Weaponsmith Archive

I had an idea the other day when I was setting up a harvester on some unknown ferrous metal...

There are a multitude of threads about which resource has never spawned on server x so we can't make gun y and people wondering why heavy weapons got their resource requirements loosened while others remain...

This little proposal finds some middle ground...

The meat of my suggestion is quite simple. Into any slot requiring a specific resource (going to use Duralloy steel as an example), you can substitute an unknown resouce of that kind (i.e. unknown ferrous metal). However, this unknown only operates at 50% effectiveness.

Lets say you're making a melee weapon (quality dictated by shock resistance) that takes Duralloy Steel but it hasn't spawned on your server since week 2 and no one is willing to sell you any. However, there's some unknown ferrous metal with 800 shock resist in shift. With this innovation that unknown can be used in place of the duralloy, but it would count as 400 SR in that specific role.

The beauty of this is twofold: first off, servers that can't make a certain item due to resource shortage could start making them, as unknowns are somewhat more plentiful. Secondly, this keeps the specific resource requirement and gives incentive to use these resources, since, to follow my example, any duralloy steel with over 500 shock resistance would outperform even perfect unknown in that weapon.

Thoughts?

That is a heck of an idea. needs to be toyed with a little but that something that would be nice.

I think this is a wonderful idea! DEV's - Please consider!

Not bad. Except for one thing. 50% might actually be BETTER than what you get when the specific resources DO spawn. Those named resources often have at least one terrible rating (IE: horrible conductivity, but good overall quality), or can have terrible ratings on all aspects. It's really rather a shame.

But, if what you're saying is that the 50% would be 50% of the average ratings of the named resource, that might work. Alternatively, you could set it up so that unknowns really would be a wildcard. Each time you used it, you could have the chance of doing quite well with it (IE: a starting rating of around 20% on your item attributes), or would do an absolutely terrible job (IE: a starting rating of 3% on your item). The benefit of using named resources would be that the range of possibilities would be tighter. So, for example, with unknown resources, the range for just a plain old "success" in the initial crafting would be anywhere from 3% to 18%, whereas a "success" with a named resource would always be, say, a 10%, or could be from 7%-10%(assuming the attributes were such that you could get this).

Thus, there'd still be an incentive to harvest named resources, since you'd always know what your general range is, but for servers with shortages of Neutronium steel, for example, you could substitute "Unknown Steel" and either get a crap gun that's only worth the XP, or a good quality gun that you want to sell.

On the other hand, there is an issue with grinding that would come up as a result of this. Having "unknown" resources in abundance would allow for more grinding (what the hell, it's just an unknown, right?), which would only create a more top-heavy profession. Still, this is a good idea that I think we should toy with more.

Yeah I had made a suggestion almost exactly like this a long time ago...except you could put ANY resource of the correct type to cover, but take the 50% penalty. I.e. if you have to have polonium Iron, you could put any iron in but take a hit on quality... Itd be nice to see, but as the game gets older we have seen fewer and fewer posts on resources not spawning...now that the 2 euro servers are up we may see a few more but right now Chimaera has the best dang steel to hit in a long while, yet Im sure very few Heavy Extractors macro sample away chimaereans!