The new procedural wrecks are great, and terrible.

[ConnorMc]

I'm curious on how others are finding the updated wrecks.

The Good

Personally, I like the new wreck designs significantly more. The old maze type, even after mastering, did feel like I was just turning my brain off and zipping around them to grab loot for something else, instead of enjoying the process of exploring. It's also nice to have the additional decorations hidden in them, as well as the posters and animal effigies for collectors.

The Bad

Invalidating auto-trade systems

Having mastered the labyrinthine old wrecks, it now feels like I can get the same loot and tokens (or more) from a wreck, in 5x less time. This isn't necessarily a problem, but it almost completely removes the benefit of building an auto-trader system when it only takes a few hours to get 100k or more tokens from wrecks.

I certainly don't think anyone should be forced to build an auto-trade system, but it should at least reward those that go to the effort to make one. Otherwise, what's the point of the production and trade multiplier fuses if all but the most extreme end-game quartz or fusion core trading systems are invalidated?

Fix Options
Off the top of my head, some fixes options could be, in order of increasing complexity to implement:
1. Remove the 5,000 token chip (or also 1,000, or all token chips from wrecks) to reduce the earnings per wreck?
2. Boost sale price of existing production items, but not fuses?
3. Increase the cost of all token purchases (not fuses to keep the buy-sell price equal)?
4. Add additional higher-cost options to buy with tokens (to push people to manually run 25+ wrecks to purchase, or take the option to set up auto-trading and continue playing as tokens come in)?

5. Trade-deal blueprint chips These are like standard blueprint chips, appearing in containers and unlocking a random tiered trade-option, until you get the whole tier and start unlocking the next.

Maybe they start appearing after you create your first trade rocket, or they appear any time, but you need to buy a blueprint with tokens that gives you the terminal to unlock/read the chips.

These trades could offer existing items that are difficult to find, or limited, and allow you to pay terra-tokens for them (e.g. flower seeds). They could have quite high prices, and maybe in each tier there's 1 or 2 unique (but not progress gating e.g. explosives) items only found through the trade-deal blueprints. This would give players a new thing to collect with a real reward while increasing the reward of creating auto-traders vs periodically running a bunch of wrecks.

Bonus: If we could set up auto-buys on a trade rocket, that would be better still. Maybe there's some logic involved (e.g. If tokens > 10,000, buy 2 seed lirma).

Wreck Differentiation:

1. It's not clear what "rarity" corresponds to. My understanding is that it is loot quality, but this also seems strongly tied to difficulty (which at least now is more clear as it relates to the number of cards needed to open all safe rooms in a biome).
2. It's not clear how many wrecks exist in a biome. The biomes are cool for 1-2 visits, but zipping around a big empty space looking for wrecks isn't fun. This is potentially more clear when you get to a safe room door, as I believe if I'm in a difficulty 3, and my wreck needs 1 key, that there's 1-2 more wrecks to find with doors with 1-2 keys each.
3. The biomes the wrecks are in are cool, but it's less fun to end up in the same handful most of the time.
4. The new furniture being gated in wrecks is great, but finding almost all of them in 3-4 runs is not.

Change "Rarity" to "Distance"
Again, just off the top of my head, a fix option could be to change the rarity system to something like "distance". Group wreck biomes, certain types of posters, effigies, rooms (thus decorations), and loot to the 5 different distances wrecks can be found from you.

Potentially add a gating mechanism for distance, by adding a "scanning distance amplifier" to the loot table of each distance. So you'd need to explore some distance-1 wrecks to find the upgrade to find distance-2 wrecks, etc.

Tie loot quantity to difficulty (which it largely seems to be already). Wrecks at further distances will have their own unique items, but for general loot quality (like those found in normal containers), you can just use difficulty.

Benefits:
- Gives an incentive to do wrecks at all 5 levels for the unique loot from each, instead of just search refreshing until a rarity 4-5, difficulty 3 appears.
- Players can use "difficulty" to select the amount/quality of loot they want, and the time they want to spend in a wreck.
Scanning distance gating benefits:
- Incentivizes players to do wrecks to unlock the further sets for their unique loot.
- Increases the chance that players see all wreck biomes.
- Allows for adding depth to the biomes aside from the wrecks, e.g. story element or flavor (ruins with tablets/crashes pods with messages that reference things at further distances), interesting visual features (caves, flora, ships or ruins), valuable base game resources (maybe some pulsar quartz or rainbow caves), or maybe unique mammals with traits only gained from petting them (unique species seems too restrictive, but a unique pattern, or variation type could be very cool).


Curious if anyone has similar problems with the new wrecks, and thoughts on how to fix them if so.

