Suggestions for Upgrades

[Pill Joy]

There's been a lot of groaning about bugs (a fair bit of it legitimate mind), but I wanted to break the monotony with talk about what we love: Upgrades!

A couple of upgrades are in a weird place, like suit upgrades which are really useful early on but lose a lot of effectiveness as you go up in rank; and then there's helmet upgrades that barely have anything at all. To make this simpler, we'll go by device starting with:

Laser Cutter: I feel the laser cutter is pretty set on upgrades. Range upgrades are kinda weird as longer range tends to become a liability and you can't toggle them.

- Laser intensity: When in standard mode, the laser burns through objects faster. I tend to use the splitsaw to cut most points as it tends to be faster but this would make a nice addition.

- Centered view: This is probably superfluous as an upgrade but it would be cool if I could "aim down" for those odd points where my cutter doesn't have a clear path and would hit something explosive (it goes right through most other things). It's also a good reason to add a silly quip about accidents that have happened to Lynx employees that have played too many FPSs.

Grapple: Like the cutter, the range upgrades could be spread out a bit; you could reach across the bay without maxing it out. The tether is loaded with upgrades to the point where I'm hesitant to add more; but I suppose it's just that central to the game. On the other hand, if I could add just one...

-Tether Overdrive: As long as you hold down the key; all active tethers will have a stronger pull effect, but this will rapidly deplete their lifetime. The effect and duration depletion will slowly become stronger as you hold the key down. I feel that this is a perfect excuse to get all those duration upgrades and not add another line of upgrades to an already loaded tool.

Thrusters: It's just pretty good as is and boosting it would result in more liability than usefulness. Maybe a fuel efficiency upgrade?

Scanner: Same as above.

Helmet: I have a couple ideas here:

- Auto-sealant: Removes the oxygen drain for a cracked faceshield.

- Emergency Liquid Faceshield: If your faceshield breaks, this deploys and gives you a precious few seconds to make it back to the Master Jack.

- O2 recharge is kinda weak since you don't really want to spend a lot of time in a pressurized ship, but if you gave it its own say... minitank that rapidly filled up which would slowly be added oxygen to the main tank it would be kinda useful. On the other hand, the 4th O2 capacity upgrade gives you 16 minutes of oxygen which is already longer than a shift lasts...

- Also wouldn't it make sense for Audio resynth to be here instead of on the suit?

Work suit: The upgrades here are in a weird spot since suit integrity upgrades means it will probably outlast your health and hazard upgrades are far up on the level tree when they would really be more useful earlier on when you're more vulnerable to hazards...

- Inertial Field: Makes you less vulnerable to being moved by floating objects, decompression. the pulling effect of the processor/furnace, and being moved around when using the grapple beam.

- Suit holding pod: You can use "f" to pick up objects less than 1kg (posters, food packs, bottles, multitools,etc) and they will be automatically be considered salvaged as if they were thrown into the proper area. You'll probably want this higher up on the level tree for the QoL upgrade it gives or even limit it to a certain number of items per shift.

- Magnetic Override Gloves: When using Z or C, any removable objects touched will automatically detach. So stuff like computer terminals, cargo, anything that you get that timer box to remove with the grapple. I originally put this as a grapple upgrade but that thing's already loaded up and this would be a good alternative that requires a bit more finesse.

Demo Charges: I thought it would be cool if we had alternative detonation modes that you could toggle through.

- Hi-Power mode: This makes the cutting radius and explosion larger with greater effect for each "cleanup" mod. Something for cutting really big things like the last internal bits.
- Percussive Boost mode: This removes the cutting radius and the explosion doesn't destroy "hard" objects, but greatly increases the pushing factor. Don't get caught in it or you'll be sent flying.
- Decoupling Discharge: It removes the cutting radius and explosion, but it has a large radius where objects inside are immediately detached.

I know the devs are hard at work adding more stuff like Hab interactivity and fixing bugs; so good luck to you and keep working at it.

[Liao]

An intensity upgrade for the cutter would be an absolute must have for me. It's such an extremely essential tool, I use it all the time and it takes forever to vaporize some things and the large number of cut points that are risky to do with the secondary mode require just a lot of time.
It's those moments where I really get annoyed with a repetitive task taking too long.

Same thing goes for the grapple dislodging objects like computer consoles and such. Would be really nice to have a speed upgrade for that aswell for largely the same reason.

One more thing, I'd really like to be able to disable Audio Resynth. Been avoiding taking that upgrade at all because I think it'd really just ruin the immersion needlessly.