Manufacturing is way too slow

[Brisingr]

Sitting and waiting for 30 minutes just to process materials for a higher price kinda takes the point away to even try to grab lower tier resources. If it wasn't for the upgrades, you'd never really want to use the feature other than while mining to compact some of the resources you are bringing back while you are still mining. Feel like they should be about double the speed they currently are for a better balance

[Spirit]

yeah , change the refinement to like 10 seconds
maybe via upgrade

[Brisingr]

Upgrading is fine. I'm really just annoyed at needing 2000 steel rods for the 2nd fuel upgrade and having all the resources for this upgrade, but it takes like 2 hours plus of just waiting or going and just having half your cargo bay full of stuff you are manufacturing.

[Reozul]

I personally would like them be aligned with and slightly better than normal mining for purpose of refinement to sell ressources.


I can get about 0.3 to 0.5 credits per second of playing normally depending on playstyle, so to facilitate using the refinement process it would be nice if they gave about 0.6 credits per second.

Example based on steel rods: 80 iron (0.8c) + 20 nickel (4c) = 100 rods (35c)
So this process generates 30.2c. At 0.6c/s this would mean 50 seconds so each 25rods process could be 12-13 seconds.

[Brisingr]

I definitely need to put a timer up next time I craft so I can track. Pretty sure it's 1, at least, minute per craft. I think it's 2 though, so it's just not worth doing other than upgrading carbon into graphite or whatever it was while you mine so it takes up less space. Same for biomass into resin and polymers while you work. Once you are ready to leave, you just dump excess out the airlock for more valuable base resources or stuff you need. If they made you pay for mining rights for every rock, that would make min-maxing resources more beneficial, but then crafting would need to be improved anyway because right now it's too slow

[Reozul]

Yeah, overall manufacturing speed could be tripled right now and still feel a bit slow, but acceptable.

[musizlover2008]

Just remember this is early access, they will add new content and adjust current gameplay as long as we give them good feedback. Already they are thinking about using napping as a way to time skip, but we'll see.

[Brisingr]

Originally posted by musizlover2008:

Just remember this is early access, they will add new content and adjust current gameplay as long as we give them good feedback. Already they are thinking about using napping as a way to time skip, but we'll see.

Idk why you picked this topic to say that in, but talking about it not being worthwhile remains the same. Sleeping only helps at the station, but it being faster while you mine is a logical progression mechanic so you can bring more ore back from runs and make your time more valuable.

[Jako]

Agreed. that steel rods mission pretty much soft locked my ships cargo space and I afk'd for 30-60 mins while it completed, and that was AFTER i deleted the other slot and made both ship slots manufacturing rods. It was not a good system. make it 1000 steel rods if u want to keep manufacturing slow. same with other missions

[Tarmandan]

To throw in my experience with the crafting system, I think it is fine if we get to the perspective of "refining the resources of one average mining trip (and with that I mean not one shuttle trip but one frighter trip, as in roughly 20 to maybe 30 minutes) should take about one average mining trip to refine. This would push manufacturing to be a bonus on top of mining, while not hampering progression.
If refining too slow: you have to wait much more for upgrades that need refined resources than for the ones you mine directly, meaning it feels slower than before = bad feelings.
Too fast refining on the other hand would encourage unfun min-maxing of cargo space by refining and staying longer on one asteroid than is fun, because just waiting 3 minutes doing nothing means you get a tiny bit more profit out of that one asteroid.

To ensure that it feels like something that you can just set up hand have your previous mining load be refined while you mine the next asteroid there are some requirements we need that currently are not there:

Firstly, it needs to be easy to set up the refiners so that the previous mining load gets refined into what you want.
Example: say you mined biomass, carbon, iron and nickel and want to refine it into steel rods and carbon fibers, you now have the problem that you cannot set it up to automatically refine all possible steel rods while the biomass is refined into polymeres and then refine the carbon fibers after the steel rods are done. This can lead to afk refining being preferable to refining during mining trips.

Secondly, refining must be worth it from a perspective that you have limited storage. Currently I can mine between 4 and 7 k resources if I get 30 minutes on an asteroid and it has enough underground ore. In the process of extracting the underground ore my turrets also mine a ton of the rock formations. After selling the stuff that isn't to be refined I will still be sitting at up to 3k resources. The next 20 to 30 minute mining session on the next asteroid might not even be enough time to refine all the iron into steel rods (which means I also have to keep nickel constantly in my storage for the non-nickel asteroids as every asteroid gives iron), even if it was enough time I will still be at the conundrum that I now still have like 9 or 10k total resources after the second mining trip. So now I either throw away the low tier materials and will not have anything refining in the background during the next mining trip, leading to a one asteroid feel bad, one asteroid feel good pattern, or I throw away more valuable or already refined stuff, which also does not feel great but then at least it is still refining in the background.

Or, to phrase it shorter: current freigher storage and refinement speed is too small and slow to make refining vialble income, it is just tiny bit up top and you make your money by extracting valuable resources from asteroids and then leaving and seeking the next.

[TankHunter678]

Personally I think they should just implement storage on the stations (make it huge) and put refineries on the stations.

This way the player can be active while refining is in progress, going out and getting the base materials while the station is chugging along. Since you have multiple stations it would mean that you have multiple ques to make things more efficient.

You can also make it so that you can purchase things like worker bots and mining turrets for "free" by bringing in and refining the materials to make them.

You could still keep the manufacturing bay in the ship but change it to allow you to pre-build various structures to load onto the shuttle or call via drop pod for deployment. So you can land on an asteroid and hit the ground running.

[Flicken]

Adding my 2c, I think having the speed of your Manufacturing increase when you are docked would work too. Anywhere from 10x-50x speed, lore wise, you are drawing extra power from the station.

[GrilledCheezz]

Ok, this won't go over well with the community, but please don't make everything easier or faster just to appease those with little patience. There will likely be better manufacturing machines as you progress deeper into the asteroid fields. The pacing is great so far - keep it as is.

[Marauder]

Originally posted by musizlover2008:

Just remember this is early access, they will add new content and adjust current gameplay as long as we give them good feedback. Already they are thinking about using napping as a way to time skip, but we'll see.

That's pretty much what people are doing right now?

Originally posted by GrilledCheezz:

Ok, this won't go over well with the community, but please don't make everything easier or faster just to appease those with little patience. There will likely be better manufacturing machines as you progress deeper into the asteroid fields. The pacing is great so far - keep it as is.

This doesn't make it "easier", there's nothing "hard" about having to sit there and twiddle your thumbs for two hours and for no good reason. Since you can do this AFK.

[Firellius]

The pace wouldn't be as much of a problem if it didn't also require you to keep the resources on hand, in your limited freighter space. This makes it significantly less rewarding to go out and play the actual game, instead of just sitting around and waiting for manufacturing.

If manufacturing stations had their own resource compartments, that'd help alleviate the problem.

[Valkyrie]

What I *thought* I could do (and got severely disappointed) is just use the onboard bed to pass time. That could be a solution as well. Both for manufacturing and for catching a sideways ride on an asteroid to extend one's range.