Ideas for Connecting Gameplay Loops Between Horizons and Odyssey

Probably one of the biggest issues with Odyssey's release (besides 14+ major updates worth of bugs) is the lack of interplay between On Foot and Ship gameplay. The only connection is credits which can be earned or spent in both gameplay loops. I'm not counting flying to a settlement as interplay because you can literally hire taxis to do that for you for a couple thousand credits.

What I'm talking about is gameplay that offers direct rewards that benefit the "other side" of the game. The most obvious way to do that would be to create ways to get On Foot engineering mats from Ship gameplay and Ship mats while on foot… WITHOUT nerfing existing mat gains.

I think the perfect way to do this for physical materials is with Ship Interiors. Aside from the endless Arx sale possibilities, FDev can add a couple lab stations within the ship interior to give it an actual purpose.

• One station can process your Ship mats into Ground mats.
  • shielding emitters can break down into Transmitters and Memory Chips (for instance)… alternatively you can directly receive the currency used in bartender trades.
  • Make the process take a minute or two per mat. If you queued up 30 mats, you can return after some time to collect your mats.
  • Allow multiple component breakdowns to be queued up.
• Data processing station
  • Processes data materials and converts them into other types. Example: Classified Scan Databanks could be processed into Manufacturing Instructions.
  • Settlement data ports should also additionally contain spawns of ship based data.
• A third station can further process Exobiology finds.
  • Processed samples can be further exchanged in Vista Genomics for usable data mats/rare element materials.
  • Alternatively, the extra processed lifeforms can be exchanged for bartender mat currency.

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The goal here is to create some natural cross gameplay benefits in each direction. Ship Interiors is slightly shoehorned in here as the perfect solution since all of this could be accomplished with simple menu interfaces, but I think thematically ship interiors are a good place to do it.

Material conversions are a quick and tangible way to link on foot and ship gameplay, since you know… I can buy a fleet carrier but I can't buy Graphene.

Edit: A quick change to settlements would be to have an Access level 3 terminal which can be used to transfer some ship mats into your docked ship.