Hardspace: A mining refactor

# Hardspace: A mining refactor Authored by Gonenoculer5 and co-wrote by many members of the community of Daedalus for weeks. Heavily inspired by DRG, Hardspace Shipbreaker, the Dead Space series, and many others! Relevant PRs: https://github.com/DaedalusDock/Gameserver/pull/91 [Main] ## What is Hardspace? Hardspace is a Hardspace Shipbreaker, DRG, and Dead Space inspired take on replacing the _god awful abomination_ that is Lavaland. It sets out to completely remove Lavaland and associated assets and be a _full seat replacement_ for Lavaland mining, and its associated lore. Some content from it may be reused in spirit, such as the mining points vendor, but a large majority of its content will be relegated into legacy assets and done from scratch. ## Whats wrong with Lavaland? In short: Alot. The biggest flaw of Lavaland is by far the fact that it is entirely circulated with PvE focused gameplay that rewards the player with PvP (or a mix of PvP and PvE) oriented equipment, such as the cleaving saw, drake armor, or similar. This does not saddle well with Daedalus's guiding principles as a server, nor its developmental direction. PvE content in itself is fine, however the reward system built by Lavaland is not. Players are rewarded with highly advantageous gear for playing what amounts to time dilation based DDR, that sets them on the same level in instances as antagonists, enabling players to singlehandedly end interesting antagonists after a short thirty minute stint on Lavaland. Ontop of this, the existing material system built around Lavaland and what came before it could use some work. A good part of the developmental team is unhappy with how the material system works in its current implementation, both in a distribution and acquisition sense. Hardspace sets out to diversify this resource system and put something more interesting in its place, but more on that later. ## Well, how do we fix it? I intend to set out a replacement for Lavaland based around the idea of a more interesting enviroment that places the 'mining' crew in harms way by their enviroment, forcing them to think on their feet or risk losing the haul. There will be elements made that are designed to force the salvage operators to stop, asess their enviroment, and solve logical problems before proceeding if they want to ensure they get as much as possible out of the dive. We've set out to remove the precedent set by Lavaland by rewarding creative thinking rather than ones ability to memorize patterns and mash left mouse on a sprite. The intent is that there would be a logical pattern to solve a 'room', or reduce the hazards within it. This removes the current gameplay loop of 'kill monster, get goodies' that mining is currently, outside of the existing 'smash rock, get ore' gameplay loop. It has come to the point that mining (the jobs primary task) is almost secondary to alternative gameplay, which encourages only further leaning into that secondary role by being rewarded with equipment that makes it easier to do. The only notable exception in this lootpool would be things like the Powerminer or Concussive Gauntlets that accelerate mining, but end up outclassed by researched tools anyway. ## Salvage Operators: The New Miner Replacing Miners will be the Salvage Operators, a group of contractors from an external company subcontracted to Daedalus Industries. These contractors are paid commission based on work done, unlike the crew which are paid out of the station budget. Contractors are given a to be determined cut of the value of their proccessed salvage at reclaimation in the Refinery. They are easily identifyable with their new color scheme and bulky RIGSuits, making them stand out amongst the crew. ## The Salvage Foreman: Your new boss In lieu of the fact that the Salvage Operators operate primarily independently of the station hierarchy, their ties to the station lie with the Salvage Foreman, the Salvage Operator equivilent of the Quartermaster. They are likely an experienced salvage operator responsible for ensuring that any dives the team partakes on are done right and that they team gets out alive, and the crew has all the supplies they need to get their day to day operations going, aswell as keeping the team in line. ## Salvage Overview: The ore of the new century The current system for materials works something like this. A miner would go to LL, extract ores from rock, bring them topside and refine them at a magic box that does all the labor for them, and then be teleported off to the Oresilo, placing points in the ORM for pick up to buy more gear. This gameplay loop is not only boring, but detracts from what refining could be. To combat this, we replace ore with Salvage, a new refineable resource that requires sorting in order to get the maximum yield out of each piece of salvage. This splits salvage into two catergories, **smeltables**, and **proccessables**. Smeltables are materials that can be refined through simple metallurgy, i.e, liquefied and