Normali(s|z)ing Ores and Materials

[Mordent]

I like everything you suggested except for the bits about lossy behavior, which fill me with an irrationally intense sensation of loathing and revulsion. I have no idea why that particular suggestion elicits such a strong reaction since, on its face, it seems like a decent idea with no significant flaws.

The "lossy" aspect was mostly to give people a reason to use the material processor over the portable reclaimers. If they otherwise do the same thing, why even have the material processor at all? (An entirely valid question.)

With bars/sheets/resources, however, I'd prefer a simplified 1:1 ratio, with 1 bar=1 sheet=1 point of resource. Largely just for clarity's sake, as the current system doesn't do a good job of showing clearly how much resource is available from the sheet/bar total. I'd like to be able to see clearly from the number of bars/sheets in my hand what I can make in a fabricator.

I'd even support removing bars altogether in favor of all processed resource being sheets, and allowing manufacturers to accept sheets directly. I'd prefer if the resource processing was left to the miners, rather than people having to take a trip to a fabricator depending if they wanted to use the resources provided for building or in a manufacturer.

"1:1 bars -> sheets" works for consistency but feels too low - it takes a reasonable amount of mining effort to get a meaningful amount of sheets of a useful construction material. I'd be totally willing to discuss the idea of "1 ore -> X sheets" and scrap bars entirely. This has much wider ranging effects, though. The idea here is to normalize ores and materials rather than rework the system too much - most of my suggestion would be numerical changes to get the balance better.

Lastly, I'd like to see an ore storage/sorting machine. As a miner, I want to be able to dump off a satchel full of ore, see clearly through the interface the ore/resource totals and eject an amount of ore I want. No more mucking about click-dragging stacks around on the floor of mining.

Multiple jobs could benefit from a better storage/sorting solution (mining, pathology, chemistry, the bar, chef, hydroponics...). As an interim, being able to split specific amounts of ore from a stack would help alleviate this (maybe remove the need of it from mining), and also improve consistency with other stacks (sheets, rods, tiles).

No lossiness, please. It was already annoying enough dealing with materials being worth drastically less in nanofabs once the bar/sheet/etc disambiguation was in full effect

I agree that you don't get anywhere near enough sheets from materials in NanoFabricators currently (especially compared to manufacturers), and while the "lossy" aspect is up in the air you'll note that part of my goal here is to being the two more in line - the proposed changes would make NanoFabricators more efficient for making sheets than they currently are (while manufacturers are still superior). I'm entirely happy to strip the "lossy" part of this out, as it was mostly a balancing afterthought, but then we need to have a discussion about why material processors are needed at all (just use a reclaimer?).

I support the idea of stuff being 1:1, "10" of a material stored a fabricator standing for "one bar" is confusing and unnecessary. Just shift the values around, do some decimal work to make this stuff more transparent because right now it's goofy as hell

Totally agreed. It took me a good while as a newb to understand how they converted - removing the conversion rates (even if means a lot of number rebalancing) would seem like a great step in the right direction.

Quality, maybe, I wish it was a little clearer what quality even meant since there's a lot of separate adjectives for the qualities with no obvious progression

How about if you can see the adjective as currently, but if you want to know what it means exactly you can hit it with a material analyser - it would give a quality number (e.g. 0.73) along with the basic properties ("soft", "conductive", etc.).

Storage, yes please, click dragging is still a rather imprecise science

Better storing/storage is something many departments would benefit from, so a standard solution for an approach to deal with that would probably be best. In the meantime, being able to remove specific amounts from a stack as per material sheets/tiles/rods would help, right?