Artisan Archive

Hi there!

Throughout the development of this game many of us have looked forward to being crafters of somekind and almost all of us have looked forward to owning some neeto droids. Droids go hand in hand with crafting because of the resource gathering involved. From a continuity point of view, the droid is the resource miners best little friend. Unfortunately the droid in SWG is mostly a box with wheels, a gun with wheels, or a crafting station with wheels. What I am wondering is where is the Mine Manager with wheels?

Here are a few little ideas of the future uses of droids and how it can help the Artisan profession as a whole. Please feel free to add any other interesting ideas that I may not have come up with.

1) Mine Management: This is the big one. All of us running our very weak tails across the universe to check out mines. A simple way to make me more effecient would be to have droids do it for us. To click on the structure terminal in my home and basically call my droid to find out what he is up to. From this window i can see what mines are working, what they are working on, and when maintenance is due. His little tin hide is out doing the meanial tasks for me. With a properly built droid he could perform maintenance on the mines lowering my costs to run them. He is my new best friend. I can see it now army's of droids going from mine to mine keeping everything running smooth, while we sit in our homes crafting stuff. All that is needed is a Resource Managment Unit to be built and installed into the droid to allow this feature. That droid becomes part of my home and once intialized-----POOF---- he is on the go! Now I have the knowledge I need to plan ahead for large contstruction projects. And good thing i got the droid with the really nice brain chip cause the dumb one wasnt bright enough to tell me how many resources i had. He got lost from time to time too. The additional maintence cost to the home can be annoying, but the freedom of not having to check the mines clearly makes up for the costs.

2) Resource Gathering: Of course maintaining mines is only a small part of our lives in the game. We have to go pick the stuff up so we can use it. Well what if I got me a Binary Load Lifter! They lift, they move stuff, the drop it somewhere. With the right chip in its head it could go from mine to mine picking up resources and dropping them into a bin for me to safely access on or near my home. No point in risking my butt when i can risk his! Sure he may get blasted from time to time and I may have to go get him and repair him, but that is just part of the business we are all in. A nice addition to the Mine Manager Droid if I ever heard of one.

3) Power Usage: Besides shelling out mas credits for maintenance, we have power needs as well. A well built Power Droid would fill in this last position. He would bebop his little self from my power plants to my mines keeping them running and giving me reports on power usage. This would give me no more reasons to leave my store unattended again! I would finally be able to speak and greet the customers as they come into my shop and offer custom built services as well.

4) How to make it work?: So, do we give all kinds of things to the droid engineers to make giving them a hundred times the business they already have? I dont think so. One of the most impressive parts of this game to me, so far, is the reliance of players on each other. No profession can exist on its own. The same approach should be applied here. The Architect builds me a new type of Structure (eating up another lot). You can give him 3 levels of this Station: Small, Medium, and Large. The small station would sit outside your home, or on another planet where your mines are, and would have the ability to house one droid. This would give the player his control terminal for his mines and any mines his is the administrator forand a central place for his droid to come back to to charge up. It would only have the ability to manage mines and help maintain them. To start managing power to your mines as well, you would have to upgrade to the medium droid facility. Here you get to add the power droid to make your mining even more efficient. This would not be a simple stationlike the small one. This is a structure you can actually go into. It has a small dip tank to clean up your droids and make the shine, and a place for two droids (similar to Lukes little shop on Tatooine). Finally the large Station will be able to house four droids. It comes with a hefty hopper to store resources in and a large enough garagelike area to ensure your droids have the finest of abodes! It would be up to the individual how far he is willing to go and the upkeep on this structure would be figured accordingly (do it like houses). Now my shop has a cool garage that will store droids (and taking it just a bit further) and someday a speeder or small ship! And yes i did say four droids. Dont think you can have those three mack daddy mine droids going without having a Repair Droid to keep them all happy. The Droid Engineers still have to make the droids keeping them busy, the Architect will have to make the structures keeping them from being bored, and the Master Artisan can be given some integral parts just like the ones he already has. All the crafter types would want this. They will pay to have it, and the time it saves would be invaluble.

This is mearly a suggestion and a dream, but if enough of us shape this into something they can make work, then maybe it will be a reality. Personally I would LOVE this kind of a setup. As I am autorunning around Naboo I am always wishing there was a better way and now technology may just provide us with an out! Like I have said before please feel free to add your ideas and maybe the devs will steal some of these ideas and put them to use.