Crafting Interconnectivity and More Crafting Furniture

Buckle up, I have thoughts and they aren’t just “make it easier!”. There’s a lot of text, but I think these suggestions for crafting are relatively small and easy to implement, and could spice up gameplay a lot and bolster creativity in base building.

My suggestion is to both break crafting out to multiple crafting “benches”, and make raw material usage more of a web by all raw materials used to make expendable items. I also suggest the new benches be used to make modification kits that are then applied on the modification table. Each bench should have some unique mechanic to it so they don’t feel like a different colored fabricators that could have just been combined into the all-in-one we have now.

Examples:
Basic Fabricator
This would do what you need at the start of the game: roast not-fish & slug water. Simple tools: e.g. air bladder, scanner, multitool, air tank, flippers, the habitat builder, batteries, and other pre-requisite to said tools. This keeps the player alive and in a place to start building a starter base where the next level of fabricator stations can happen. Quartz-to-glass should also stay here so that the biggest material needs for base building are either raw materials or processed off the basic fabricator.

Processor
The process is awesome and exactly what I’m talking about. Need ingots or biofuel bricks, this baby will crank it out with a mechanic of varying processing time per unit, and only able to make one kind of thing at a time. The ‘alternate recipes’ from it should move to appropriate specific benches.

Manufacturing/Welding Bench
More advanced tools and equipment, and certain vehicle upgrade kits, e.g. strike armor or engine efficiency. Expendables like torpedoes, self-propelled flares, or decoys, which might need materials from other benches.
-Mechanic: needs separate fuel for processing. Quartz for starters, but then other options that last longer/indefinitely, or special fuel that speeds up the crafting or makes the expendables more potent/effective/higher yield per crafting.

Chemistry Station
Strong acid, synthetic fiber, grease, alternate water recipes, and special materials used for other things like advanced batteries. Possible expendables: supplements to mix with water that give temp buffs, like faster swimming speed, faster self-healing, damage resistance, improved heat resistance. Yes, I’m aping Minecraft’s alchemy stand.
-Mechanic: basic fabrication is very fast and creates an intermediary item that then needs put in a separate compartment or piece of furniture: a fridge, centrifuge, or autoclave (or all-in-one). This step takes a bit longer, variable times like processor, choice of post-processing could affect final product.

Electronic Lab
System chips and dedicated cores, vehicle upgrades like sonar or anti-cavitation. Possibly even upgrade kits to the base depth modules that ‘fine tunes how they work’ instead of just being ‘stronger materials, rawr’. Expendables like creature decoys or super high charge single-use batteries.
-Mechanic: it can overheat, which slows down crafting AND increases power draw. Only big deal for bulk crafting.

Kitchen Counter/Range
Food sustenance past roasted not-fish.
-Mechanic: an overhaul on food. Bring back deteriorating and salted food, but also get away from ‘Pavlova is best, eat nothing else.’ Food that is best for different situations or biomod kit out, or providing buffs like the suggested water supplements.

Biomod Injector
This could stay as is and it’s great, but most likely, players will find the biomod mix they want, and then this collects dust or just gets de-fabricated. Suggest making biomods into recipes that are used per application of the mod. Also, add a hacked biobed to the station.
-Mechanic: use the station to queue up altered biomod load out, including fabricating the new biomods to be injected. Mods being replaced are lost and need refabricated before they can be re-injected. Once new mods are made and the load out for what is being overwritten is locked in, use the bed to commit to the change. Major mods are good until swapped, but minor mods might have /long/ timers before needing re-upped or replaced to keep bench useful.

In general, there isn’t anything ground breaking in these suggestions. It is basically an RTS game’s technology trees where different buildings make different units and other different buildings upgrade different parts of the trees, with some upgrades permanent, while others need reapplied from time to time.

My first draft was over the 5000 char limit. Woo editing down. Thank you any and everyone that got this far. I hope y’all agree that this would make the game’s crafting more engaging, and that I’m right in my assessment that this wouldn’t be much of an under-the-hood programming change. Hopefully the biggest lift is making the new models for the different benches and sprinkling them into wrecks or recipe cards.

So yeah, thanks for reading!