Dev/Player Opinions on Refinery Exploits?

[lexilogo]

I've heard tell of duplication glitches but I'll just clarify that is not what I'm talking about here, I'm talking about the simple exploits of game mechanics working as intended (at least, theoretically). As some examples for those who aren't aware of what I'm talking about:


-Di-Hydrogen Jelly can be made with 40 Di-Hydrogen and refined into 50 Di-Hydrogen, resulting in an infinite loop of Di-Hydrogen profit.

-You can combine any 1 stellar metal with 1 Chromatic Metal to produce 4 of that Stellar Metal, allowing you to produce more Chromatic Metal from that, resulting in infinite Chromatic and Stellar Metals.


Those two are IMO the biggest exploits possible with the Refiner, as both processes are very fast and require little effort. There are other Refinery loops like producing infinite Coprite and Condensed Carbon, but those are generally less practical than just using the products of an Oxygen Harvester.


I mean, obviously generating lots of resources with little to no effort isn't an egregious issue, that's what Farms already do. I'm just curious as to what the community or dev team thinks about this kind of thing, I looked around but couldn't find much on the topic. Are you guys staunchly against the idea of Refineries generating infinite resource loops, do you think it should be possible but require more work/time (eg. the Di-H thing could be changed so Jelly refines into 40 Di-H. Infinite Di-H would still be possible but would take far longer), or do you think that the existence of these infinite resource loops isn't much of a problem?

[Dirak2012]

Personally, I don't care about any of that. The whole refining thing seems too complicated and boring to me, when I need something I usually get it from mining and using the small refiner.
Maybe it's a bug, maybe it's working as intended, maybe it will be fixed, I don't really care. If I were to use exploits I'd rather use the save editor.

[BonPadre]

First, you'll not get a "dev" statement here.

Then, as you put it yourself, it works as intended.
It's here, it hasn't been changed since it has been intorduced, while many other things have been nerfed, removed etc.

The timer of such actions takes enough time that needs you to sit next to your refinery, or if you simply launch it and go minding your buisness, the method would not be efficient.
If all that was possible to be automated, then yes, it would be way more unbalanced.

Now, to be fair, at some point many players out there buy more than they even mine / harvest anything needed.

And if you think the 2 you mention here are the 2 biggest exploits of this refinery system, then you haven't set an oxygen harvester, and mixed chlorine with oxygen.

There are so many of those stuff out there with recipes that most players probably never really use more than what, 10-15 of them ?

Personally I'm fine with the way it's set up right now, I think it's a perfect alternative to many other gameplay, like setting AMU and a simple base computer on ressource and have it forever, etc

And I have fun using the refinery and all it's tricks ;-)

[lexilogo]

Originally posted by BonPadre:

First, you'll not get a "dev" statement here.

Oh, for the record I'm not hoping for an actual dev response, when I say "dev opinion" I'm mostly asking if anyone from Hello Games have given their two cents on this in the past. (which I don't think they have)

Originally posted by BonPadre:

And if you think the 2 you mention here are the 2 biggest exploits of this refinery system, then you haven't set an oxygen harvester, and mixed chlorine with oxygen.

I stayed away from talking about Oxygen Harvester methods to mostly just talk about infinite resource loops within the Refinery itself. I am aware that Oxygen Harvesters basically make resources like CC, Chlorine, or Sodium Nitrate (and by extension, all of their component resources) infinite too.

Anyway, that's just me answering two points regarding my actual post, I'm not here to actually argue with anyone as to their opinions on this topic, the whole point is just to ask people what they think.

[flick]

I enjoy the alchemy and the reality warping nature of the mischief. I like that you can start off putting normal things into the big blender, but start discovering things don't quite work as you might expect. Then you can start playing around putting in odd combinations and discovering reality isn't working as you might expect. Small clues, like the description you get for refining larval cores add to the intrigue.

My experience of the story was finding small clues in the world itself - the crashed ship messages, the refiner clues, the boundary failure things - leading me towards the revelation at the end. I suspected with more and more certainty as I went, which was a fun journey to take, and altered my experience of NMS as I went. I bought in to the world, and the impossible happenings in the refiner were a part of that. It's good.

I also wonder how much the refinery system helps to encourage exploration, and kills off storage. You can stay and build your factory, but if you get too far into the crafting, you come out the other side with more materials than you ever need. It becomes more of a diversion than a tool if you push too deeply into it. It's a bit like the money - I have half a billion in the bank that I don't need to spend and more fusion ignitors than I know w hat to do with. Chasing units just isn't a feature of the game for me, and I'm not held back by materials or storage. There are enough resources to help a traveller to go see the sights, and it's seeing the sights that is the main reason I'm here.

[Asmosis]

I think if people want to spend 20 mins refine cycling to make 50k units or so instead of a few seconds to scan a tree or creature or something, more power to them.

If not units, then for generating raw resources (like Di-Hydrogen) it's far far quicker to fly to a planet and mine some than refine.

To call it "free" units or resources is a bit of a noob trap tbh.

The only thing i refine myself is Di-hydrogen jelly (from shop) into D-Hydrogen for frigate fuel. Maybe the odd bit of magnetized ferrite with the portable refiner while out and about.

[DedZedNub]

Do the larger refineries use Fuel?

I mean, the Portable Refinery uses up Fuel and Time -- those are commodities with value. Fuel has a cost, or takes time to acquire. Time, well the player uses up personal time and game-time doing these exploits or any Refining.

