The Chief Engineer's Thoughts: Encouraging Modification.

[Tribaja]

I've always wanted to incorporate a kind of "Under Construction" room that's not quite finished being furnished but has a lot of materials and tools lying around for this reason

It's a good idea and I think there's a few places where this has been the intent i.e the warehouse next to QM. Unfortunately, it and most others still suffer for the location issue, people only really go on that side if they need something specific from the area. They also usually have unremovable machinery that prevent larger modification.

In addition to that, I've found that usually the material amounts are a bit lacking unless you go and gather most of the mats around the station. The Rage Cage takes 2 full stacks of reinforced glass and a stack of rods and that is quite a small modification. You can of course gather quite a few mats from around the station, but that all cuts into the building time which cuts into the time you get to see it in action, which is usually pretty short anyways on larger builds. Again for an example, I can usually throw the Rage Cage up in about 20 minutes if I'm CE and get going straight from round start with no distractions, it takes about 10 minutes longer if I do it as a staff assistant having to gather mats, weld down walls etc.

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somebody mentioned in another thread (the what makes a station good thread?) that a station should have a storage room with spare building materials such as stacks of rods, tiles, glass, steel, etc. so i've taken that to heart and made certain there's enough spare building materials so players can build stuff with ease.

i liked the idea of an events-centric room so i made one close to a main artery on my map:



trying to stick to your principles - no permanent fixtures, a little side room with a door that can be controlled, and enough room to do whatever thing it is you wanna do. plus you have exposure to the hallway and windows that give people a view of what you're up to.

That looks very good in my opinion! Seems to me like the ideal size for something like this, if it gets too large it can feel a bit empty, and the visibility of it is great. I like the little stage especially, little details like that offer some inspiration for a build, like you could make that a karaoke bar or an auction house pretty easily!  Keep up the good work!

I went into the materials in my last post so I won't go into it further here except for maybe suggesting that the amount of mats in Cog1's engineering storage room seems like a pretty ideal building mat room stock.