Infinite sales and infinite purchasing power.

On paper that does sound like a good idea but given the sheer volume of trash one can accumulate after one run, you'd be stuck having to visit multiple merchants to empty your stock before being able to go back to exploring. I can see that pissing off a lot of people. I am guessing you got this idea from games like Witcher 2 and 3?

 

What happens when a player spawns like 7 merchants in their home or uses an Avian town which had like 7 merchants as well?

 

So, like the Skyrim merchant system? That would be pretty neat.

 

Vendors could also sell items that they would only sell for a limited amount of time, and which would be easily better or more useful than the other items that they would sell, such as food vendors sometimes selling foods a few tiers above the rest, and weapon vendors sometimes selling up to rare weapons sort of like the Item of the day mechanic in Borderlands 2, which would act as a pixel trap because it would be more likely for the player to buy it due to the possibility of not being able to buy that item again in a long time.

 

Fallout 3 had a nice way of balancing merchants.
Merchants only carried so much money with them, and that number was displayed to the player, so s/he had to be careful to buy/sell on what the merchant could afford.

 

@xxswatelitexx That reminds me of the other game I am currently playing... Elona. The merchants in that game due have a defined amount of currency, although quite high when lower level.

I rather like the idea, although like other pointed out; may not be everyone's cup of tea.

I think if it was done there would be a difference between spawned in merchants, renting merchants, and ones you find. Not neccesarily 3 types, but more or less 2 in the sense the admin would be for the first type, and that would be for testing purposes. There money's would refresh every so often, like if you left to planet to go to another one, not just beam up to the ship. Well it is an idea anyway.

Really though I don't mind either way, long as I can build what I want in the game.

 

I play on the "Nightly" build, and have been using the terra-mart merchant to sell to. Having a pixel limit on the merchants seems like it would hurt the game, as you have to hold onto stuff for a much longer period of time, till they restocked

I mainly run the lunar base and floran missions back to back and get an average of 3000 pixels or more each trip, and being able to sell the loot helps even more.

Right now on the nightly build you can sell most the junk and weapons at a 1 for 1 rate, so it's not really worth selling those. On the other hand, the food and decorative items sell for a lot of pixels, Farming is very lucrative and cooking even more so.

To be honest, I cap glitched Fallout 3 and New Vegas to negate the money issue. Waiting in-game for three days for them to restock was even better since it took 24 seconds to wait an entire day away.

 

I figure the Merchant system is just a stepping stone to the economy for now. Being able to sell stuff is sweet, but I don't really like the idea of the limit on merchant moneys, since that can be bypassed by going to multiple merchants.

Either way, a player can still achieve the same goal through a ton of merchants. They can be spawned, and don't forget you can build a home for NPCs and collect rent from them too.

 

I think I heard that they planned to add a Combat path, Farming path, and Colonizing path. These might even out the income down the road.

Food does take time to grow and stockpiling a ton of it to sell to market and is that much more rewarding.

I play Single Player and haven't really jumped on any servers, But I would have to say that once I obtained the P.P.P. that being able to create cheap lights on the fly for underground exploration helped out a lot.

The cost of the Triple P building materials adds up when you're trying to build a bigger base.

Plus you can compress said pixels for your other characters too to help them get started

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Like many other mechanics in this game, currently, its just a placeholder, but I do agree, that vendors should be balanced, with selling restricted to interest and available gold.

Though honestly, I would quite like to hoard a enormous amount of money to just research new Tech, maybe Develop the Outpost?

Investment in the Outpost, maybe new Mechs, or just plain Colony Template purchasing, where ya just pay a certain amount, and then they just deep strike a colony of your liking and theme in it.

Just some thoughts, with this new acessibility of income, new options should come for those who want something to do with the new mountains of cash.

 

What about merchant sell price being linked to race and location: Selling a bit of corn to a glitch on a grass planet with lots of corn and you get very very little. Sell the corn to a human on an Ice world and it goes for a premium?
Therefore you have to export to other planets. Basically set up lucrative trade routes.
The caveat being that farming would then have to be linked to environment so you cant grow corn in ice. To create a greenhouse for producing corn on an ice planet I think would be deemed enough effort to earn your higher margins.


At the risk of going off topic if plants in general required more care to produce - Temperature, Sunlight, water, protection of pests etc. etc. then they would earn their right to be more valuable commodities.

 

My suggestion:
Create several categories of merchants each offering different prices and multitudes of items they are willing to buy:

1. The specialized merchants. Think town market/shop merchants, or those random simply merchants you encounter in the wild. Will only buy and sell only certain items, like vanity clothing, or fruit and vegetables. The prices are moderate but still notably smaller than the average market price.
2. The junk buyer. Player settlements should have this as one of first merchants, and some of randomly encountered or settlement merchants can qualify for this too, if they offer a wide array of items. Buys absolutely anything you can say, but at extremely low prices. Great for getting rid of misc junk, or just dumping stuff, but not the best option when earning pixels is a priority.
3. The rarity collector. Works both as player town and randomly encountered merchant. Is interested only in certain type of items, like decorations of a certain aesthetic, or certain weapons, or something like that. Sells a few items of similar type, and some related to them items, like apex lab blocks if it's interested in apex lab furniture/decorations, or cakes and other complex foods if they are interested in ingredients. Willing to buy similar items, and at the best price you could expect to sell them. The interface description/subtitle in the selling menu, and the NPC introduction upon approach mention what sort of items the collector is interested in. You know, "Greetings, traveler! I'm willing to buy [aesthetic/race/material] artifacts if you have any!".
4. Super rare summoned merchants. These require a certain consumable item, or triggering a one-time object that disappears afterwards. Think like those monoliths you can find cultists guarding sometimes. They offer some rare items and buy everything or almost everything at extremely profitable price, but if you walk too far away from them, or teleport back to your ship, they will vanish and you will have to acquire or discover another object to summon one of these with.

 

What do people do with pixels in this game? I mostly make cheap lights.

I guess I don't see the need for a pixel-sink, or limited selling, until there's some way to become powerful by having lots of pixels.

 

Yeah cheap lights is the way to go right now

 

my idea is that if you sell enough of one type of item the price of all items with that same label goes down for that merchant (to a minimum of course)
and merchants should have different interests, so a hylotl would buy hylotl stuff at a higher price but floran stuff for almost nothing (hes not going to PAY for that crap) this could give a bigger sense of the world being alive and the races having various opinions about each other