Rust, Wear and Decay (game mode)
Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 8:35 pm
New gamemode / difficulty level where items and stuff has limited lifetime. Player is not fighting only against alien horde or building his machines, but also trying to upkeep his decaying system and decayed parts also create problems for the players - be that conveyor belts that drop their cargo sometimes when they are in bad shape - or your acid-factory simply blowing up spilling its contents around because you neglected it for a long time. You probably cannot keep whole infrastructure pristine - so you'd have to choose what to patch and what to replace and what to drive until they break and also brace for the problems this wear and decay causes.
Every item would have two new values: quality and durability. Hitpoints would be measure against "Is this thing damaged", quality is straightforward measure how fast or slow something detoriates, durability would be the longterm lifespan of product, slowly falling.
Relation between these things would be that equipment with lost HP would lose its durability faster than undamaged items, so repairing stuff would be important, more important than it currently is. Low quality items lose their durability faster. The usage level of machines, belts and anything "active" would also affect the durability loss; if you drive the system at 100% constantly you need high quality parts for them to last for a long time. Low quality items will be worn out fast when in "professional use". Machines on light use would not lose their durability as easily.
Quality would be something that is decided while creating stuff - Quality parts would take considerably longer to create, need more advanced parts, more parts and lots more time to create, so quality products is not automatic "right choice", sometimes you'd pick inferior quality because it is fix for some temporary structure, it would not need to last long - low quality parts are fast to create and they cost less resources.
Fixing durability would be a bit more costly than repairing the hitpoints, also, you could not repair all the lost durability ever; when you repair durability you lose maximium durability, the lower the quality the more maximum durability you lose per fix. Fixing durability would require resources that were used to create the item, picked in random from the recipe. OFC you could craft maintaince bots later that could take part of the maintaince work stress away.
I think performance wise its not issue, durability can be updated at slow interval since its kind of creeping effect, once per game-minute would be more than sufficient I think.
This also strongly correlates to several other ideas that add some kind of disaster or source of potential durability/HP damage to structures, creating wonderful synergy. With enough "enviromental issues" the time-based durability might actually be unneccesary since acid rains and dust storms will do the same eventually, in more chaotic way. Here's some ideas that can go hand in hand nicely with rust, wear and decay.
Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) - viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342
Events (“Againts all odds”. Free-play, global task.) - viewtopic.php?f=80&t=183
All these combined would/could create "hardmode" game where you are constantly backtracking and fixing sources of problems and needing to allocate time and resources to that side too and plan the "durability/catastrophy" issue in mind too.
Every item would have two new values: quality and durability. Hitpoints would be measure against "Is this thing damaged", quality is straightforward measure how fast or slow something detoriates, durability would be the longterm lifespan of product, slowly falling.
Relation between these things would be that equipment with lost HP would lose its durability faster than undamaged items, so repairing stuff would be important, more important than it currently is. Low quality items lose their durability faster. The usage level of machines, belts and anything "active" would also affect the durability loss; if you drive the system at 100% constantly you need high quality parts for them to last for a long time. Low quality items will be worn out fast when in "professional use". Machines on light use would not lose their durability as easily.
Quality would be something that is decided while creating stuff - Quality parts would take considerably longer to create, need more advanced parts, more parts and lots more time to create, so quality products is not automatic "right choice", sometimes you'd pick inferior quality because it is fix for some temporary structure, it would not need to last long - low quality parts are fast to create and they cost less resources.
Fixing durability would be a bit more costly than repairing the hitpoints, also, you could not repair all the lost durability ever; when you repair durability you lose maximium durability, the lower the quality the more maximum durability you lose per fix. Fixing durability would require resources that were used to create the item, picked in random from the recipe. OFC you could craft maintaince bots later that could take part of the maintaince work stress away.
I think performance wise its not issue, durability can be updated at slow interval since its kind of creeping effect, once per game-minute would be more than sufficient I think.
This also strongly correlates to several other ideas that add some kind of disaster or source of potential durability/HP damage to structures, creating wonderful synergy. With enough "enviromental issues" the time-based durability might actually be unneccesary since acid rains and dust storms will do the same eventually, in more chaotic way. Here's some ideas that can go hand in hand nicely with rust, wear and decay.
Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) - viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342
Events (“Againts all odds”. Free-play, global task.) - viewtopic.php?f=80&t=183
All these combined would/could create "hardmode" game where you are constantly backtracking and fixing sources of problems and needing to allocate time and resources to that side too and plan the "durability/catastrophy" issue in mind too.
