Balance: Rich asteroids do not respawn?

[Thundercraft]

I made the mistake of joining a multiplayer game before going through the tutorial or even trying single-player mode. But doing it that way made me acutely aware of this problem.

 

Of course, the first thing I did when I got my mining drone was try to complete the tutorial. And the part that tripped me up was having to gather 1000 Iron before we could proceed to the actual ship building.

 

Problem is, this server had been played a while and there were no mineral-rich asteroids left in the starting system - like... none! :'( Well, that's not 100% accurate. There was the one waaay out on the edge of the system that the tutorial had me mine. At the time, I assumed that the game spawned this one as part of the tutorial.

 

As a consequence - because there were no other rich asteroids - I was forced to mine regular asteroids. And that would not be an issue for me, except... We have to gather a whopping 1000 iron before we can build our first ship! And each regular asteroid only contains about 26 iron! It's quite disheartening that each "chunk" of an asteroid only yields 1 iron, especially since it can take a long time to bust up some of the larger asteroids. How many asteroids would that take? You do the math.

 

I honestly don't have an issue with having to mine for resources. Actually, resource gathering is one of the aspects of this game that sold me one it. But... come on. The worst part, in my opinion, is how large asteroids do not yield any more resources than tiny ones. They all produce the same. This, despite how large asteroids take a heck of a lot longer to mine.

 

So, please make adjustments to this. Please have all asteroids yield more than 1 unit of material per chunk, even with the pathetic starting mining laser. And please have the yield respect the size of the asteroid.

 

Mineral-rich asteroids are somewhat uncommon even in a newly spawned universe. And the longer player(s) play the universe, the rarer they're going to become, until they're completely gone. If they never respawn, then you're just forcing players to spawn a new universe on a regular basis.

 

At the least, mineral-rich asteroids should respawn in the starting system. That, or you could increase the size of all asteroid fields and have the mining part of the tutorial trigger the game to respawn a few (more than one) of the rich asteroids in whatever system a player is currently in.

[Dinosawer]

Not disagreeing, but tip: even in a drone you can travel to other systems (either via hyperspace jumps or via jumpgates), go find one that still has resource asteroids, it'll save you a lot of time

[Sorero]

I'm playing singleplayer but can somehow feel the problem. I did travel to other sectors/systems and flew around the system and throught the astroids. I had a lot of rich astroids in may home system, but in other systems I was lucky to find one after 5 minutes of searching. This is quite frustrating.

[Ranakastrasz]

The diminishing resources seem like a problem to me.

 

Two things that might work.

 

Each sector should have a set amount of asteroids and rich asteroid values saved when generated. If the ratio goes down, slowly convert poor asteroids to rich asteroids.

 

Once the overall asteroid count drops, have poor asteroids spawn in.

 

Both proportional to how many asteroids are missing. Like at 1k asteroids, with 100 having been destroyed, spawn a new one every 15 minutes, and at 500 destroyed, every 3 minutes.

Similarly, with 950 poor and 50 rich expected, at 30 rich convert one every hour.

 

 

This will slowly, in the background, restore an area's resources, but not enough to make it always possible to find a new asteroid in a sector, requiring exploration.

 

 

 

[Naggerknife]

Honestly sounds like the server is set to everyone spawning in same sector. The server owner can actually change this so nobody spawns in same sector. Works perfectly for my server!

[guiohm]

I experienced similar issue in single-player and I actually found way more wreckages containing iron (and other stuff) than iron rich asteroids. And wreckages are continuously created.

[Albrat]

I jumped into the test server...  The starting area was devoid of minerals.  The local station had 40k + of minerals for sale (sold to it by players I am guessing.)  So I jumped to the next system.  Saw 3 asteroids.  Went to try and mine them... Raiders jump in, I'm not in a ship yet, just the drone. Boom! dead, respawn.

 

Try another system, no asteroids... 6 systems later I gave up on the idea of being on a busy server of less than 10 people.  This would mean a server with more than 10 people would probably consume all resources within the start zones in no time at all. Making it harder for new players as the server is online for longer. (resulting in players avoiding servers that run more than a few hours.)

 

In my single player game I also hit a problem...  My mining ships mined all the rich asteroids.  But they have not touched any of the poor quality asteroids. 

[Worm]

I don't think that lack of asteroid respawns is bad.

 

In fact, I'm against it, as it encourages sitting in a single sector rather exploring around. The galaxy size is huge and you can jump around very quickly in a drone if you need an asteroid belt.