Now, the D-Hydrogen -- the fuel cost might even excuse the meagre gain, at least there is little value in it unless there is a recipe that can use this and magnify it, I am too noob to know.

Chromatic Metal, you need another input to exploit, if I understand. So you are losing another material and wasting time and possibly fuel. Is the gain major? Maybe, I leave that to others to measure, I'm too noob to evaluate that. NOTE: I do not see these Copper Deposits growing back quickly, if at all. So it might be a waste to add them to increase Chromatic Metal. Probably I can farm all this anyway, so is this really a valuable exploit?

Like some others here, I am not sure that it all ends up an exploit. Carbon does have some value, almost always, but it is very easy to attain. It is a common fuel for the portable refinery at least.

I'm not sure there is a time/cost analysis that would say these exploits really win. Yes, most games don't have such inequalities when fully patched. But then most games don't care about player time. In NMS, everything requires either time, or automation set-up, or a quest, or locating something to get something for free, so far. Given that, how do we measure value?

I think Time has value in this game. Otherwise you will never finish it. So unless the exploit makes you rich tens of times faster, not sure these matter.

IN COMPARISON, THE ABILITY TO CRASH AN ECONOMY AND THEN MAKE 10 TIMES THE MONEY FROM IT PER MANY VIDEOS, THAT'S A MAJOR EXPLOIT TO BOTH TIME AND MONEY. It seems based on exploiting how terminals price things due to attached locations as context, and that is basically too simple and easy to scam. Is it realistic simulation? Possibly, to a degree. Is it a rules-based simulation gone awry and being exploited? More likely than not. The mistake with crashing the economy is that they aren't making the distance required take enough time to travel to make the exploit not worth the effort of the wasted time, risk, and fuel. And so it repeats.

I put that one sentence in CAPS to highlight it, since we live in a tldr world online -- which is pure idiocy in itself as a concept. But at least it also highlights the value of time. My apologies to any simulated eyes that feel any simulated pain by viewing those CAPS.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by DedZedNub:

Do the larger refineries use Fuel?

No, Medium and large refineries don't use any fuel.

To answer the Op. I don't think its an exploit. I think its an intended feature. This is a sandbox game. Non sandbox games force you to grind endlessly to get enough stuff to make the materials for the next higher level of grind. New expansions create higher levels of grind to get the new teeny tiny bit of improvement that every min/maxer is salivating to own for themselves.

I think the devs were smart. The grind is greatly reduced. There are 3 or 4 different ways that you can gather resources. Mine it yourself, use Automated Mining Units, oxygen harvesters and atmosphere harvesters, farm or pick the various plants, use refiners and endless loops, buy it from life forms in ships, or from galactic trade terminals. Which ever method you find least onerous is the way that you are going to go and it varies from person to person. Lots of roads to take to get to the same destination.

Monetary units are the same way. In the first 10 hours of game play you can get enough of a nest egg set up that you don't ever have to worry about grinding for cash and can spend the majority of your time playing the game that you bought instead of the economic mini games that are a "feature" of most MMOs.

I recently set my self a challenge. I emptied my exo suit (except for the charges on my mining laser and terrain manipulator in my multi tool), went to a mild planet emptied my exo craft, emptied my starship, and emptied my storage containers and built a complete farming base by mining only what was available on that planet and using refiner loops. It was very doable though it took quite some time. Its not a personal challenge that I'm going to do again any time soon but I enjoyed that challenge.

How boring would it be if there was only one way to achieve every goal in the game?

[DedZedNub]

@ knighttemplar1960

Thanks for the answer on no fuel use for large refiners. Must not have been easy to find the question amidst my longwinded post. Appreciate your diligence and consideration.

Your last post makes a lot of sense, especially when you mention all the other ways to farm or make money, which I forgot since I have not yet experienced them, only seen mentioned here and there.

Maybe that is why it feels like an MMO to me, but one I can actually like more than most MMOs. The grind just doesn't feel, so far, that unreasonable, and it is overall somewhat immersive because you are doing it as you explore, often as just a sideline base of operations.

Since I was also just able to fix a fair amount of the stuttering on foot by a sort of weird adjustment, I am enjoying it again. Basically, I just reset all graphical options back to default, then went with the suggested Low Textures. Reinstituted all my changes from before one at a time, tested. And found that at my old desired settings, now it all ran fine again. As if going to Low then back to Medium finally lost all the issues. Weird, but it has happened in other games before. Stuttering is down maybe 75 percent again in occurrence, but odd, since it took about 15 minutes of testing it in the last session, and then it popped into working in all times of day. Still holding after several exits and reloads and about 4 hours of play more. Shrug.

[Asmosis]

Shader cache has been pinged for causing issues, maybe changing up/down texture levels flushed it out? *shrugs* I'm no expert in the matter, and NMS has had weird performance bugs over the years (like your computer's clock timezone causing lag).

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Originally posted by Dirak2012:

Personally, I don't care about any of that. The whole refining thing seems too complicated and boring to me, when I need something I usually get it from mining and using the small refiner.
Maybe it's a bug, maybe it's working as intended, maybe it will be fixed, I don't really care. If I were to use exploits I'd rather use the save editor.

Agree, most of the get rich quick and reload save exploits seem really dumb to me. I rarely use the refiners at all. Credits ultimately become a burden in the game. The main thing I wish they would fix would be to provide more ways to offload credits or change the economy so some things would be much more expensive to buy.