Preventing Cargo from draining the Rockbox

[mintyphresh]

Has this ever happened to you? 

You're a miner, mining as usual. You put all your ores into the Rockbox, because you'd have to be crazy to store them anywhere else, and have them all set to "DO NOT SELL" because you're still working on getting your preferred equipment. But!! Avast!! A bohrum asteroid! 84 ores in total, you're all set! You dump it all in the funny orange cylinder and set it to "Sell;" you excitedly await to hear the crew's resounding silence on the matter! Whistling with your new bohrum hammer on your shoulder, you go back to the magnet.

You've just finished mining the last resource you need: Uqill! Now you can make Industrial Space Armor and totally pwn the debris field! You head back to mining HQ and slot the refined crystal into the fabricator. Ah, needs more Dense Metal-- No need to worry, you've got plenty of bohrum in the Rockbox! ... uh ... Well, you HAD plenty of bohrum in the Rockbox. In your short time away Cargo has completely bought out your stock of bohrum, the "0" in the Rockbox staring into your soul. You've nothing to make your beloved armor with, and there's absolutely no way for you to get it back, outside of hoping you stumble across more of the stuff. The crew has no access to it for THEIR purposes, either-- the Quartermasters have deprived the entire station of a valuable resource all to make a quick buck.

This is the equivalent of a clown walking up and eating all of the food on the Chef's counter, and it gets the same defensive argument: "If you didn't want it sold/eaten, why did you put it up for sale/on the counter?"To that, I say... I don't care whether it gets sold! I want it to be USED! Selling ores on the market exchanges a hard to find, directly valuable commodity for credits (which you can get easily regardless of whether you sell these commodities), credits that most often go towards a useless golden chair that only gets built as the shuttle arrives. This is a terrible, super lame trade. But, well, QMing isn't going to change just because I get butthurt and yell at QMs to be more considerate over the forums; I know better than to try to tell anyone they should care about other people.

Instead, I propose a third setting on the Rockbox: Minimum Stock. After an ore is bought down to a certain amount (e.g. a QM buying all but 10 of the bohrum in the Rockbox) it can't be bought from. The 10 ores left still show as available, and perhaps there'd be a button to request a number of ores to be freed up by mining, but it lets mining staff make the decision on what gets sold out. Talk to your miners today (They're lonely)!

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OTHER SOLUTIONS, AND WHY I DON'T LIKE THEM

"Just make the price higher!"
The issue with this is that there is only one price that is too high for Cargo: Slightly higher than the price when it's a hot-market item. This puts the value of just about every ore (even Rock) in the hundreds. Isn't the whole point of the Rockbox (and indeed, of Mining as a whole) to share the fruits of your labor? What does it mean if the crew can't afford to use them in a timely fashion?

"Just don't sell!"
Why am I mining, then? So I can be the only one with samus armor and shiny spear and glowing hammer? Doing this makes mining worse than genetics. Boo.

"Just store ores outside the Rockbox!"
The Rockbox is such a powerful organizational tool that I scoff at the notion. This requires me to put in a lot more work -- budgeting how many ores I need, finding a safe place to put them where they won't get picked up by my ore scoop --  all to fix a problem caused by the bad behavior of an entire separate department.

"What if we reworked the Rockbox to distribute materials on an as-needed basis to fabricators, and force ore-selling to be on a request basis?"
This one is pretty cool, but I worry it'd be difficult to implement without putting the sell-out capabilities in the hands of the crew (making way more sheets than they need because it's all free). Maybe there's a way to make it work, but this is too dramatic of a change for me to advocate for it fully.

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This post makes sense to me logically, but it comes from an ugly, spiteful, and bitter place in my heart. It's possible I care too much about the farting simulation game! Take what's said here with a grain of salt.

[deathrobotpunch]

Melt the ores down and it automatically puts it in the fab where you can easily eject and sell them in the rockbox or turn it into gear

[mintyphresh]

Melted ores are only worth something if they come out as ingots, and at that point they're all worth the same regardless of if they're rock or gold. I'm not against ores getting sold! Just sold out.

[saccharineChampion]

I believe you are being somewhat unfair to Cargo here. The Rockbox as is is designed to be oriented towards "throw stuff in you don't care about" and, while that may not be the case you want it to be for, it's not selfish for QMs to think that there is any problem to take as much as they want.

The analogy of the chef setting out food does not work very well because the usual intention of setting food out like so is to make a bunch of folk happy and/or impressed at such a variety being offered. There's effort there beyond just clickdragging a crate to a thing. Furthermore, unless there's particular buffs involved with the dishes, there isn't really much gain from mass-eating the chef's food compared to just eating a bit, or even just buying food from a vending machine. Buying and then selling ores in the rockbox, in contrast, scales well with helping cargo do stuff.

Your solution ultimately comes down to other people communicating with the miners. However, that already exists as a solution on its own without adding some restriction to the rockbox; if you care about where your ores are going, don't put them in the rockbox, mention on radio that they're there, and listen for requests. The rockbox, by design, is an incredibly simple "throw stuff in and forget" contraption.

