# Cargo Systems Design Document
#### real actual cargo system additions design doc (real)
(its just me rambling about my ideas on how to fix cargo to get feedback before i try implementing them)

Okay, heres the baseline. Cargo sucks, trading sucks, and the economy sucks, lets figure out how to fix it.
# Having trade between ships backed by mechanics.
This one is first because I have the strongest and clearest ideas on what to do and how it should be done, at least in my opinion. There are two main issues with trade, the **cost of items** and the **actual process of trading itself**.

* ### Cost
Right now, ships have very little reason to trade goods because the outpost acts as the only reference of value for most items and costs the same amount for every ship. In order for a ship to sell anything that the outpost does, they would have to make the price lower than what the outpost sells in order for people to actually bother buying it. This means that the ship selling wouldn't be making a profit, which negates the point of trading in competition with the outpost.

I think this would be best approached via a discount system that operates off of the ship's niche. Medical ships get a discount on medical items, service ships get discounts on ingredients, food and fun stuff, combat ships get a discount on ammo and *possibly* guns. This would mean ships in need of certain equipment may seek out ships of certain niches in order to get what they want at a price lower than what they would have to pay at the outpost.
> [An idea from this I'm not sure of is the potential for a dedicated Merchant ship with larger discounts in most areas except ammo, guns and security supplies. A ship like that would be able to buy and sell goods to other crews easily, but at the cost of easily being abused for discounts on a lot of good gear and then using it instead of selling it.]
> [There is also the potential of outright locking some purchases to certain ships to force taking a middleman if you want something like a really big gun or something. Needs work.]

Heres an example. A combat ship is in need of medical supplies, so they call up a medical ship willing to trade with them. When the combat ship trades with the medical ship, the ideal exchange is that the combat ship is getting what they want for less than what they would have to pay at the outpost for it, and the medical ship is getting paid more than what they pay for the goods at the outpost. Alongside this is the possibility of the combat ship bartering with the medical ship in items other than credits in order to make up for the deficit. Both ships get to interact with eachother and work out interesting solutions to get what they both want.
> [This does have the potential for multiple ships of the same faction to link up and pool credits to share in a communal-potluck of discounted items, but I'd prefer to call that good teamwork instead of exploiting the system. I'd kill to see players coordinate such a feat on Shiptest.]

The summary is this, giving ships discounts in their niche areas opens up the potential for viable trade with other ships that benefits both parties. But how will they trade the goods they buy?

* ### Trading
The process of meeting up with a ship to trade goods is an arduous one. Almost enough to justify just buying from the outpost anyways, even if the other ship had a discount. There are three parts to trade between ships that come to mind. Communication, Location and Interaction.
### Communication
Say a ship wants to get ahold of someone from across the sector, they have three obvious options. Holopad call them, hail them over wideband, or fax them. Each has their advantages and disadvantages. Holopad means you're talking with them face-to-face so theres less chance of misinformation, but they might be busy or miss the first two or three calls. Wideband means you are speaking to them directly and have a log of what they say, but they might not be at the bridge when you hail to answer you or may have their wideband turned off. Fax means you have a paper trail of communication between you and them but they might miss your paper atop their fax machine or it may end up misplaced.

I don't want to be the XKCD comic about trying to create a universal standard that just ends up being another competing standard, so I'd actually like to hear some feedback and ideas about this part and how to tackle it. How do YOU think communication between ships could be improved? I'll add it as comments or something in this section.

**Sadhorizon**: one idea could be a marketplace on like the cargo console, but you can't actually buy there, so it's more like a dedicated place to announce "hey, we are selling X, let's meet up"

**Anticept**: you say "want this, offering 2000 credits, contact <this ship>. listed by <this character> <this long ago>"

**jegorg**: Leaving messages on holopads, possibly using the holodisk recording code already ingame.

**Theos**: Holopads leaving a "Who last tried calling" note or a call record

**Zevo (me)**: Some kind of hailing system directly on the helm console that lets you target other ships and send a short message directly to their helm console. Something like 50 words max. Good for trading, coordination and pirates.

### Location
At the bare minimum I want to be able to keep a log/notes in the helm console interface. A little drop-down notepad to jot down the locations of the outpost, star and any other useful information would be a wonderful thing. A feature that would require further implementation would be a way to be able to track a ship that is outside of your range. Tracking a ship (or at least the direction of one) has multiple uses, but the one I want to point out in this document is it's use for finding a ship you want to trade with or letting the sector know you want to be found and traded with. Perhaps something to make your ship's location/direction extra-visible on the overmap.

