Normali(s|z)ing Ores and Materials

[Mordent]

Because the original post was probably not in the best thread, re-posting here.

Materials need their costs normalized (I'm going with "z" because now that I'm in the US my spellchecker whines, plus British English doesn't use anywhere near enough "z"s, so why not?).

By that, I mean we a) shouldn't be able to generate infinite materials by Smaht™ use of the machines, and b) should have a reason to use both. There's also some other general materials stuff that needs a look at, so I'm rolling this all up into one post.

Some terminology:

• ore: mined from asteroids; has variable quality
  
• scrap: random bits of metal that are sometimes found at the mineral magnet, or can be found as a result of explosions; can be stacked. This includes glass shards.
  
• bar: a bar of material, namely that which is made from ore - functionally identical to "blocks" for crystal materials
  
• sheet: material sheets, whether metal or glass
  
• tile: floor tiles (4 per sheet)
  
• rod: metal rods (2 per sheet)
  
• manufacturer: I think this are actually called fabricators in the codebase, but everyone knows them as manufacturers so going to use that term. The "General Manufacturer" is an example of one of these.
  
• material processor: the new-ish machine for converting ores into bars.
  

Ideas incoming!

Ores

Ore has various qualities. These are, as per this thread, not used for anything (they may have affect on sale value now, but I'm going to bring that back up here just in case, apologies for repeating myself).

Let's give ore quality a numerical scale of 0.5 to 1.5 (arbitrary numbers, could be anything). The "grade" of ore (great, terrible, etc.) gives you an indication as to where the ore sits on the scale (so each grade covers a range of this scale, e.g. "at least 0.8 but less than 0.9" could be "poor"). Quality modifies the sale value of the ore (not for traders, who don't care, but for the general market) by their scale, rounding down. For example, if the base price is 250 and your ore is of quality 0.95, you get 237 credits for it.

Stacks of ore have a quality that is the average of the ores within it. If you have 3 ore of quality 0.8 and 2 ore of quality 1.5, the result is a stack of 5 ore with quality (0.8*3 + 1.5*2)/5 = 1.08. Once ore has been stacked you cannot return it to its original parts - if you split the stack you then have two stacks with the new averaged quality (so splitting the stack above would give a stack of 3 and a stack of 2, each with quality 1.08). Basically, each stack only has to know about one quality value.

Ore quality will also come into play in a bit, so keep reading.

Ores can now be split into stacks in the same way as material sheets: by having a stack in one hand and clicking on it with your other (empty) hand you get a dialogue asking for how many you want to take from the stack. This makes e.g. filling a furnace with the right amount of char much easier, and also reduces the issue of "well, I need some clarentine to make this thing in the mining manufacturer, but I can't be bothered to split my stack half a dozen times to get the one ore I need to make into a block so I'll just use the lot". Now you can take the bit of ore you need from the stack of ore, use it for whatever, and send the rest of the stack on to the QM.

Making Bars

Bars can currently be made from ores in two ways: portable reclaimers and the material processor. They both convert ore-to-bars at a 1-to-1 ratio. This is good. To make this better, bring quality back in: the quality modifier of the stack of ores you load (or whatever's in the reclaimer at the time of activation, as you can put lots of different stuff into it before turning it on) affects the number of bars that are generated. To simplify the process, different objects contribute different amounts:

• Ore: quality value (0.5 to 1.5)
  
• Scrap: 0.1 (scrap pulled in by the mineral magnet is now in stacks of 5-10 scrap, to make it still marginally worthwhile to pick up, and it fits in ore satchels/scoops as currently)
  
• Sheets: 0.2
  
• Tiles: 0.05
  
• Rods: 0.1
  
• Cables: (I forget the amounts here, but normalise as per sheets to give the current behaviour) - only available in the reclaimer
  

Optional: the reclaimer is portable, and because of this is less efficient in getting the most out of the material; it requires twice as much material to make a bar (i.e. 2 points rather than 1, so a stack of 10 sheets makes 1 bar in the reclaimer but 2 in the material processor).

