Cargo QoL Suggestions

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

I've been playing a lot of Cargo lately and brainstormed a few things that might make the job a little easier and more enjoyable:



1) Make import/export shutters a permanent toggle and not a temporary one. Ocean maps are so much fun because you're not gated by how wonky the shutters can be.

2) Add botany seed/tool vending machines to the hydroponics starter crate.

3) Add more neon coils to the neon lining crate. Nobody that buys them wants them in small amounts.

4) Replace the percussion band instrument with a 3-5 random instrument crate or add more categories of instruments to buy.

5) Add a deconstruction device to the engineer ruckinger crate. A multitool would be really nice too, I think there's actually another forum post for that up right now.

6) Allow us to order additional base resources (wood, cotton, maybe alternative tile designs?) from the order list and perhaps rarer materials from traders occasionally. It's fun to use the cargo budget to build and decorate, but without a construction worker around, the design potential feels really narrow.

7) Probably beating a dead horse on this one, but changing trader buy/sell prices and inventories on refreshes would be REALLY nice. 

8) Specific sports themed crates. Basketballs with jerseys, baseball bats with mitts and uniforms, ordinary football gear with footballs, etc.

9) A crate with several plant pots with/without flowers already in them. It takes a weird amount of effort to get seeds and/or botany gear right now, it seems like the sort of thing you should just be able to order.

10) Not sure how this could be achieved, but sometimes people get bodied by incoming/outgoing crates because you don't see them when you're traveling way out. Is there a way to give a quick signal to people traveling through the streams to let them know stuff is going in or out?

11) Trash/junk mystery crates from traders. It could be anything, even another junk crate! The possibilities! 

12) Add a pill bottle or two of mutadone to the genetics crate.

13) Capsule machine restocking pack. 

14) More fast food crates. Pizza and chinese is cool, but sometimes a guy wants tacos or hamburgers with fries. A chance of getting exceptionally rare sauce packets would be funny, but it's really not necessary.

15) Add a little bit of meat or something to come with the cloning crate.

16) A security crate with old timey police clothes, mustaches, and wooden sticks to beat unruly hooligans with. It would be wonderful if it wasn't security locked, too. Having security come and unlock the crates you ordered to make a militia in defiance of security would be awkward.

17) A premade suicide vest emag crate. The one and only crate you get from emagging the console is neat, but it would be nice if there were other things. Maybe a dangerous animal crate, too?

18) Bonus Noot suggestion: The ability to minimize/maximize sections of the order list. It's massive and uncomfortable to scroll through.



Bonus unrelated suggestion that I just remembered: Allow us to construct various furniture frames using rods and then let us use custom fabrics to cover them. Extra brownie points if we can infuse the materials and let the furniture apply it to people who buckle into them. Also, please let me decon the comfy brown couches. I want to make the jazz lounge on Cog1 into something else, but that couch continues to spite me.

[Arlian]

As a QM main I can't see any suggestions I disagree with, but I particularly like:

1) Make import/export shutters a permanent toggle and not a temporary one. Ocean maps are so much fun because you're not gated by how wonky the shutters can be.

6) Allow us to order additional base resources (wood, cotton, maybe alternative tile designs?) from the order list and perhaps rarer materials from traders occasionally. It's fun to use the cargo budget to build and decorate, but without a construction worker around, the design potential feels really narrow.

11) Trash/junk mystery crates from traders. It could be anything, even another junk crate! The possibilities!

14) More fast food crates. Pizza and chinese is cool, but sometimes a guy wants tacos or hamburgers with fries. A chance of getting exceptionally rare sauce packets would be funny, but it's really not necessary.

16) A security crate with old timey police clothes, mustaches, and wooden sticks to beat unruly hooligans with. It would be wonderful if it wasn't security locked, too. Having security come and unlock the crates you ordered to make a militia in defiance of security would be awkward.

17) A premade suicide vest emag crate. The one and only crate you get from emagging the console is neat, but it would be nice if there were other things. Maybe a dangerous animal crate, too?

18) Bonus Noot suggestion: The ability to minimize/maximize sections of the order list. It's massive and uncomfortable to scroll through.

On trader buy/sell prices:

7) Probably beating a dead horse on this one, but changing trader buy/sell prices and inventories on refreshes would be REALLY nice.

As long as haggling would lock in the price and inventory for a particular item I would be fine with it. It would be no fun to spend 5 minutes haggling cargo hold prices to 5k just for a refresh to reset the price back poverty levels or have the trader decide to not buy cargo holds anymore. An obvious meta way around refreshes would then be to just haggle for everything you want to keep from a specific trader which I'm not sure would be a good or bad thing.

