Toxic Waste Removal

[Kamo]

Nowadays some stations produce Toxic Waste, that can only be sold at Trading Posts and clog our cargoes. Stocking it is kind of necessary but since it's infinitely produced (like all trading goods), is only a very temporary solution. I have several ideas to put back the Toxic Waste into the cycle.

 

The nice but expensive solution - Waste Decanter: That could be a special kind of station that'd turn waste into low-level resources, but the conversion rate would be capped by a logarithm of how much waste is currently inside, because compression would be involved.

So they would be really pricey to maintain to be efficient enough for a station or two, as they'd need to have cargo holds as big or even bigger than Trading Posts'. (However the production would make them less of a money sink.)

 

The slightly evil solution - Jenkhem Factory: A definitely illegal station that would make Morn and Acron out of (a lot of) Toxic Waste alongside other things. Now the problem becomes smuggling the drugs... unless you have a really conveniently-placed smuggler post trading both, of course. May increase pirate activity.

 

The really evil and hopefully temporary solution - "Suspicious" Stations: There could be some stations using Toxic Waste as supplementary ingredients to make things. Those would be less expensive than normal stations to build, more efficient with the ingredients, but their cycle is dangerous: they would have a chance to lose crewmembers at random production cycles (so they may need crew runs in addition to cargo runs, and they'd be able to resupply themselves automatically with the crew they offer) and the production would count as Suspicious cargo (because it doesn't meet regulations).

Suspicious Stations would also be able to be "sanitized" into their ordinary counterpart for a small price, for when the player'll have enough money to afford another or a bigger decanter.

 

The careless solution - Trash Heap: Another station that is just classed as "Suspicious", it just fires Waste into the nearby star(s), but it has been proven that a really small amount of waste really lands on it. For some reasons Xsotan hungers for the most of the rare toxins inside, so building that station increases Xsotan activity, in quantity and quality. (Also, dropping Waste into space would have a similar effect, or else it waste processing station would be useless.)

And worst of all, it gets rid of Waste really efficiently, bringing cargoes from distant sectors to empty their holds inside, causing the increase to be massive :o and the need to build and maintain large Xsotan-culling fleets.

(Alternatively, Xsotan make organic, crew-killing torpedoes out of it ! Yeowch ! And annoying ! Players and other NPCs could also make them, but they are illegal under space-Geneva Convention :P.)

[DivineEvil]

Personally I see Toxic Waste as completely redundant, along with Protein, Fabric, Dairy, Plant, Scrap Metal, Tea, Paper, Ore, Corn, Sheep, Cocoa, Raw Oil, Bio Gas, Crystal, Coal, Lead, Beer, Coffee, Chemicals, Gems, Food Bars, Paint, Solar Cells, Power Units, Metal Plates, Fuel, Energy Generators as well as varied ammunition types and accelerators. Like I've said before, the variety of goods is far too overblown to be comfortable and expedient. The framework for goods and factories should be redesigned without all of these generic, nonviable or overly-human commodities.

 

Toxic Waste has absolutely no value in intergalactic trade as it is easier to just drop it into a star or on any barren/gas planets readily in abundance and to process raw materials anew, than to try and recycle it.

[Wanderer]

Personally I see Toxic Waste as completely redundant, along with Protein, Fabric, Dairy, Plant, Scrap Metal, Tea, Paper, Ore, Corn, Sheep, Cocoa, Raw Oil, Bio Gas, Crystal, Coal, Lead, Beer, Coffee, Chemicals, Gems, Food Bars, Paint, Solar Cells, Power Units, Metal Plates, Fuel, Energy Generators as well as varied ammunition types and accelerators. Like I've said before, the variety of goods is far too overblown to be comfortable and expedient. The framework for goods and factories should be redesigned without all of these generic, nonviable or overly-human commodities.

 

Toxic Waste has absolutely no value in intergalactic trade as it is easier to just drop it into a star or on any barren/gas planets readily in abundance and to process raw materials anew, than to try and recycle it.

 

Did you ever try to make rocket launchers? Goodluck without fuel.

Or other turrets that require lead?

 

If building stations yourself, you will understand some of the goods named above are really important!

 

Ore and coal you need for steel, raw oil for fuel, corn (but also rice, potato, wheat) is required for carbon, also for steel etc. etc. Most of the goods you named are required for building production chains!

 

And yes there are things like accelerators and energy generators, but i think that it makes the game feel more alive, because stations need goods so you can trade. So can the npc's. What use is a researchstation if it doesnt need supplies for research?

 

Trading is a good mechanic in the game and at least 1/2 of all goods you named are used by players for building productionchains or turret making, 1/2 of the remaining goods is often used to trade and the rest is, indeed, not really needed, but it makes the galaxy feel alive.

 

I dont think it needs to be redisigned without these goods.