[jdbenavent]

The new butterflies are 4500 T worth

[Larza81]

I LOE IT HOW IT IS NOW,, SO I THiNK YOU ONLY SPEAKS FOR YOURSELF

[Zippy]

I do like it better how it is now - it seems more like a ship than a maze.
I also like we now can get patterns to build our own things later.
There seems like there are some other new goodies also - which is also cool.
In my opinion - nothing needs to be "fixed" - all good.

[Saskia]

I'm kinda with you tbh, I didn't like the level 5 difficulty wrecks, they were just annoying to me, so I stuck to the 2-3 difficulty. While I like the new difficulty better, I can run the level 3 without flares, I just drop one at the exit and don't need them at all anymore. The amount of loot is also kinda crazy. I was already at the end point, so I already didn't really need the loot, but have just started to ignore the blue boxes all together now, after just two runs looking for new stuff, I just can't even store it anymore. It's not increased slightly, it's now a lot a lot.

But, I think you are going a bit far, dialing back the loot a little, not all the way back, and maybe adding back a few dead end circles in the level 3 wrecks (by blocked off doors, so it doesn't distrub anyone's immersion), and I think you're there. I think we're closer to great now, then we were before. So I think several of your fixes go a bit far, like removing the 1000 and 5000 tokens, wouldn't it be so much easier, to just make them a bit more rare?

I do like your idea for an incentive of sorts to do all difficulties, just not the one you gave. And the extra chipset for the traders rocket, I think that would be cool, but as an extra, not a fix or anything.

[Bob]

Yea, they did kind of kill trading/selling it would seem. A bit odd that you can get so much in a single wreck.

[maestro]

I think the idea is that you're supposed to sell off fuses and other stuff you don't need to buy the stuff you do need. That's what Trading is all about.

And on the side, you could make a factory but that's going to be less efficient.

I think the developers saw people making absolutely ridiculous factories that were breaking their games and then these people would complain their games don't work very well, lag, drones not functioning right, etc so they said "you know what? grinding up 25k TTs by selling computer chips and quartz is stupid". They don't want to remove the ability to do that entirely as you might want to try to farm up for some of the cheaper items by producing on a smaller scale, so they decided to add the safes in to remove the grind.

TPC is not supposed to be a Factorio Clone.

And I'm glad it isn't.

If I wanted Satisfactory or Factorio (not saying they are bad games, but they are entirely different genres), I'd go play those games. But, I'm playing TPC because that's what I want to play. I don't want to grind my eyeballs out making huge factories that take forever to get me what I want.

[ConnorMc]

Originally posted by maestro:

I think the idea is that you're supposed to sell off fuses and other stuff you don't need to buy the stuff you do need. That's what Trading is all about.

And on the side, you could make a factory but that's going to be less efficient.

I think the developers saw people making absolutely ridiculous factories that were breaking their games and then these people would complain their games don't work very well, lag, drones not functioning right, etc so they said "you know what? grinding up 25k TTs by selling computer chips and quartz is stupid". They don't want to remove the ability to do that entirely as you might want to try to farm up for some of the cheaper items by producing on a smaller scale, so they decided to add the safes in to remove the grind.

TPC is not supposed to be a Factorio Clone.

And I'm glad it isn't.

If I wanted Satisfactory or Factorio (not saying they are bad games, but they are entirely different genres), I'd go play those games. But, I'm playing TPC because that's what I want to play. I don't want to grind my eyeballs out making huge factories that take forever to get me what I want.

I also don't believe TPC should be a factorio clone, so we agree there. I don't even think it should be necessary to set up any production chains to make terratokens.

What I do believe, is that there should be some reward for players that chose to do this play style. With the amount of loot and tokens in the new wrecks, it almost completely negates the reward of doing this (other than the intrinsic balancing etc.).

I'm not sure what the fix would be, but it seems like the paths to getting enough terratokens should be to actively find them in wrecks for a quicker reward, or more slowly get them with auto-trading while you do something you enjoy more. Maybe the average auto-trader system takes 5 hours to make the tokens that you find on average in 1 hour of wreck diving.

But at the moment, it feels like you need 20+ hours of auto-trader tokens to get the amount found in 1 hour in wrecks. That, seems off.

I'm not certain of the dev's intentions with the trading, but it certainly seems far more like they wanted it for a factorio-lite side game for some players, than for just selling fuses and extras.
- There's an auto-sell option when it's full.
- There are production and trade rocket fuses, which don't really have a point unless you're building a lot of miners. If you're playing casual, you only need maybe 1-4 of them depending on the resource.
- As all items bought can be sold for the same price, and as we can buy fuses, you have to be able to sell them. So I think the intention first was a way to buy fuses, but it also has the benefit of people that don't want to engage in trading can just sell fuses to unlock most things.