I'd also like to add a suggestion that higher value crates be added to the list of things to buy. It's not hard to get millions of credits doing QM if you know what you're doing. Even easier if you have an experienced miner who grabs 3 starstones 5 minutes in. Last time I checked the most expensive thing you can buy is a singularity core which is 160k.

It would be nice to see a few crates worth up to a million or more worth of credits so there's something for productive QM's to aspire to buy. Stuff like gold plated furniture, rare items that can only be bought by buying that crate, joke items and more. Would help to ease the boredom of some shifts where you're insanely rich and nobody is ordering anything, and you've already neon lighted cargo for the 100th time

[Frank_Stein]

I'd like to see more depth to haggling. Have the merchant do things like agree to a discount on one item if you also agree to buy some other stuff, or have them agree to buy things before you sell them to them.

More give and take, with frequent transactions building trust and offering better options.

[Drago156]

Oh boy I have a lot of typing ahead of me I can see it.

So as a resident cargonian Lizard since my time off from security, there are things I like and things where I think you might just be a bit lazy on. I'll explain as I go through each thing with my thoughts, though some of these I might be indifferent to.

1) The problem with shutters being permanently open on space maps is that they can and will drain the atmos of the belts and rooms around them. Maybe if all the belts has the atmos shields on them it'd be good, or if that was something you could buy as an upgrade to cargo, it would be great!

2) So there are two ways around this. Usually as long as there's a botanist they're pretty chill and will let you in to scan stuff with the mech kit you can order, or if that's not an option you can just strap a phaser onto one of the indy pods in the Cargo podbay and go south of the mining outpost and scan up the abandoned ruskie ship. Also not sure it would be good in the starter crate, maybe move some items in the crates around and make a Hydro recon kit.

3) Yes please. Maybe keep the current ones as a small pack then allow us to buy a megapack. I almost always have people order like three crates of neon lining when I play QM.

4) Yea this one is fine with me, but I think you can make most instruments somehow through matsci, and drums aren't in that list.

5) Decon device is kind of iffy to me, just hack into mech lab or ask them for one or something I guess? Also might work better being put in the mech recon kit instead of engineer. As for the multitool that's not a big deal, really. You can order all the other tools and a set of insuls, which allows you to get through windows and doors pretty easy. So you can just screwdriver and crowbar your way into like mechlab or EVA on most stations to get a multitool if you don't get one of the ones that's generally out in the open near Cargo anyhow.

6) Yea I think this could be cool, though technically possible through botany plants and stuff. Gragg also generall sells some kind of ore or two, but the base traders never really cycle ever, nor do their inventories, which kind of sucks.

7) Yes and no! I think if you buy a significant amount of a trader's stock on something or sell them a lot of something they should probably keep it on their, seeing as it's something that is getting bought/sold. But absolutely yes otherwise. Maybe even have the base traders not stick around for literally ever unless you peeve them off with haggling.

8) Ehhh I'm mostly indifferent on this but consider that the baseball bat is a very powerful melee weapon and that most sports balls can disarm people when thrown at them.

9) See response to #2. Easily worked around. I would be fine though with the flowers that you can't get or grow though.

10) Normally this isn't an issue because the PTL is next to the output and input lines so people ain't wondering over there. Maybe we could have little lights along the path to the edge of the z-level that flash while something is coming in our going out.

11) Not sure I understand what you're going for here. Could you elaborate?

12) Maybe we could have mutadone come in with brain damage kits, they've got the space for it and it's not like brain damage is common enough to sacrifice having a kit on you for it in most cases as it is now.

13) Probably should have this.

14) I thought one of the crates did come with fries? In any case maybe just a fast food crate that's got a random assortment of fast food and junk food stuff?

15) Pretty sure you could just use the meat from the meat and dairy crates, and if all else fails just get some monkeys and murder them one at a time.

16) Arguably half of this exists as traitor items already, like the fake moustache and the riot baton. As for the old timey clothes could just throw those in clothing booth or the clothing crates. The old timey police thing might also end up being a gang theme too, but I'm not too sure if Kyle has that planned or not.

17) Yea no. Just make your own suicide vest. The emagged crate you get is also incredibly powerful considering what's in it. Sleepy pen on its own is a power weapon and can decimate a station if you know what you're doing.

18) yes yes yes YES please. I enjoy that it doesn't scroll back to the top any more like it used to while you have the window open, but it can be annoying to get around.

Yea so that's my thoughts on this stuff. Also yea it would be great if you could wrench the various couches around the station like you can chairs. In any case you can still make use of the Jazz Lounge on Cog 1, I've made a Mech Lounge out of it plenty of times with it chalk full of shit.

Edit: forgot to add, but I also like the idea of adding higher valued luxury crates you can get, because I can confirm you can very easily reach over a million creds without even relying on mining if you know what you're doing, and it would be nice to have something to spend that money on.