 

Maybe toxic waste could be made into something poisenous, wich you could use for a (new) type of gun?

 

WHY THE HACK ARE SHEEPS IN YOUR LIST!?!?

[Kamo]

The economy in Avorion is not really well balanced, but (seems to be) more or less functional. It’s definitely very complicated with a huge amount of goods, even more than in X2, but it’s a worthwhile detail: someone does not simply decice to "make an intergalactic empire" and actually do it as easily.

All the necessary production is more or less "realistically" complex, which then justified why trade is important and why supply and demand vary depending on different but similar regions of space: generations of tycoons tried to find a perfect balance and failed, their stations running chains that worked before they broke for various reasons (the cataclysm being one of them). The player is in the same spot, trying to support various industries with various degrees of success and inevitable bouts of failure.

 

The "overly human" goods are actually destined to biotopes and habitats, that are a currently not-yet-totally-implemented thing: galaxy (re-)population and crew production, right now crew is more or less easy to obtain in that there aren’t any shortages of them and they "regenerate" alongside equipment and other "spawned" goods, but it may change in the future...

(And, if those goods are "not alien enough", well, the game is made for humans to enjoy, so being more realistic about that approach would either call for

• More and even procedural types of goods
  
• Goods whose names do not mean a thing to players
  
• Goods whose designations would be too complicated to players, or too distant to players' tastes (as example, "Beer" is much more warm and significant than "Low-Yield Alco-Beverages").)

Alongside the "sentient" factor of failure, is failure endemic to the system itself, secondary "goods" that are actually useless trash, which Toxic Waste is a perfect example. You cannot throw it into space because it will fall again on planets, be extracted again as asteroids, or make giant corrosive clouds once burned by a sun. Getting rid of it should be relatively easy but penalizing in various, player-chosen ways, another challenge to make the universe more lively (which is why I made that suggestion thread).

 

Added a new idea on the main post: the Trash Heap !

 

WHY THE HACK ARE SHEEPS IN YOUR LIST!?!?

Once I had a random looted sheep in my cargo. It stayed in my ship for in-game days because the nearest biodomes were distant, I traded for other things, and I just assumed it was brought by one of my crewmen to serve as a pillow :P.

[Wanderer]

Really like the trash heap idea. I've been playing on a server with someone that had a sector filled with xxl sheep farms and sheep storages... those are a lot of pillows :)

[DivineEvil]

Did you ever try to make rocket launchers? Goodluck without fuel.

Or other turrets that require lead?

Rocket launchers without fuel? Easy. Rockets themselves are irrelevant, since ammunition seems to be contingently infinite, which is why any goods necessary for production of ammunition doesn't seem to be necessary, and the fact that greater amount of such goods somehow improves the properties of the weapons does not make any sense either. How exactly more lead makes a weapon more powerful? How is more ammunition of a certain caliber makes a turret more rapid-fire? It doesnt make any sense at all.

 

If building stations yourself, you will understand some of the goods named above are really important!

Not in the least. There's definitely an obscene amount of factories necessary to perform every little refinement process for the production chain indeed, but it is in that state because there's these redundant and weird goods all over the place.

 

Ore and coal you need for steel, raw oil for fuel, corn (but also rice, potato, wheat) is required for carbon, also for steel etc. etc. Most of the goods you named are required for building production chains!

Coal and raw fuel cannot be mined in space - they're products of organic decay on habitable planets. Carbon can be derived from everywhere, you don't need vegetation for this, and then it can be used for steel and to synthesize fuel from Carbon and Hydrogen. Besides, why the hell in some unknown, alien galaxy there's corn, rice, potato and wheat? Why do we need all of these? Why can it all be substituted by Grain?

 

And yes there are things like accelerators and energy generators, but i think that it makes the game feel more alive, because stations need goods so you can trade. So can the npc's. What use is a researchstation if it doesnt need supplies for research?

These are not redundant because they're superfluous, but because Fusion Generators ARE the Energy Generators, you dont need both. Same with Accelerators - they're Particle Accelerators, and you don't need to have a separate unit for Protons, Neutrons and Electrons. Its just three goods of about-equal value, that are produced in the same factory and purchased by the same station. Being a interstellar species, do you really need paper!? Cloth!? What is Ore? Isn't all you mine from asteroids and wreckages IS Ore? Crystal is a form of matter - it can be ANYTHING, from a crystal of water to the crystal of Galena. Et Cetera, et cetera.

 

Trading is a good mechanic in the game and at least 1/2 of all goods you named are used by players for building productionchains or turret making, 1/2 of the remaining goods is often used to trade and the rest is, indeed, not really needed, but it makes the galaxy feel alive.

