Artisan Archive
Thread: Will the space expansion get us out of the stone age?
Putting this in the Artisan forum, since it goes with survey and miner/farmer issues.
When wanting to assess the degree of development of the SWG civilisation, I'm at a loss. We can clone our bodies. We can make droids whose IA is supposed to be near human. We can make mining machines that dif deep into the earth, scanning tools to eveluate what is in the ground, basically very advanced technology. But that doesn't say all. Check how we gather our food and vegetables. We're still a nomadic hunter gatherer society. Such as were the Cro-magnon and early Hoo sapiens sapiens tribes.
Hour homes serve mainly as storage and can be put anywhere, regardless of what lays around, for a very god reason. We must go hunting for meat, and go harvest for vegetables and water.
We can tame beasts for war, but not raise cattle for food. We can bioengineer new species, but can't even raise crops. I know I'm getting a bit on the ethnicists side but no society has evolved thing way in RL. Cuktivating crops and raising animals for food is what started the sedentary existence for ALL the people of Earth. (Who achieved sedentary existence. Not all did). All the technologically advanced societies bypassed the need for hunting before raising to the industrial age. (Which starts with the automation of manual tasks, ie, water mills in 1300's Europe).
The miner and farmer professions have been ditched so far because of lack of content. If all a miner had to make was survey, it would grow old fast. That is debatable (I spent half of my playing time hunting for resources to sell) but that's how the devs ruled it.
The space expansion opens new areas. Possibility of mining asteroids. The miner won't be a sample-only guy.
Same goes for the farmer. I find it utterly stupid to have to run after antilopes for meat in a society where I can hunt them with rocket launchers. A farmer profession, able to operate farms and bonify the land, would be neat.
To avoid the "good" land spots to be taken on once and forever, give a max efficiency to the land, the same everywhere. The grassy Naboo plains will be good for crops, but you'll get near the max efficiency from the start. Even on less lush plkanets, poor soil could be upgraded to Naboo levels by virtue of superior farming skills.
Of course, on a given planet, you'd produce that planet's meat and vegetables. And since carnivores usually are a problem to be raised, carnivore meat should still be hunted. But herbivore shouldn't be a problem.
Just make tatooine unbuildable to farms for continuity reasons and you have a new profession with lots of promise, that would mix well with DE and CHs. Only CHs could train commands to a pet, (I guess the farmer could teach his cattle how to follow and this is pretty it)and only BEs could better the cattle stock for better resources. A high quality resource farm would then be a great money earner, as medics and chefs are tired of paying ten times what non organics consumers pay.
1) No one has to eat! It's true...arguably pets do, but you COULD just destroy them..
2) Flora harvesters currently gather resources at incredible rates, and make farming vast plots of land unecessary. One could argue that that is the step from the stone age to the future.
I won't argue with you that we're a hunter-gatherer society though. Krayt hunting anyone? A nice Peko Peko feather? Even combat missions...survey artisan missions...
Don't know what world you see where people roam the lands in search of minerals, but I make Coronet my main battlefield. Buying and selling is an amazingly fun thing to do, and the hustle and bustle of people selling anything and everything is the place and wayI choose to war in this game.. What's more, I provide those near-human droids to everyone and as such am constantly surrounded by high technology (well, usually broken high technology, but same principle).
Not everyone is out there hunting/gathering. I could happily spend the rest of my existance in Coronet living in the middle of society if I desired. But it is good to stretch the old legs and right some wrongs in the lesser parts of the galaxy, like Tatooine.
Anyway, hope that helps