Patch When? #3 - Dev Diary - Economic Reform™

[jammi]

Oh - so PoBs are basically way less vital for good profits now?
Mining will just sell to NPC bases, PoBs can just refine for slightly higher c/s in further places?

That depends. Single POB with refinery 2 can produce quite a lot of refined metal per day - 92,400 in transport volume. That's over 18 hauls for 5Kers or over 25 hauls for 3,6Kers and that's without a faction bonus. So just in term of quantity, I think the base absolutely can produce enough commodity to supply players, while still not producing too much as to make multiple bases redundant.

Now, If the NPC price for raw ore is low enough and the price for refined ore is high enough, PoB can be still quite vital because it will be able to offer higher price for raw ore than NPC and lower price for refined ore than NPC and still be profitable for both players and POB owners. It really is just a matter of how large the price difference between raw and refined will be for NPC prices.

100%, spot on. This is exactly what we're trying to design for. Although to clarify, the two listed recipes can both be produced in the relevant refinery. It just means you have the option between choosing T1 for less complicated inputs and less output, or T2 which needs a bit more work but is more efficient. Potentially we'll add more tiers in the future, but the fact that these have to be duplicated by fuel type means that could get messy and snowball quickly.

Yes, there is certainly a risk of POBs being redundand if the NPC prices are too close to each other so the bases can't offer signifficantly better prices, but that's a matter of numbers not mechanics. Sure, there inevitably will be a certain drop in the necessity of the bases, since you can now buy the high paying cargo from NPCs, which wasn't the case before, but if the price difference the POB can offer is HIGH enough, players will still use them.

And this is what we're hoping to avoid. I've asked for a community refineries feedback forum to be set up on the community Discord, so I'll be workshopping numbers and taking suggestions there too, soon. If the refineries don't pan out the way we're hoping, adjusting prices and outputs is a simple matter of adjusting a config file.

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