Topic: Fluff idea for artifact caches - easy to implement?
Ok, so we have the makings of a great little sandbox. We sort of have an economy, we have territory control, inter-corp rivalries and metagaming, we have industry and farming.
What we don't have is anything cosmetic or not-useful-but-desirable for us to spend money on. Right now the game is a self-perpetuating loop of get rich/industrialised so you can pvp so you can control a beta island so you can get richer.
Here is a really simple idea to create a PvE goal outside that loop:
Put fragments of information about the Nian civilisation in the artifact caches.
These can take the form of transcripts of radio conversations, reports from observers on terran activity, plans, maps, historical documents, sections of computer code, letters, instructions, images etc.
They show as an item in your inventory or cargo, perhaps similar to the transport/bounty hunting data modules, and double-clicking on the icon brings up a window on which text or a picture is displayed which gives players background lore about Nians.
You could start with, for instance, five documents, and split each into four pieces. Then distribute these randomly to the caches. That way you can advance a Nian storyline, or tell for example a back story about the reaction of the Nians to the appearance of terran controlled bots, or how the Nuimquol suceeded from the Empire, or things the Thelodica have done to interfere with the other two factions etc.
Players can piece together the information by combining each of the four fragments of the data files.
You could go on and write some of them in code, and then introduce code keys into the world that players can use to decode with (or just not provide a key at all and let people have fun cracking it themselves).
Devs, you've said before in the blog that you enjoy thinking up names for the places on Nia. Think how much more fun it would be to write something like this!
Bernard Suits, 1978