# Titanfall lavaland Lavaland overhaul that focuses on managing the power imbalance between lavaland and the station. It will achieve this by making mechs a lavaland only vehicle (leaving more room for modsuits in the station environment). With the miner piloting the mech on lavaland against the environment and local wildlife. ## Reasoning A lot of lavaland was designed in such a way to prevent cheeseing, because kor wanted to protect the value and sanctitity of the leaderboards for the PvE aspect of the lavaland areas. That means that lavaland creatures resist large amounts of normal crew weaponry, have massive amounts of health and are generally indestructible by a lot of the normal cheese methods you might be able to use against a regular player or NPC This imbalance between the miner and lavaland creatores is then dealt with by the rather fridge logic crushers, that deal greatly increased balance in lavaland like environments, but are nerfed heavily on station to ensure they are fitting within both locations power levels. This differing power level leads to a situation where mining loot becomes very unbalanced because it has to be effective on lavaland, but lavaland is a much higher power scale area than the station. This in general has caused a lot of design headaches for the maintainer team as we're constantly fighting against the power imbalance, and mining loot leaks back into the station and causes problems to the standard meta. ## Implementation Mechs become drivable only on lavaland, with the justification that they're actually "too big" to ever fit on a spacestation. Interaction between the mech and station will be by a mech bay, where the mech can be parked "imagine in your head it's just the cockpit docked under the station", and then orbitally dropped down into lavaland when the miner goes down to the planet. To return they are fired from a railgun on the planet at the mining station area, and then caught by a tractor beam and redocked in the mech bay. Robotics and Mining can work together to upgrade their mech in the mechbay Mechs have their nimbleness greatly improved, such that they move and turn like a normal human mob. Lavaland creatures and fauna become balanced against players being inside mining/combat mechs, with much more powerful armour, health and weaponry. We remove a lot of the fridge logic preventing you say bombing lavaland creatures, and instaed just buff their health and damage a lot, so they scale with the mechs. It's expected that an unmeched player on the lavaland will be in a very dangerous situation, and we will likely provide emergency pods that can immediately pull you out of lavaland and fling you back up to the station, in case you get marooned without your mech. The mech can hold quite a lot more mining materials, which will hopefully result in increased deliveries of materials, and I'm open to an upgrade tree that adds passive mining systems so that even PvE focused mech drivers are still bringing materials back to the station from time to time. Much of the loot drops from lavaland creatures will be rethemed to provide bonuses to the mechs, where a loot item is intended to be used stationside, it must be appropriately power scaled to the station only, and this will be heavily monitored and policed. In general, it's expected to focus more on mech unlocks than things you would use on station. (resources that can be consumed by all depts are an exception to this rule). I know this loot change is upsetting to many, but I'd rather the PvE aspects of lavaland be something that's inherently fun, and not a chore you do to get a list of items so you can valid hunt on the station. ## outcomes Lavaland has a power wall between it and the station, as the mechs provide the necessary buffs to combat lavaland creatures, but do not go on the station to be overpowered there. This preserves the sanctity of the PvE leaderboards, while managing the damage to our design space from the differing power scales required to do this. Secondly, mechs are given a new lease on life, they step out of the niche that modsuits fit better into, and get a whole new space with which to operate in, where the powerscales can be upped significantly alongside the increase of lethality of lavaland. Side bonus: modsuits have more room to grow into that has just been vacated by things previously filled by mech modules. Robotics and mining get a new incentive to work together, and mechs can have a much more fully featured upgrade system that provides for more interactions between those two depts (I would even consider colocating the mech bay near robotics if possible). The PvE space can also be upgraded to look quite different, as you no longer need to balance just around the average squishy human. Changes to the on station balance no longer have to consider impacts in lavaland as much, which reduces the need to design in the other direction ## problems that can occur we need to consider what an ashlander looks like in this context. I'm open to them getting their own form of biomechanical mech, or reflavouring them to be 12 foot super lizards that could fuck up a regular station member (but this would rule them out of ever going on station). Icebox presents a problem, as the planet and station are much closer to one there - you could limit the mechs to the lower levels and prevent htem from the station z level, it's just more of a fridge logic issue.
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