> [What I mean by "Track" here is the ability to locate a vessel via a ping or a directional arrow like the crew pinpointer does. Either some way to make your vessel always visible to everyone in the sector or a "Hey! Tell us where you are?" type ping from another ship. This has potential use in pirate events, fugitive hunting events and generally would be a godsend for medical ships.]

The other half of this part actually correlates to *where* the trade is taking place. On a planet? Only two docks so if someone else is there you're screwed until they leave. In empty space? Have fun putting on a suit and dealing with having to haul your cargo through space. Through a subshuttle? depending on where it docks to your ship it's either going to be very smooth or airlock-shuffle hell. On the outpost? Congratulations, you picked the one place that doesn't have obvious issues. The main point I'm making is that I want trade in a location to be smooth and fast so that it doesn't take forever and bore the hell out of anyone not participating in the trading process, and the only place that's possible is the outpost. What I'm saying is to improve trading infrastructure on the the outposts, and I'm not just talking about the empty storefronts that people never seem to use. I'd like to see a cargo elevator for sending crates/items to different floors without having to drag one through the elevator for people, or having stairs so you don't have to rely on the elevator as your only way to move between floors.
> [Having player-usable cargo elevators transport and dump crates onto the floor a ship is on would be a fun and actually reasonable way to deliver cargo to players instead of using pods. I think Apogee was the source for this idea, it's pretty sick. It'd probably be pretty easy too, a mix between elevator, crate shelf and maybe even conveyor belt mechanics.]

### Interaction
So you spoke to and found the ship you want to trade with? Great, now you have to actually trade with them. You have to barter and settle on a price, assure the goods are correct and not some knockoff or scam, then actually exchange the goods for cold hard cash. But whats stopping your clients from just snatching your cargo and telling you to fuck off? Or just shooting you, looting you, and making off with your cash?

Players need an optional way to both secure the goods they are selling, know they aren't getting scammed, and ensure payment is recieved. I propose a shamelessly Risk of Rain inspired crate-lock that is locked until you give it a certain amount of credits. It would either be purchasable from the outpost, or craftable with the right tools or lathe. Ideally, for both simplicity's and security's sake, the lock would be linked to the ID card of the seller (or the cargo bank account of the ship) and would transfer the credits to them and inform them of the purchase once the buyers fork over the cash to the crate. The lock would have to list the crate's contents to the buyers on examination to prevent scams from being too easy, but potentially hacking it would allow for such measures to be bypassed. The lock would also have to have its price modified by the owner while on the crate in case a non-cash barter is agreed upon. Breaking the lock would have to be justifiably hard, but not impossible. The lock could also come in the form of its own type of crate

Adding some kind of mechanically-enforced "no-takebacks" system that both parties benefit from would ensure players set up mutually beneficial trade agreements that are still as cutthroat and greedy as you might expect. Both groups would have to interact in person, but without the drawbacks of looking eachother in the eye and gripping a gun wondering if the other is trying to scam them or not. Seller brings out the crate, buyer checks the contents, ensures they're correct, buys the crate, and leaves with both parties satisfied.
> [Not 100% on the hacking thing, I want players to have a mechanic to trust behind trading with eachother. Alternatively, just make a type of crate that is only locked and unlocked by one individual ID instead of a credit amount, but thats lazy and opens less possibilities.]
> [The money-lock crate also allows mappers to meaningfully lock loot in crates for money just like risk of rain. every credit goes to the mapper's static of choice (/j).]

**marksuckerberg and tmtmtl:** Selling through the outpost as a "quick and dirty" alternative to face-to-face trading at the cost of a % cut to the sellers profits and the risk of nobody buying. Only one item at a time per listing in theory, and sellers would have to raise prices to make up for the cut which would encourage making a personal deal to avoid the increased prices on both ends.

# Points that aren't directly Trading
These are points I've thought less thoroughly about, and generally have less ideas for and feel passionate enough about them to put them down for discussion.
## The Cargo Selection

It sucks. It feels like either too much is available for one section (security) or too little is available for another (robotics/service). The jukebox is still like, what, 10k? At least put a boombox on there or something. I'd like to see more varied ingredients, more niche items, and maybe some other essential things I have forgotten.

## The Economy
The Shiptest credit economy is in shambles. I get its a post-ICW setting but oh my god are prices fucked. I'll have to take a look sometime to get some specific examples but generally I think the prices of a lot of items need to at the very least be rearranged and checked against the background of what we want the end goal Shipconomy to look like. Mark probably has clearer ideas on this.