Optional: loading not enough into the material processor (e.g. one sheet at a time, or having some leftover material from your stack of ore) leaves behind the amount of that material that isn't used, letting you add to it over time and outputting a bar once enough material is eventually inserted. Would probably be a pain-in-the-ass as it would keep small amounts of potentially lots of different materials stored within it. Alternatively, have it store only the last type of material, discarding it if you load a different type but stacking with it if you use the same type.

Making Sheets

Both the NanoFabricator and assorted manufacturers can make sheets. These costs are normalized to be as follows:

• Manufacturer: 2 "material" (i.e. 0.2 bars) per sheet - options for single sheets and stacks of 10 sheets are now available (they come out as a stack of 10, not 10 individual sheets). As it stands, if you increase the speed of a fabricator it has no effect on items that take 1 second to make. By allowing you to make stacks of 10 (10 seconds) you a) need less clicks, and b) give speed tweaks some purpose. This applies to both metal and glass sheets.
  
• NanoFabricator: 1 bar per 4 sheets (come out as stacks of up to 50 sheets, based on how many you make - if you make 13 lots of 4 sheets you get one stack of 50 and one stack of 2). You get the result instantly (or near enough), which gives you an advantage over using the manufacturers, but as the NanoFabricators are rapid they are also wasteful: you lose some of the material (compared to a manufacturer) in converting it to sheets.
  

Note that with this (including the optional note about lossy reclaimers) there is now only one "lossless" path of going between bars and sheets and back: put bars into a manufacturer, make sheets, put sheets into a material processor (makes bars). Any other path now has a small amount of material lost in the process.

Chunks

Optional, quality-of-life improving extra:

NanoFabricators can make "chunks", making a stack of 10 chunks per material (can apply to any bar or block, and I guess fabrics and whatever else). These chunks can be loaded into manufacturers and count as 1 "material" each. "But Mordent," I hear you ask, "what's the point of this if you can just make bars?" - firstly, it lets you insert just the right amount of material to make whatever you want. No leftover from the whole bar you had to insert to make that one thing you wanted. Secondly, it sets up the framework for being able to remove fractions of bars from manufacturers.

Chunks could also be loaded into the reclaimer or material processor to contribute towards making bars (0.1 each), if your need to carry around whole things is driving you nuts.

Bonus: we have a separate component that we could use within NanoFabricator blueprints, allowing us to use fractions of bars for things (e.g. lightbulbs) or allowing us to blend in a second material to get its properties (e.g. cells could require a metal bar for its casing, and need 5 chunks of a power source to determine its capacity and another 5 chunks to determine how well it recharges - you could make a cell that has high capacity from, say, telecrystal, and decent recharge from being radioactive, like cerekite or koshmarite - I'm just spitballing, I'm sure there are much better ideas out there).

Summary

• Make ore stacks splitable easier.
  
• Make how much material is used to make sheets/received from sheets consistent.
  
• Make manufacturers able to make sheets in bulk so they can benefit from speed increases.
  
• Introduce some lossy behaviour (gives reasons to use specific equipment).
  

As always, criticism appreciated. Numbers for quality values are entirely up in the air (0.25-2? 0.1-2? 0.25-1.5?), and suggested numbers for how the whole ore -> bars -> sheets -> bars conversions work are also fair game to discuss - my suggested behaviour normalises things a bit (makes making sheets actually sensible on both the manufacturer and the NanoFabricator, with pros-and-cons), but it may need tweaking to make the manufacturer actually viable (could even have the NanoFabricator make 1 sheet per bar - the fact that it's instant is a huge benefit over the manufacturer).

[Keelin]

Keeping an eye on this

[Mordent]

Not quite sure why there's been a lack of discussion on this... any feedback from anyone?

[Noah Buttes]

Not quite sure why there's been a lack of discussion on this... any feedback from anyone?

I've been holding my tongue because I didn't want to offend you with my feedback.

I've been trying to think of a way to phrase it in a constructive manner, but doing so has been exceptionally difficult.

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.

Something in my gut is screaming that this a really, really, really horrible idea, but I can't tell you how to fix it because I don't even know what's actually wrong with it.

My first impression is usually pretty accurate, but since I can't justify it, I'm going to respectfully withdraw from providing any further feedback on this issue unless I suddenly have an epiphany.

