Key Matrix should not be a physical item.

[VulcanTourist]

The Key Matrix, as essential as it is to the early game, should not be a physical item that must be carried. That wastes a backpack slot, made all the more precious now in the early game when materials will so often be shuttled from their moons of origin to another moon in the player's backpack through a teleporter.

There are other physical items in the game, like Explorer Tokens, that arguably should also be intangible - ever been denied a Token merely for having a full backpack? - but the Key Matrix stands above them all as deserving of intangibility.

[Bif]

Okay, makes sense.

[Sabaithal]

Doesn't it kind of lose its use past early game though? I don't really see a reason to hold onto it...

[HurtfulPlayer97]

I agree. It should be something like keys in WoW. Something that once you get you always have.

[VulcanTourist]

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

Doesn't it kind of lose its use past early game though? I don't really see a reason to hold onto it...

If you don't "hold onto it", as you put it, then you don't get to use the teleporters even after you gain access to them. You must possess the Key Matrix ON YOUR PERSON to use any of the teleporters in the Obelisks. You MUST hold onto it early game if you intend to use them.

[TwitchyJ]

Yeah I feel all keys, tokens, and any important mission item should always be digital things the player can't lose.
Especially in this game where missions can already break so easily through no fault of the player.
Even more so if it is something you can only get once.

In this case it is basically like the devs are setting the player up for failure and rage quitting.
Making it a physical keycard that the player can die and lose, or accidentally misplace, or just have plain disappear due to a bug, is such a terrible idea.
Especially when they are expecting you to use said teleporter without really knowing what is waiting on the other side.

This isn't limited to any particular keycard either. They are all intended to be important and as such should not be physical items.

I feel you 10,000% on the explorer tokens as well. You can only get so many. Dying and losing them is enough to make someone rage if they know what they are missing out on. You either have to cheat or start a new game then basically.
Not a good design.

The worst part is the infrastructure is already all there for them to just add in a new tab in the F1 screen for keycards and mission items. Just a mission flag that gets flipped and then the item is shown in that new tab never to be lost and easy to view.

[VulcanTourist]

And they're already relying on an actual gen-yoo-wine relational database to track so much savegame data now, so they don't have that as an excuse, either! It would be just more records to store.

[ravien_ff]

Tokens can be set to not drop on death, but of course that won't help you if they are in your ship's inventory and your ship gets destroyed, or you leave them behind, or you delete them manually.

But yes, having a separate "token inventory" would be really nice and would solve all these issues. Something I know has been asked for before.
It's important that this is an option on a per-token basis, however, as there are times a custom scenario would want a token kept in the normal inventory and making it an option will still allow scenarios to do this.