
In addition, the refinery system is designed to transform Ores into High Risk Commodities. Refinery recipes requiring Fuel can use H-Fuel, MOX or Promethene.
Diamond Workshop: Uncut Diamonds + Fuel (+Industrial Materials) = Diamonds + Toxic Waste.
Production bonus: DHC, Kruger, IMG, Red Hessians.
This is the basic implementation we want to launch with the patch release. We anticipate being able to build more interesting factories and refineries on top of this base layer, to allow for engaging supply chains and complex mechanics. Figures for refinery recipes and toggles to change fuel types and apply bonuses can be found below.
A huge limitation on the ability of POBs to act as public trading platforms has always been the hardcoded limit that buy and sell prices for commodities must be the same. The refinery system is intended to tackle this, by allowing stations to buy Ores at one price, and sell refined High Risk Commodities for another.
The way we anticipate this working is as follows:
The higher volume of ores will make it inefficient to ship them long distance, compared to refining the goods and shipping the higher value-per-volume HRCs. 1 unit of refined ore will generally give you 0.5 HRCs. This should incentivise refining Ores in the local region.
POBs can offer higher prices than the surrounding NPC stations for local Ores, to attract a range of players to sell there. The POB can then refine these Ores into HRCs, and sell those for less than nearby NPC stations.
The spread between the purchase of the Ore, and the collective value of the produced HRCs will enable the POB itself to earn a profit on the transaction.
This can then be used to finance buy prices for secondary refining inputs such as Industrial Materials, or premium fuel, such as H-Fuel which will boost efficiency further, providing traders with consistent imports they can bring to your base.
Plans for the future
We will be taking some time to see how refineries are used and adjusting the numbers as needed. Once we’re confident that the basic system is working as intended, we would like to expand it to include more commodity manufacturing and refining possibilities, including the potential for supply chains and complex internal mechanics.
Player feedback will be extremely important here, as well as requests for the types of modules you would like to see.
A very simple example of the kind of interplay we hope to achieve through this system can be found in the Toxic Waste byproduct from Ore and Scrap Metal refining. Normally Toxic Waste would be a nuisance that eats into your cargo space, but it can be an economic opportunity with the right preparation.
MOX Plants can process Toxic Waste into fuel that can be put back into your refineries. These plants will never cover your fuel cost entirely, but they are extremely useful for reducing your operating costs. Alternatively, in regions where MOX is sparse but Toxic Waste fields can be mined, there are opportunities to produce fuel for profit.
Some other features we would like to include in the future include:
Automation functionality - being able to set commodity stock floors and ceilings to allow refineries to start or stop work automatically.
Parallel refining, to allow specialized POBs to process larger quantities of goods with multiple refineries (this would likely require recipes to be rebalanced).
Specialized cargo storage modules that only stock a particular commodity. As an example, “Toxic Waste Tanks” would reduce the volume of stored waste from 1 to 0.25 per unit.
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(09-16-2023, 09:22 PM)sane Wrote: How many Deployable Mining Containers can one carry/deploy at one time?
One per player. All they're really doing is compressing mined ore into 'batches' of 1,000 to avoid clutter, so one is all you need. Of course multiple different players can drop their own container if they want to.
You can carry as many as you want, given that they're stored as a regular commodity. Not much point though.
Wait, if everything gets divided by 100... does that mean if I buy Oxygen before the patch, it will fetch a good price?
Jokes aside, very cool stuff. A long time ago I was already advocating for literally these new refinery modules for PoBs, and seeing them being implemented like this, I do have high hopes that maybe at some point, codename weapons can get produced on PoBs instead of people making 4579234789 throwaway ships to harvest the same single wreck for their favourite codename every day
I do hope the complexity of the PoB plugin won't affect the server performance, though
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(09-16-2023, 09:34 PM)Sombs Wrote: I do have high hopes that maybe at some point, codename weapons can get produced on PoBs instead of people making 4579234789 throwaway ships to harvest the same single wreck for their favourite codename every day
Quote:New refinery and manufacturing systems are being introduced for POBs. This post will only be exploring refineries, with new equipment manufacturing options being covered in a future post.
(09-16-2023, 09:35 PM)Couden Wrote: Does the Shield Absorb damage being reworked?
For the time being, shields will work exactly the same as currently... just without a module or fuel. I believe there are plans for a rework in the near(?) future however - I think Haste can probably confirm or deny.
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A bit nearer than the near future, a siege rework is very much planned for the patch and just a matter of number crunching, but the deadline for that number crunching is getting closer every day.
(09-16-2023, 09:43 PM)Haste Wrote: A bit nearer than the near future, a siege rework is very much planned for the patch and just a matter of number crunching, but the deadline for that number crunching is getting closer every day.
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Common POB commodity conversions
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