4Game

TL;DR at the bottom

This is a concept for how Ship engineering could be slightly reworked to use existing game mechanics, but simplify the collection and upgrade process to make it less dependent on farming specific materials over and over. At the bottom of this post I briefly talk about why this wouldn't work as well for on-foot engineering. Anyway, on to the post.

Engineering effectively has two stages (assuming the chosen engineer is unlocked – changes to the unlocking process is outside the scope of this post). These two stages are: Material collection, and then trading/crafting. The gameplay loop as it stands is

• Farm as many G5 mats of either Raw, Manufactured or Data that you need by visiting a popular farming site
• Trade them for the materials you actually need and craft the upgrades.

I think a lot of this is needless – it's clear that Fdev has always wanted to reward players with materials for basically just playing the game – mats are dropped in some way from nearly everything in the game. Unfortunately it's built in a way that makes "just collecting mats as you play" a useless task that will usually result in you never being able to engineer anything you actually want. So I have some changes to both the collection and the crafting side of engineering to encourage collecting materials in all styles of play, where every material you collect is actually a useful resource to you further down the line.

So first of all, here are my changes to the material collection part of engineering. Once materials are collected, they go straight into a storage pool and are no longer stored or tracked separately. Effectively there are three new currencies: Raw components, Manufactured Components and Data Stores.

Different grade materials offer bigger increases to that currency. A G1 increases the currency less than a G5, proportional to rarity.

What does this do?
It fixes the collection gameplay loop which currently consists of "go to a location where you can easily re-log for G5 mats and then trade them down". Grinding G5s is still a thing, but currently anything other than a G5 is a waste to farm for since it's probably not what you need and you probably won't be able to trade for what you do need. With this change, every material collection is useful because over time you will build up stores. If you need currency fast though, grinding G5s is still possible. But all your other mats will have provided value too.

So collection is fixed. What about actually crafting?

Engineers now have a "credit pool" system, where you can deposit your currencies into a total component pool. The logic is that you donate components to an engineer, and they pay you back by offering upgrades. Different engineers give bonuses to different currency deposits. For example, Farseer, being an exploration focused one, might give a bonus to donating Raw Components as they are the things you collect most during exploration.

Each engineer has a separate "credit pool". You can donate to them at locations where materials traders used to be (the traders themselves are redundant), bartenders (for on-foot), or at engineering locations themselves.

Engineering upgrades simply require a cost from that engineer's credit pool.

The idea is that you can gather materials in gameplay, and then bank them with specific engineers you are planning to use. It also allows those with no specific engineering goal at that moment to invest into their future by donating to engineers and effectively saving up credit to be spent on future ships and on-foot upgrades.

This solves the problem of needing to make huge lists of specific materials to trade for when building a new ship. Instead, all you need to budget for is which engineers you will be using, and (if you want to be efficient) gathering enough of the currencies that they give bonuses to. It encourages you to still plan out your gameplay and work towards getting the resources for engineering your new ship, but now instead of being forced to grind G5s to trade down for what you need, not only does the new system mean that non-G5 materials are actually valuable to collect, but also it cuts out the material trading middleman and allows you to just directly go from material collection to getting upgrades.

Regarding On-foot engineering introduced in Odyssey, it's a bit different for on foot since material collection for Assets, Goods and Data is all done the same way (looting settlements) and material trading is only for Assets and not for Data and Goods, even though all three are required to unlock engineers as well as upgrade gear. To be perfectly honest, even if we replicate my changes to apply to on-foot gear, the problem remains that settlements are the only way to gather any of the materials, and so there's barely any purpose for the three separate categories to even exist in the first place. In other words, Odyssey materials and engineering needs a much bigger rework to make sense and be interesting than my changes can really fix.

TL:DR – Materials are stored as currencies based on what type they are (raw, manufactured or data). Bank currencies with different Engineers to gain "credit" with them, and you spend that credit on any upgrades they offer. No more need to farm lots of G5s and then fill lists of specific materials through traders. Just gather any mats, bank them with the Engineer you want, then visit them and buy upgrades with the credit.

Thoughts?