No it doesn't. It will feel the same way if the amount of goods is halved, and I don't even advocate that much. The thing is that all of these redundant goods produce redundant production chains and redundant station types and makes it almost completely impossible to trade without a powerful Trading System upgrade, especially in early-game, which on its own makes a whole family of cheaper goods completely wasted.

 

I dont think it needs to be redisigned without these goods.

Well so far you only described how it is now, not why it should not change.

 

Maybe toxic waste could be made into something poisenous, wich you could use for a (new) type of gun?

Do I even need to respond to this? Why do we need to come up with uses for something that is useless in the first place?

 

WHY THE HACK ARE SHEEPS IN YOUR LIST!?!?

Because Sheep are Earth animals! Earth! Why do we ever trade Earth animals around some random Galaxy!? To produce Clothing, that nobody needs either, since its easier to make synthetic one?

[Wanderer]

About the ammunition for rocket launchers, you need it for the turret fac. About the rest, if there is no food at all, even if it isnt used or so, still it does make the galaxy feel alive, because it suggests there are human beings or others that need food in order to survive. That feels alive to me.

 

Why are sheep earth animals? Because they cannot get to space, if we built a space station, why wouldnt we be able to (by lack of a better word) grow sheep there? Radiation shouldnt be a problem, as my crew doesnt die because of it.

 

side note, how do you make specific quotes?

 

Wich guns get improved fire rate with more ammo?

 

More fuel = longer time the thruster can burn, = longer distance traveled.

 

More lead = more damage? Well i believe guns sometimes use lead as projectiles. Heavier projectiles = more kenetic damage.

 

About the insane amount of factorys, i do agree. That should be less. Go complex mod!

 

Coal is nothing more than pure C (...) and thats an element. Parently it exists in asteroids, and that you can mine. Raw oil is indeed not logical.

 

for the ore part: do you want mines that can produce everything?

 

Why should i tell you why it shouldnt change? Its good like it is now for me and i think its timewaste for the dev to change it. Do you change all your lights if one is broken or something is wrong with it? Its the same as this but that the toxic waste is the broken lamp and the rest of the goods the working ones.

 

If we go to mars, and make a colony there, then wouldnt we need to grow food there? So why not produce sheep and food in space? Yes we could do with less but why change it to less? Doesnt really matter for me and honestly, i think more do.

 

More and more people prefer hand made stuff these days so why not use sheep stuff? You can eat them as well. Maybe there should be a station that buys everything but for lower. I believe thats what the tip in the loading screen says, but i never figured out how to then.

[DivineEvil]

About the ammunition for rocket launchers, you need it for the turret fac. About the rest, if there is no food at all, even if it isnt used or so, still it does make the galaxy feel alive, because it suggests there are human beings or others that need food in order to survive. That feels alive to me.

Indeed, and its weird. Ammunition and its constituent parts has nothing to do with the construction of the weapon as such. It logically has to be substituted by completely different components.

 

I'm not talking about removing food. I'm talking about removing the Earth-only varieties. If you have variety of organic species, then you can have a couple of Farms that produce Meat, Vegetables, Fruits and Grains. These can be brought into Food Processing together with Nitrogen to produce Preserved Food and Military Rations for delivery to Habitats and Military Outposts, etc. Fruits can also be delivered to Distillery to produce Alcohol and Grain can be brought to Animal Farms to boost production of Meat. That's it. No redundancy, simple and intuitive trade chain without unnecessary waste. No Protein, Wine, Beer, Liquor, or any other redundant junk.

 

Why are sheep earth animals? Because they cannot get to space, if we built a space station, why wouldnt we be able to (by lack of a better word) grow sheep there? Radiation shouldnt be a problem, as my crew doesnt die because of it.

They're not even supposed to be there. This is a random Galaxy, not even a unknown Milky Way region. Sheep isn't supposed to be there, and wool that they're needed for is worthless, as it is cheaper and more efficient to synthesize fiber for cloth either way.

 

side note, how do you make specific quotes?

I quote the entire message, close the quote on the first paragraph, then I select separate paragraphs and use a button uptop to envelop them into additional quotes.

 

Wich guns get improved fire rate with more ammo?

More fuel = longer time the thruster can burn, = longer distance traveled.

More lead = more damage? Well i believe guns sometimes use lead as projectiles. Heavier projectiles = more kenetic damage.

Again, we're talking about bringing ammunition to turret factory to improve turret parameters. It doesn't make any sense. You can bring weapon components to do so, and even that would have questionable logic, but at least you won't just bring more fuel to increase the quality of infinite ammo.

 

About the insane amount of factorys, i do agree. That should be less. Go complex mod!

And you cannot reduce their number without reducing the number of goods, or making some of them completely non-functional.

 

Coal is nothing more than pure C (...) and thats an element. Parently it exists in asteroids, and that you can mine. Raw oil is indeed not logical.

