Ship Repairs?

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

I've tried searching the forums for the information but the most recent posts I've seen are all from a year ago.


This game shows plenty of massive and detailed ships blowing each other in half or ramming straight through each other.

I saw mention in those year old posts about repair tools coming eventually, but no confirmation that they were added or how they would work.

Which begs me to ask.... how do you go about repairing damage to a ship?

Do you have to literally repair every piece like you're building it from scratch?

Can you save a blueprint of a finished object and have it rebuild from there or auto-repair or something as long as you have the parts?

Thanks in advance for any assistance. I enjoy the concept of these building games especially when you can wreck things, but I hate the idea of having to spend hours upon hours of repetitive rebuilding of things just to trash them in a second.

[error1440]

There are no "auto repair" blocks. You will need to make repairs either yourself, or with a drone with a ship-welder attatched to it.

[Mystra4]

You can use Welders (attached to a conveyor system) to supply parts to the block adjacent to the welder's tip (and possibly to blocks beside the tip as well). For an 'auto-repair system' you would need a group of welders spanning the length of the surface to be repaired, as well as the components needed to replace what is lost.

'Damage' to a block will remove from that block's part inventory, a certain amount of components, which must then be replaced.

A projector can be used to display a blueprint for building. Projectors can be built on, and project the blueprint of, its' own grid. Projectors themselves can also be rebuilt this way, but only if at least one undamaged projector is displaying its' pattern.

[Kalakian]

Think of what happens to a car after it gets totall'ed... Theres a point where from its not worth to repair it.

[ImIronWolf]

Well, welders and other hand tools were added a long time ago, along with the ability to repair stuff if you have the components that are missing after it took damage. So that is one way of doing it but it is the manual way. OK for small ships, not so much for big ones which I think is what you are asking about.

We have ship mounted welders too. Making the job a little easier. Can also be mounted to stations and moving arms on pistons and rotors to articulate but are not fool proof.

You can blueprint a ship design if you wish, and use a projector to create a hologram somewhere open enough to accomodate it. Then weld all the blocks bit by bit both manually and with ship/station mounted welders, and I guess it can be used to project the missing blocks you can weld back up. Not tried this myself. But you would still need to actually get to that block and weld it.

My advice if you are looking for a fuss free system would be to push your damaged ship into a wall of grinders, hooked up with conveyor pipes. Have them grind everything down and back into an inventory that an adjacent ship printing facility could access, and rebuild your ship from a blueprint using projectors and piston mounted welders.

But in short, no there is no one magic block you can put on a ship or station and have it search out distant damaged blocks and repair them. You need to get welder to block somehow and do it that way. ;)

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Alright that kinda what I expected. Thanks for all the responses.

If I'm understanding this correctly...

There isn't any real fast or easy way to get large scale repairs done. Every method involves a lot of effort as you either need to do it by hand or build another machine to do it for you.

Only method to actually rebuild without doing it bit-by-bit would be to grind the entire ship back into parts and then have it rebuilt from a blueprint.

That about, right?



Since we're on the subject...

How big of a hassle is the damage and repair system?

Are ships fairly resilient and able to take some knocks without issue or is it a constant struggle to avoid any contact with anything lest you have hours of repair to do?

How often does stuff you can't easily access get damaged? As in, do you often have blocks tucked away inside other stuff that need repaired or sections of a ship that can only be repaired via removing another section of your ship?

[Mr B.]

Completely depends on what sort of pilot you are. Small ships can even 'bounce' off things of they hit them at low speeds.

However, the more mass you have, even a glancing hit with something solid can rip through armour. And of course, the more mass the less responsive a ship is, meaning momentum will not be your friend.

[arreclain]

I'm going to respond by talking about the main ship type I use: mining vessels. I build a small one for digging tunnels to get at small pockets of ore, and a large ship version for grabbing massive surface deposits.

For the small ship, as long as I build in a fairly streamlined fashion, I replace a thruster every 25 runs or so. It takes a fairly big thwack against an asteroid to damage stuff on this little guy, and so you know when you're going to need to get out and look for damage. If there is any, you can likely fix it there yourself. A single thruster is..I think a plate, a thruster component, a general component, and one last small piece, I think a tube. It all fits in inventory easily.

For the large ship, I must stay away from obstacles: it's as Mr. B said, mass makes for much heavier collisions. I repair a thruster from damage every 7 or so runs, and I have lost my antenna twice now. Is it worth it? Oh yes. The resources you can get with large drills are astounding.

I would not say repairs in this way hamper me. Fighting other ships can, but not run-of-the-mill piloting.

Edit: minor grammar

[BOYCOTT S-T-E-A-M!]

Good to know. Thanks for the reply.

Basically, I just want to avoid creative games that have repair and damage mechanics like the game Terra Tech, early access here on Steam.

In Terra Tech you can build some awesome stuff, but you'll be doing it constantly and its tedious and repetitive as hell.

You can make something and tap a tree and have to repair half of it because parts flew off. After every single battle in the game you have to basically completely rebuild your vehicle from scratch because its 90% gone. While repairing you can get attacked still so its not uncommon to spend tons of time literally sitting in one spot stuck in a loop of slapping on parts, shooting back, slapping on more parts, etc.

I love creative games, but I hate creative games that don't let me play with my toys without them breaking into a billion pieces that'll take hours to rebuild. Kinda makes me neurotic after awhile and I just make things to look at but not touch and then get bored.


Thanks again for all the replies. This game is currently up as part of a Humble Bundle so I got curious about the mechanics of it.

[arreclain]

I do combat it Creative Mode, where I can paste in a new ship from my blueprints, and Ctrl-X a ship out that has been disabled. It means your flawless vessel can get trashed but it's of no loss to you.

Or, if you're as insane as I am, try this. Make a world Creative, paste in the ships you want to use with fuel and ammo, then switch to Survival and have a Chess-like fleet battle, moving pieces for each side each turn. It's hella fun, if a little tedious.

[lPaladinl]

Repairs can be tough. You can have automatic repairs but it's very complicated and difficult to repair an entire ship. You can however of course repair everything either by hand in your suit, in a ship that you equipped with a welder tool (Which can make repairs much faster, at the cost of being harder to fit into tighter spaces), you can even design drones and come up with ways to make them automatically fly about to repair the hull. (Which can be more difficult to build a drone that does that, than to just do the patch jobs yourself). You can also outfit a hangar with welders and simply fly around into the welders (gently!) to get them to repair for you.

Unfortunately, there's no way to make ships place blocks yet either, meaning any totally missing blocks will have to be replaced by hand, no matter what.

With that all said though, you can also build what people have dubbed a "3d printer". Basically a hangar with welders on piston systems and a projector that puts up a blueprint of your ships.

So if your ship is damaged to a point where you'd not want to repair it anymore, you can scrap it much more easily by hand or even making a hangar with grinders to again fly around in. Then you use the same materials to "print" a brand new ship.

[BinaryBlackhole]

if you want a better combat experince with machines you designed yourself and can repair easily then you should play from the depths. Otherwise its scrapping, repair drones or doing it alll yourself. Apart from combat you shouldn't take much damage.

[Ruthgar]

welding or repairing heavily damaged blocks will yield scrap that the refinery can then turn back into ingots. However you only get back a fraction of the total ingots that went into making the destroyed components that were in the block.