Materials, Stacks, the Nano-Fabricator, and so-on

[Mordent]

I've been having a hard time getting my head around how the different grades of material (terrible, great, etc.) come into play any more.

If they have an effect on the item built from them in the Nano-Fabricator (e.g. if a molitz-tipped spear has different properties depending on if it's cracked molitz or not), then how do I select what material is going to be used from the 100 I have in the machine already? Does it select the best one?

This also comes into how stacks of materials behave. Stacks of the same type of material seem to be able to made from materials of varying grades, and the resultant stack does not have any grade information associated with it. Is that information simply not displayed, or is it gone forever?

Overall, the materials changes from the 2016 release are basically a black-box for me that cause a lot of confusion when it comes to wanting to make further patches, and having some level of this peeled back (both in terms of how stuff works in a gameplay perspective, and how it works from a technical perspective) would be awesome.

[Sov]

I believe they do indeed have an effect.

For example midas touch makes things into soft gold. A soft gold pod is fast and weak compared to a normal pod

[Keelin]

Material quality itself no longer has any effects.
It was too difficult to find some generalized effect that quality had on materials without making it the single most important stat.

The only thing that matters for the fabricator and such are the material type (metal, organic etc) and the actual stats.
Stats being things like hardness.

[Sundance]

Too lazy to find the thread, but originally the request for quality was to effect all stats universally. So like high quality uqill would be extremely hard but also get a boost to all other stats. This would encourage users to smelt and create polymers.

[Keelin]

Too lazy to find the thread, but originally the request for quality was to effect all stats universally. So like high quality uqill would be extremely hard but also get a boost to all other stats. This would encourage users to smelt and create polymers.

The problem with that, as it turns out, was that there is no one direction for a stat to be 'boosted' in.
Low conductivity is great for insulating gloves but terrible for cables etc.

Boosting the "cap" of them also wasn't viable since at that point coders could no longer expect to see a certain and defined range of values for a given stat.
(Making general handling of the values as well as balancing a nightmare)

If anyone wants to have an extended conversation about this, send me a message on IRC (when I'm there) or on discord.

[Noah Buttes]

So quality is just the aesthetic appeal of the item now?

[Keelin]

It's nothing. It doesn't mean anything.
Eventually the plan would've been to have boosts to certain stats in certain directions for certain ores *instead* of quality.
So you might get some uqill that's extra hard etc. But there's some issues with that as well.

Of course, it always depends on what people want. But last time the feedback started drying up later on.
It's worth mentioning that making quality irrelevant was something that was specifically suggested by other members of the community at the time.

If people have some good alternative solutions we can probably work something out.

[Mordent]

I like that all mauxite, for example, is created equal as it means I don't have to worry about "was this wall made with good mauxite or terrible mauxite?". It means stacking is possible. Stacking is good.

One aspect that would be a simple "it actually does something but isn't a huge pain to balance": make the market value of the ore vary between 50-150% of the base price dependent on quality. Stacks of ore would have to keep a list of the quality of the ore within them, which might be annoying, but if that's the only variable between ores then it probably isn't terrible.

EDIT: The act of stacking ore blends it into a stack of the average quality of the ore within it. The act of sticking a stack of ore into the NanoWhatever could blend it together to form bars of the average level of quality. (e.g. 5 terrible (-50%) and 10 good (+30%) ores blend together to make materials with (-50%*5+30%*10)/15=+3.33% quality. Means you're only persisting one number per stack rather than one number per member per stack.

[Cirrial]

Yeah I actually like the reliability of ore properties now. Also I like everything Mordent said.

[Keelin]

That's trivial to do and i would have no problem whatsoever adding that if you want.