poured into sheets. Proccessables however are materials of a higher caliber that require more delicate deconstruction in order to get the maximum yield, such as complex machinery, fuel couplings, engines, computers, etc. Salvage is acquired through the use of a set of specialized tools intended explicitly for use aboard the platform or the Space Hulk. Currently there are four, each serving a specific purpose in breaking down salvageable structures. Depending on the size and type of salvageable structure, it may require general deconstruction or it may require specialized, careful steps to remove the more sensitive internals. Structures that can be broken down normally will follow a series of randomized steps until the structure no longer has any remaining salvage to give. Specialized structures that are sensitive or otherwise hazardous to haphazardly take apart will have structured steps that will always follow a specific order, and generally return bigger rewards for greater risk. Once you have acquired salvage, you can stow it in your handy **scrap bag**, the replacement of the orebag and orebox. This can later be upgraded by way of the RIGTerminal alongside your other equipment in exchange for materials. The cost of such upgrades varies based on the upgrade pattern, but it will always be in refined materials such as iron sheets. Once you return to the Refining Office you will be able to refine your spoils, which must be sorted as prior mentioned. **Smeltables** will be put through the Metalurgic Proccessor and the Arc Furnace, before being refined into useable material sheets, whilst any materials designated at **proccessables** will be put through the Deconstruction Scanner and Dematerializer. Both the byproducts of each refining proccess will be output into the Stacker, where they will be output into a cart for transport, to Cargo. *Misproccessing of salvage resources results in a sharp 50% cut in yield due to improper handling. Sort carefully!* Alongside the prior mentioned refining proccess, there is the Alloy Furnace, used for making alloys such as Plasteel for the crew to use. It is the Salvage Operator and Cargo Technicians duty to operate the Alloy Furnace according to the crew's demand, as Protolathes will be unable to make alloys after this change. ## The Salvage Platform: Your new home Replacing much of the mining bay and extending into space, is the Salvage Platform, kindly provided by the Wildclaw Industrial Conglomerate for the use of Daedalus Industries, as a part of their interstellar reclaimation program. This sizeable platform is made up of a few primary areas, as listed below, aswell as the landing platform for the Scarab and SLED. ### Gravity Tether Controls The star of the show, dominating much of the Salvage Platform, is the completely depressurized Salvage Bay, where the Gravity Tether can be used to pull in objects of interest such as ship parts, asteroids, or even entire shuttles that were unlucky enough to be scrapped by the hostile enviroment of space. Upgrades to the Gravity Tether allow the Tether to pull in larger objects and heavier objects, such as shuttles, which have more precious salvage aboard. Once you've finished scrapping whatever object you've dragged into the bay, it can be ejected back into space with the Tether, but beware sending the crew along with your payload! *Daedalus Industries pays out small bonuses of credits to Salvage Operators capable of being 'enviromentally cautious' of their payloads, by completely scrapping anything that enters the bay before ejecting it.* ### The Refinery and RIGTerminal Occupying much of the remainder of the Salvage Platform would be the Refinery. Within lies the many machines used to sort, smelt, and stack salvage or refined materials. Alongside it however, is the RIGTerminal, your primary method of printing new salvage tools, replacement equipment, aswell as printing upgrade modules for the SCARAB/SLED. The RIGTerminal accepts minerals and materials, and at times rarer components to construct the aformentioned tools and upgrades, making your work safer and more efficient, aswell as replenishing expendable hardware used on the Hulks. ## The Space Hulk The PHX-86 'SCARAB' is the prescribed method of transport on Dives, acompanied by a Swift Loading Extraction Device, or S.L.E.D, used for the extraction of heavy materials and machinery not normally carryable without a stellar barge. The SCARAB is your primary method of entering a Space Hulk, one of the many derelict vessels frequently left behind by the forerunner parties of Daedalus Industries and other companies during the construction of the Interstellar Highway. As a part of the Interstellar Reclaimation Project, Daedalus Industries has interest in cleaning up these derelict vessels and the valueable technologies inside of them for reuse as spare parts. However due to the rather unsafe nature of the Hulks, the SCARAB is your primary entry method. Upon landing the SLED will deploy with the SCARAB, the landing zone having already