I'd like to close by again emphasizing that I think you are being needlessly aggro about Cargo's side of Rockbox usage. Please try to understand this from a QM perspective; that the rockbox is a clear "buy what you want, I don't care" device. Unless you're specifically asking them not to use it willy-nilly (which is itself a volatile proposition, since you'd need to be sure every QM, current and future, will know your request), why would they think there's an issue with buying up everything? Especially since the most common usage, robotics needing more metal, crystal, and wires, is actually more efficiently dealt with in-bulk by both the roboticists and QMs by the QMs buying metal/glass/wires crates rather than the roboticists buying the materials with their own relatively limited funds.

[babayetu83]

personally i always treated the rockbox as a treasure chest for me to loot as a cyborg

but as someone who also enjoys playing miner, just put the good shit in your fabricators first and put the excess in the rockbox, that's how i always did it

[Lord_earthfire]

If you put sonething into the rockbox, it's free for everyone. If you need certain gear first, put it into your fabricator.

The rockbox is, for miners, for ores you specifically don't need.

[Garash]

I think Minty's problem is a legitimate one. It would be nice to be able to choose the amount of ore you want to list up for sale instead of being forced to either list all of them or none at all.

I think though, instead of adding in an additional input named "Minimum Stock," the "For Sale" button could be *replaced* with a number input, labelled "For Sale:" which decreases every time an ore is bought, and, only if the Auto-Sell option is checked, increases every time an ore is loaded.

So in Minty's scenario every ore would be at 0 since they unchecked the Auto-Sell option, and after loading in their new haul of Bohrum they would get to set the For Sale amount to like 75 out of the 84 Bohrum in the rockbox.

And, in the case of a more laissez-faire miner who didn't disable the Auto-Sell option, their For Sale amount would always be equal to the amount of ores in the box, since it increases every time they load stuff in.

[Brixx79]

I much prefer the rockbox method of 'dump and forget' than having to micromanage quantities I'd want to sell at what prices. That's what cargo does. And I usually just have cargo come and ask/steal ore on maps like Donut3 where we're close instead of buying it.

You could always build vending machines with the ore if you really want to control distribution somewhat.

[Mouse]

Why are you putting ores you want in the rockbox where they do fuck all instead of in the fabs where they actually serve a purpose?

[Kotlol]

I am with the crowd on this one.

If you don't wanna sell all your BOHRUM then don't put em on sale till you have enough or put em aside.
If you do... then put em for sale.

You can just refine em and put em in the fab but if you go: "But what if it takes the rest of the shift to find what ya need to get industrial? then that bohrum is wasted."
Yes... that's the risk.

There is no fix for this.. whatever we add to fix this "Niche" problem will just add a whole lotta nothing.

Also if you have trouble finding Bohrum, use the quantum telescope to find asteriods. Bohrum Asteriods are one of the most COMMON Asteriods to get... and sometimes you get two asteriod hits with one being a choice.. and one of them is BOHRUM. So Bohrum is litterly easily found if you take abit of effort.

I hate to be that guy.. but this is a non issue that you can solve by putting in effort... and it's not UNNESSARCY EFFORT in some QoL changes, but this one seems to fix a problem that doesn't need fixing at all as the way to solve the problem ALREADY EXISTS in the game and is as easy then adding something to the rockbox...

This is like wanting to drink from a glass bottle, but not wanting to pour into a glass, drink straight from it or put a straw in it, but you specifically want teaspoon sips but without pouring into a teaspoon or taking small sips... but insted want to jam the tea spoon into the glass and scoop it out to get the teaspoon sip. Complex and unnessarcy.

[Dhaidburt]

I've been in this same situation, but with uquil.. it's definitely heartbreaking but its more of a learning opportunity than something that needs to be changed. Once its in that rockbox, it's not in a safe space. Its on the open market, so if you want to save anything you either smelt it right away or keep it on a table on the side. This applies to anything from bhorium to gold to uquil.

I'm not opposed to the idea of having a 'reserve amount' option though, like if you want to keep a supply of char in case the engine needs some refueling but still want to sell your dragons horde of char. That might clutter up the ui more than necessary though.

[Decarcassor]

Yeah you can just hold the sales of top priority materials until you get everything you need.

If there is one issue with the rockbox is thats its not access locked. Anyone can just enter the mining department and take stuff from it. And since miners spend a lot of time outside, they often can't really stop it, depending on where the rockbox is located in each station.

[FireKestrel]

Sort your ores. It takes two clicks to stack and sort ores dumped from a satchel. You can easily split your ore into stacks to sell and stacks to put in the ore processor. Processed ore can't be put in the rockbox or picked up by ore scoops and don't sell for much on the market. Use that to sort ores you plan to keep in mining from the raw ores you want to sell in the box.

You can also just tell the QMs not to buy all the ores.
Miners and QMs are on the same radio channel and on most maps the departments are right next to each other. You can easily tell cargo "hey please don't buy all of this ore" and most players will be happy to oblige.

If you absolutely MUST use the rockbox to store ores you plan to use, just set those ores off sale until you have used what you need.

I would like to see the rockbox get access restricted to people mining access, though. A lot of people bypass having to spend money by breaking into mining and taking all the ores directly from the box, which contributes to supply issues for some of the more useful ores.