I've noticed a lot of valuable things that were meant to be sold on the cargo pad for cash now are mostly useless. The large gems that rarely drop from mobs and appear in a few ruins come to mind, as well as some of the less useful necropolis chest drops. If feasible, I'd like to add a way to sell these back in as soon as possible. The gems would obviously be worth a lot, while the necropolis junk can be brought down to like 300 credits each maximum to prevent players from just farming tendrils and elites for cash. Generally just a way to sell things that other players wouldn't buy (or wouldn't be in a mission) to the outpost for a handful of cash would be nice.
> [Maybe we don't even have to let the necro loot be sellable. That loot pool needs a fundamental reality check. It encourages like, the exact opposite of what we want which is squeezing every last drop out of a planet and leaving after an hour of tendril breaking and elite killing.]

**tmtmtl:** Adding a console to the outpost main floor to sell non-player valued items like gems, anomaly cores and various other fetch quest things.

## The Outpost Missions
They suck. The missions for driving through overmap hazards are by far the worst because best case scenario its your captain focusing on driving for 20 minutes while the crew just sits around and chats and worst case scenario your ship is now a few tiles and a distress signal in space. This would be less of a problem if the only time people actually did them WASN'T at the very start of a round when people want to be doing things. The electrical storm mission kills you most of the time, the carp mission has a decent chance of killing or injuring your crew, and asteroid missions pay way too much for just being a round-trip with an extremely slow driving requirement with the chance to just End you if you go over 3 Gm/s in an asteroid hazard.

The fetch quest and monster capture missions aren't much better due to one simple issue: THE TIMER. Trying to coordinate a medium to large crew into going to and getting off a planet in under 25 minutes is nigh-impossible. Smarter crews will read the fetch quests on the mission lists, note them down, go and grab the things they need, then come back and take the mission to immediately turn in the goods to bypass having to deal with the timer at all. I get we want crews to return in reasonable time to the outpost but the current timers just feel too short for crews to make the time on the planet count. Perhaps just make the timer itself worth a large portion of the reward and make completing it but not within the time limit just halve/quarter your earnings.

**tmtmtl:** Adding a console on the outpost main floor which lets you sell items directly to the outpost to replace fetch quests. This would also open up the opportunity for the mission ideas from the next bit to take center stage as bounties.

> [yippee! tmt also doesnt like people gaming the timers, we have a solution.]

I'd like to see some notes taken from the original cargo bounty board (which is currently nonfunctional) for making an alright amount of cash off of things that you can order your crew to create out.
Things you need to make in the crafting menu like reagent scanners and rifle stocks.
Having your doctor make a specific amount of a certain chemical and pouring it into a specialized container.
Forage for or grow a specific amount of a certain plant that grows on a planet to put in a specialized plant bag.
I'd like these to be missions without timers, things the crew can set aside as goals to work on in transit or reasons to go to a specific planet above another. Missions like these can also just be ways to let ships turn their resources into credits that aren't just Mine ore >Refine ore >Sell materials >Repeat.

As for longer missions, I'd like to eventually look into ruin-specific missions that spawn/reveal a certain location for a crew or two to coordinate and tackle as a team. Maybe like 1h 30m time limit, something generous as there could be many complications for something as large as that.

In summary, remove the "fly through X hazards" missions, ~~Adjust/remove timers for fetch quests~~ Replace fetch quests with a "sell directly to outpost" console, add small busywork missions for small sums that can be done in transit. Later on add longform expedition ruin-specific missions.

# Semi-Final Judgement (Subject to change depending on feedback)
### These are the decisions after feedback on the changes we want to try to implement over time. Subject to change as more feedback from different people is taken into account.

* Instead of being podded directly into your ship, cargo is delivered via conveyor belt into the hangar your ship is on. Like airport luggage but for shopping.
* "Fetch Quest" missions are phased out by a console/machine on the main floor of the outpost where you can exchange valuable items directly with the outpost for cash. Items like rare gems, anomaly cores, and other "Fetch Quest" items.
* Potential phase-out of mission timers and implementation of mission-based ruins (see: punchcard generated ruins by rye and overmap 5)
* Selling items to other players can conveniently be done through a console/machine on the outpost main floor, adding it directly to a section of the cargo catalog for other players to view and purchase. The outpost would take a cut of the profits (or have a listing fee) for using their services, encouraging players to either raise their prices to make up for the cut or to sell directly to other ships.
* Selling items in-person to other ships can be easily arranged and conducted by using a payment or code-locked crate that displays its exact contents while closed and remains tightly locked until payment is recieved to ensure fair trade between buyer and seller. Better infrastructure for arranging deals and bounties between players.