been cleared by a preliminary salvage team ahead of you prior to selection. The Company can only give you preliminary information as to what lays within these towering monoliths to artifice, and what to roughly expect inside. Your mission is to safely cut the innards of the ship apart so that a clean up team can come behind you and scrap the hull and superstructure of the ship for recovery. From a gameplay perspective, you'll be responsible for solving logical puzzles to make the interior of the Hulk safe for exploration, ranging from managing decompression of enviroments, working around potentially lethal, long unmaintained fuel couplings, reactors, and dangerous SLS Spools left undischarged, waiting for a jump that never came. Heavier objects must be moved by tether, or marked for reclaimation with beacons to be transported to the SLED. Hulks will be generated in various tiers of difficulty, yet to be determined, but there will likely be three tiers, of rapidly escalating difficulty. ## Okay thats cool, but how do we do it? The plan for building out content for Hardspace will be built out in four 'phases' that iterate on the foundations build by the prior phase. ### Phase 0: Initial Gameloop Buildout Initially, the first 'build' of Hardspace will include the following features: - The Salvage Platform - The GTC, and its associated base mechanics (pulling debris in and scanning it) - The Refinery and Alloy Furnace - The working basis of the RIGTerminal - The Salvage Operator job and its outfits - Salvage Borgs and their upgrades - Initial remap of Cargo and the Mining Bay - Removal of Lavaland, and archive of its assets, and associated ghost roles (Ashwalkers, Golems, Pod People, etc) - Removal of Icebox from rotation due to incompatibility with Hardspace ### Phase 1: Space Hulk Rollout After the initial foundations of Hardspace have been built we can build ontop of them to build out additional content of it, expanding on the mid-late game of it, adding the additional features: - The SCARAB and S.L.E.D. alongside their mechanics - S.L.E.D. bounties for Cargo to sequester through Salvage Operators - The Space Hulk and its base mechanics (Logic puzzles, moveable machinery, arriving, extracting) - The initial 'template' system of the Space Hulk, which will later be replaced by custom pre-mapped ships using socketed rooms - Small, medium, and large 'sockets' for filling out the insides of the Space Hulk - The Salvage Operator RIGSuit's additional modifications - Completion of the RIGTerminal - Polish of prior mechanics, QA/QC pass of gameplay/balance for the Salvage Platform/Refining - Adding additional debris that can be brought in by the GTC - *Maybe support for Icebox. Maybe.* ### Phase 2: Lore and Story integration Once the meat of the gameplay is built out with Phase 1, we can start looking upwards with additional refinement of existing content, building out the refined appearance of the Space Hulks, expanding salvage 'loot' pools. This phase and the one after it is more of a 'Things we wish to do, but might not be able to get to' depending on how initial acceptance of Hardspace goes as a system. These will likely end up as more 'broad strokes' type ideas. The following features will likely be in Phase 2: - Finalization of the appearance of the Space Hulks, with fully built out ships, each having 3 variations (lightly damaged, moderately damaged, and fully wrecked), aswell as lore integration of the Hulks on a per-ship basis, more socketable template rooms - Buildout of approximately 20+ ships for the crew to select from three at a time in the SCARAB's scanner - Additional designs for the RIGTerminal to expand the aresenal of tools useable by the Salvage Operators, such as specialized tools for dealing with unique mechanics on hulks - Adding the third, final tier of space hulks. ### Phase 3: Prayers and Dreams The following is more of a list of ideas that I wish to integrate that might not ever get reached or might be easily done. Depends on how we get along. - The potential integration of Caches and Alpha Fauna, on the final tier of hulks. These potent creatures serve as an antagonist aboard the more dangerous hulks, ranging from deranged creatures to walking biohazards ripe with parasites. They serve as something the team has to work around to get ahold of a high value Cache left behind by a prior salvage team that met their unfortunate demise on the Hulk. Widely discussed, some people love the idea and some people don't, so we'll figure it out. - Addition of extra logic puzzle mechanics that encourage bringing other crew aboard such as engineers for stabilizing the integrity of the hulk to make salvage easier, scientists for extracting xenoartefacts that could have a part in R&D's gameplay loop (akin to Xenoarch but not awful), unique biosamples for Xenobio, etc. - Expansion of the SCARAB and making it upgradeable through the RIGTerminal, potentially even specializations for members of the salvage team to spec into for more individualized gameplay.