Then just make a Carbon mine and forget about Coal. Oil doesn't make sense, and using outdated fossil resources to produce fuel doesn't either, easily superseded by Hydrogen when readily obtainable. Really, this looks like some ridiculous medieval-era economy mixed with high-tech.

 

for the ore part: do you want mines that can produce everything?

I want mines, that produce particular elements necessary for particular uses, designed in a framework, where Iron, Titanium and other materials are available. If Avorion definitely needs the basic metal commodity for factories, then it should start from the Durasteel Foundry, that forges available materials into composite alloys, that then can be used for more delicate or durable components, not from a Mine.

 

Why should i tell you why it shouldnt change? Its good like it is now for me and i think its timewaste for the dev to change it. Do you change all your lights if one is broken or something is wrong with it? Its the same as this but that the toxic waste is the broken lamp and the rest of the goods the working ones.

No, but following your own analogy, there's like 12 lights in a single room. There's few broken lamps, there's few that flicker, and few more, that has odd colors. All of that makes it uncomfortable to be in a room. I propose to remove all the bad lights and keep the lights, that do work as they supposed to.

 

Same is true here - Current economy is unrefined, there's too many goods, too many factories and too many steps to trade goods between the stations to get the end product. There's many goods that are human-specific, and there are cases where groups (Food, Ore, Crystal,) and particulars (Vegetables, Fruits, Platinum, Silicon) coexist in the same framework, which is invalid. You have to have particulars where you need them and groups where you need them, but not both at the same time. There are also goods, that essentially the same things (Fusion Cores, Power Units, Energy Generators) and there's absolutely no point for them to be like that, and goods that are just terribly named (like Crystal, but not Optics, or Gun over Firearms).

 

All of these issues has to be solved to arrive at the good-looking and comfortable trading system eventually.

[Wanderer]

Okay so, if ik correct, you want more alien goods and less earthlike-goods?

 

about the other things, i think you have a good point, and that it should be changed and refined, but like a lot of things in the game, its probably gonna change. I do agree that its a lot (or even to much) work to make a chain for all the railgun parts. I made a complex and needed like 30/40 stations and mines for it, not including dubble ones. Thats just to much.

 

And when you see how little it produces, you indeed start wondering why you needed all the other stations in the first place.

[DivineEvil]

Okay so, if ik correct, you want more alien goods and less earthlike-goods?

 

about the other things, i think you have a good point, and that it should be changed and refined, but like a lot of things in the game, its probably gonna change. I do agree that its a lot (or even to much) work to make a chain for all the railgun parts. I made a complex and needed like 30/40 stations and mines for it, not including dubble ones. Thats just to much.

 

And when you see how little it produces, you indeed start wondering why you needed all the other stations in the first place.

More or less. What I advocate for is a system, that doesn't rely on any mundane human commodities to provide understanding. If Avorion does involve entirely separate galaxies, where any given faction can be led by an entirely different alien species, as it seems to, then human-specific goods and needs has to be excluded entirely. Living beings might need to source generalized sources of nutrition, medicine and sustenance and advance to use of technological principles of physics, chemistry and computing, but none of that requires the use of human terms and Earth-specific flora or fauna.

 

All of that is just an expansion on the argument, that economy as of now is full of redundancy of goods, that is hard to manage for a player, while also missing the variety of illegal goods and corresponding production and demand points for them. Even by reducing the variety of factories and mines, there's place for additional installations, like armed Space Forts, that would help factions keep sectors secure, Storage Facilities, that can store goods for players for a fee, which player can check on and recollect when convenient, Accelerator Gates, that can propel the player's ship to more distant regions of the sector or closer to the planet, where Planetary Outposts provide their unique commodities, and Mercenary Outposts, where you can hire outfitted ships and personalized commanding officers with individual perks. None of that is anything new for the genre as long as you'd care to look.

 

I myself have played Avorion for over 700 hours, and yet I still find it extremely difficult to make any value of the economy without the use of spreadsheets to keep track of all available points of supply and demand, and in most cases its just easier to salvage wreckages and sell the unneeded materials. In this framework, goods like Toxic Waste and Scrap metal is an eyesore, that has absolutely no relevance to the economy, where the opportunities for disposal are virtually infinite, and is thrown out of the airlock, just like the majority of goods of the same price bracket and below.

[Wanderer]

Well that clears it up :D i have to admit that through that vision, your points make lots of sense. But maybe thats something for another thread?

 

As for the removal of toxic waste, i believe there is a tip that says "smuggler hideouts will buy everything, including stolen and suspicious goods, but only for 15% of the value"

 

Well if this was true, then getting rid of stuff would be so less annoying. So maybe this should be implemented, not saying i wouldnt love the suggestions for toxic waste removal, would be awesome to see something like those ideas.