[Superlagg]

Also a catwalk a ways out from the belts to make it easier to fix crate pile-ups.

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

Getting access to deconstructors, botany machines, instruments, or other common items/machines with uncommon (but not rare or Command Staff) access shouldn't require more than a cargo order if you have the money. If that was the answer, we could just remove most of the order list and rely solely on other departments/methods for resource gathering, items, and construction projects. One of the huge benefits of Cargo is being able to save an incredible amount of time by using money. Convenience is Cargo's greatest power.

Hoping other people can bother helping you in a timely fashion or expecting Security won't put you in the baby cage for breaking into places is ludicrous. Suggesting the average crew member to crime their way to ordinary goals and risk leaving doors electrocuted or permanently open to anyone shouldn't be the answer.

The problem I have with traders never changing stock is that it makes Cargo rounds super stale. The traders will only ever have the same options and each shift develops a permanent round long meta around that. The shipping market is fun because every ten minutes you get to change your strategy to exploit the ever changing needs of the economy outside of the station. Why not extend that to traders, but add more elements of risk/reward?

This leads to the junk/mystery crate suggestion.

The ability to accept great risk for great reward by buying a true mystery item would be a fun money sink. We already do it for some of the NPC Traders, but the "mystery" wears off after you buy into these options a few times because the list of items they pull from is incredibly small or straight up singular. The best one there is Gragg's strange item because artifacts can be truly varied, even if he's only going to give you a handheld. Everything else is just mysteriously labeled and that's not really the same thing.

We could always just put whiffle bats in the sports crate if you're worried about being able to order baseball bats. I'm also pretty sure the shutters have atmos shields on them as well that prevent airlessness or the entire ocean from flooding Cargo. Even if they didn't, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable to add it. We have it on Oshan and it makes buying and selling there superior because your efficiency isn't gated by some janky shutters.

[Drago156]

Getting access to deconstructors, botany machines, instruments, or other common items/machines with uncommon (but not rare or Command Staff) access shouldn't require more than a cargo order if you have the money. If that was the answer, we could just remove most of the order list and rely solely on other departments/methods for resource gathering, items, and construction projects. One of the huge benefits of Cargo is being able to save an incredible amount of time by using money. Convenience is Cargo's greatest power.

Hoping other people can bother helping you in a timely fashion or expecting Security won't put you in the baby cage for breaking into places is ludicrous. Suggesting the average crew member to crime their way to ordinary goals and risk leaving doors electrocuted or permanently open to anyone shouldn't be the answer.

I'm not saying you should have to rely on other departments or getting access, because of the fact you can get anywhere if you know what you're doing, and part of that includes fixing your mess and leaving no trace behind. Anyone who leaves a door electrocuted or wide open is just being sloppy and lazy, and you should absolutely slap them, but if they're closing the door on the way out and leaving it as it was then honestly what does it matter if it's not an important place? And also security couldn't be assed to handle someone breaking into a place if they're literally closing the place back up afterwards. I know I can't be when I play HoS or NTSO and I've talked my way out of being bothered by sec by simply saying that it'll be fixed when I'm done. Long as you don't break stuff no one really cares.

As for getting botany stuff in specific, you really don't have to bother hydro at all. It's INCREDIBLY easy to just fly a pod to the abandoned russian ship and scan the stuff there, and with relatively no danger. Heck you can even grab the strelka's guns while you're at it and slap those on your indy pod.

All in all I think a good QM shouldn't have to rely on money for everything, because you're not always going to have money available, especially when you need it, so being a thrifty and crafty QM is better than falling flat when the money's gone.

[BatElite]

Something to keep in mind is that some jobs get exclusive gear to make sure they have something others can't find elsewhere. IIRC it's the case with medbay's defibs (although they're scannable and cargo can order them) and deconstructors for engineerin/mechanics.Arguably seed planters can be said to be that as well? Although you do need to hack a vending machine for one. Cargo can already do a good job at being botany as far as I know, Never done it myself. Adding a deconstructor to the mechlab crate means that you can just be mech lab for 35k.

I'm aware that this isn't bulletproof, with the crates available and hacking being a thing. We probably don't want to let cargo easily put other departments out of a job though. (Heck, you can probably already make medbay's shift a bore by teleporting a medkit crate to every pad at round start.)

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

Isn't it weird that the Hydroponics Starter Crate has everything to grow plants except for the seeds and tools needed to do it?

[Technature]

Well you're (allegedly) ordering it to supplement Hydroponics, who have all the seeds and tools they need to use them.

[Kamikaze Mongoose]

Hydroponics Starter Crate implies you're making something from the ground up, such as in the event of having to start up a new hydroponics after it explodes or letting a crew member start up a grow operation. Which is weird because it only has half of the things you would need to start a hydroponics set up.