Non-farmable biofuel and metal imprints for metal farms
It’s a common opinion that Metal Farms are completely overpowered right now.
Their current function nullifies the player’s need to explore anywhere beyond what the story requires after that first trip.
A possible solution to the stop of the gameplay loop could be the requirement of a unique, non-farmable fuel that the metal farms need for each duplication, which you can only get by making the trip to an area where it slowly regenerates.
This would create two cases in the player’s mind:
- to either make the trip to get said fuel, possibly with considerable danger that you can however adapt to on the way;
- to instead head to the location of the original resource, either because the trip is shorter or to prevent making the gathering of the metal farm fuel too repetitive.
Additionally, it can be frustrating to run out of a metal to duplicate after already having done it several times.
To avoid this frustration, metal farms could be reworked to need an initial sample of each metal you’d like to duplicate, which will consume said metal for the imprint of the metal’s structure, but will let you farm the metal without needing another sample as long as you have the fuel for it, also eliminating the possible tediousness of transporting the sample metals in and out of the machine’s storage and to your base.