[ferriswheel1]

I like the suggestions for ore-quality, as they could potentially open up upgrade paths for mining tools or the mineral magnet that would create higher yielding ore.

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.

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.

[Nnystyxx]

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 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

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

Storage, yes please, click dragging is still a rather imprecise science
Also I think borg ore scoops might be busted but that's for a bug report

[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?

[Dr Zoidcrab]

While reclaimers have the advantage of being moved anywhere, processors have the advantage of not being moved. It's impossible for someone to steal or run off with the processor and if it's not there it can be assumed that it's gone and you won't waste your time looking for it.

Reclaimers already have features the processor doesn't have, like being able to smelt random stacks of tiles, sheets and rods of the same material, and get multiple types of material from objects like cable coils etc, and yet the processor is still the go-to place for refining.

[Sundance]

I feel like if anything, ore processing needs to be simplified, as currently it's a mess of old and new code of drag+drop.
I like where you're going with the quality prefix, but lets take it a step further. 
I'll try keep my post concise: 

Let's take 2 examples of bohrum. 

Crap Bohrum
   --> x1--> x5 
Good Bohrum
   --> x1--> x10 

What's changed? The MAIN change is that Bohrum tile will always yield a single bohrum ore, no matter what. What's different about it is the quality of the ore will dictate what amount of usable processed material will come out of it, in the above example crap bohrum ore will yield 5 material, good will yield 10. 

The usable processed "bar" has no quality prefix, only the ore. The "bar" is stackable, but because of the quality prefix removed upon processing, this vastly simplifies the process without the need for much organization. 

As far as quality effecting pricing.. I'm lukewarm. Technically if good quality ore produces a large amount of material, then good quality ores when refined will sell for more by natural default

[Mordent]

As far as quality effecting pricing.. I'm lukewarm. Technically if good quality ore produces a large amount of material, then good quality ores when refined will sell for more by natural default

But... you sell ores, not bars...

[Frank_Stein]

I feel like if anything, ore processing needs to be simplified, as currently it's a mess of old and new code of drag+drop.
I like where you're going with the quality prefix, but lets take it a step further. 
I'll try keep my post concise: 

Let's take 2 examples of bohrum. 

Crap Bohrum
   --> x1--> x5 
Good Bohrum
   --> x1--> x10 

What's changed? The MAIN change is that Bohrum tile will always yield a single bohrum ore, no matter what. What's different about it is the quality of the ore will dictate what amount of usable processed material will come out of it, in the above example crap bohrum ore will yield 5 material, good will yield 10. 

The usable processed "bar" has no quality prefix, only the ore. The "bar" is stackable, but because of the quality prefix removed upon processing, this vastly simplifies the process without the need for much organization. 

As far as quality effecting pricing.. I'm lukewarm. Technically if good quality ore produces a large amount of material, then good quality ores when refined will sell for more by natural default

Yes, I was just going to say something similar to the ore quality vs bar production

I say, make ores and bars equivalent in price. To use the same example, a crap bohrum ore is worth 5 bars of bohrum, a good ore is worth 10. 

Maybe merchants could request one form or the other for a premium is occasionally

[ZeWaka]

As far as quality effecting pricing.. I'm lukewarm. Technically if good quality ore produces a large amount of material, then good quality ores when refined will sell for more by natural default

But... you sell ores, not bars...

could just switch them to buy bars tho tbh

[Nnystyxx]

As far as quality effecting pricing.. I'm lukewarm. Technically if good quality ore produces a large amount of material, then good quality ores when refined will sell for more by natural default

But... you sell ores, not bars...

could just switch them to buy bars tho tbh

agreed
in the SPACE ECONOMY, if you can't refine your own ore why would you buy your own ore
maybe to a rock worm refined ingots are like a candy bar instead of raw chocolate

[Keelin]

The chunks and non 1:1 ratio stuff is very unlikely to happen.
It opens up a whole new can of worms and problems. Not to mention exploits.

As for the processor, that will go away eventually as it was meant as a temporary bridge between the new materials and the old ore stuff.

Other than that there's some interesting ideas in here!