So after reading a few threads on how the economy is going and not being very happy with the conclusions I have decided to try and put my 'unique' problem solving skills to task with a fix.. The most common issue I see is with the lack of the rare materials getting on to the market (and not enough of the common ones). Rather than fiddle with numbers and NPC buy orders to encourage people to put the items on the market, I have decided to attack the difficulty in obtaining them in the first place.
And so steps in the auto-miners..
How I propose these little things work is that you go out in your bot or mech and find a good mining site. Once you have located it you drop your little auto-miners and set them to task. These tiny automatic spider type robots bury themselves in to the soil and start to extract the materials they have been programed for, accumulating them in to a container on the surface. While slow, they allow the user the freedom to leave them and walk away, coming back in a few (to be balanced) hours to cart off the materials.
The details in point form:
- They are produced as a single unit just like everything else. From a game point of view the 'little robots' are for animation purposes only as they bury themselves underground to stay safe.
- They can only extract 1 ore type (either programmable when deployed or pre-programmed when being made, depending on which balances better).
- They are single use and once the timer expires they go dead, trapped beneath the earth.
- The can is on the surface and is detectable and destroyable. This needs to be balanced so they are hard to find, but not impossible.
- Only 1 group of auto-miners can be used per person at a time. There should be a skill to use it and its level can adjust the area the bots can extract from. Again depending on balancing, this could be expanded later on with other skills.
- The extraction rate and timer will need to be balanced so they extract at a much slower rate to someone standing there and extracting by hand. I would say about 1/4 the rate at a guess. The timer should be set to something like 3 or 4 hours.
So why again?
Basically this will allow people to drop an anto-miner on a beta island to mine the rare stuff and not stand there themselves risking their bot. The miner still needs to find the spot, get it in to position, start it and then come back in a few hours to collect the ore so its not 100% safe.
It also has the added advantage of allowing people on alpha islands to mine while they do something else. Plus it takes the boring bit (standing around) out of mining...
It should be noted that the rate of extraction should be significantly low enough that mining by hand produces a much better income.