Unless you're buying terminator seeds, I think that seeds should cost way more. The profit margin is low (or negative) initially, but as DarthTrethon pointed out, you get more seeds from harvesting, which allows you to plant even more plants, and so on - an exponential increase in yield. Even if a seed cost three times that of a crop's worth, you're going to easily outstrip that cost in no time at all in any non-trivial farming operation. Edit: Someone already said this on the first page. Reading the thread is hard.
As important as economy balancing, the neat new craft room, and a telipad being on Outpost for linkage, which rocks. My only comments are that I think a 'teliporter room' would be cooler instead of 'just there' and.. am I the only one that loves the Ocean Purple but thinks the Orange with it is awful? >_>'
I have to second this. Being able to revisit the Outpost through a mission link from S.A.I.L., or even through a menu option for the ship's teleporter, would be much more convenient than having to visit some floating gateway that's found in every single star system in the galaxy (which in itself seems ridiculous). However, keep in mind that missions are currently configured to reset themselves upon being revisited, so there'd be no point trying to use the Outpost as a place to store things, as you'd probably lose them once the Outpost refreshes itself. There would need to be an option for dungeon worlds (as defined in dungeon_worlds.config) to not reset themselves before Outposts could be used in that manner.
If you've developed a formula for pricing, why not have an object's price be dynamic and not hardcoded?
I play Minecraft with a mod called AetherCraft, it works by setting a few costs and calculate the final item based on the ingredients so, if a Iron Ingot costs 256 mana, a recipe that uses 5 blocks of Iron will be calculated as (256*9)*5 totalling 11520 mana. It works also with huge step crafting, some have 20+ steps. Could this be implemented in Starbound? It would make the pricing changes easier. I'm eager to see economy in Starbound. Good Work ( ^_^)_b
First, I'll have to agree with former mentions that for the economy to be balanced, certain features will probably have to be modified. For example, I do understand that selling one's grown vegs should be a thing, but given how easy it is to mass-produce such things without much of any requirements beyond 'find some seeds on a few planets, till a loot of ground' it seems rather unfair even if profits would be tiny. Every plant having certain range of environment (temperature, lighting) that one would simulate with necessary equipment to allow optimal growth would not only make farming in itself interesting but actually make it balanced to the effort questing, fighting, exploring or mining characters would take. I also hope that the whole economy will be on somewhat harsher side. It would be a different thing if players would be required to participate but the way game is, one can easily get anywhere without ever buying anything from everyone. Thus, introduction of both nice and useful items (crafting ingredients, services, unique luxury items and blueprints, maybe even informations ranging from NPC finding particular location for a player to pointing out some unique place/semi-quest) that actually cost quite a bit would be a good thing, especially since while pixels aren't overly common in the very beginning, they keep on piling up easily from mid-game when NPCs cannot offer anything one wouldn't already have (or have a working substitute for).
I wouldn't base my pricing formula on just that, since some items may be worth less than the sum of their ingredients. In World of Warcraft, ores and bars tend to be in much higher demand than armor and weapons that are made from them, thus causing their market values to be higher. This is supply and demand we're talking about, and I doubt that Steel Spoons would be in as high of a demand as individual Steel Bars.
I really don't envy the task of creating an economy. From an early age we are all trained to be quite smart about money, how its made and lost, how buying and selling works and most gamers learn how to abuse the so called economy in games. Sadly it often results in certain aspects of the game being somewhat of a joke. Problems are created such as creating an infinite source of health potions or some other critical resources resulting in easy purchase of most sought after weapons and armor being easily available. Finally the undermining of the entire content structure. Unfortunately games tend to over simplify things drastically resulting in almost all gamers being able to abuse the system. Only one dev studio I've heard of has ever employed an actual, real life qualified economist, and while I respect this Armagons attempt, it seems to me that he might be a bit over his head! 'Value' just doesn't work this way.
Which developer got the economy system right? Blizzard? Well, if worse comes to worse, perhaps we could implement some sort of money sink to keep inflation low? Perhaps auction houses could, from time to time, charge so much money to sellers using the service (possibly as a flat fee in advance, as opposed to a percentage of the money earned, though both could be implemented) that it makes selling to npc merchants more desirable? (It could also force market prices to rise so high that it makes them unaffordable for all but pixel farmers.) I'd imagine that, if much more ore is being supplied through the market through auction houses than there's demand for it, then sellers would have a higher risk of losing money through failed transactions, thus causing them to turn to npc vendors to sell their surplus. Or maybe we could prohibit farmers from selling lots of crops and food items to npc merchants due to how easy it is to grow lots of them (or put their selling prices as exceedingly low)? With a renewable resource like that, I doubt that it would sell high in an auction house. Then again, how many people are playing on populated servers? I tend to play alone, so I wouldn't be able to take advantage of an auction house. By the way Armagon, perhaps you could take a look at Game Theory's episode on World of Warcraft's economy, if you have about 15 minutes of spare time?
Looks like a good foundation for NPC markets you guys are building. It also sounds like a lot of work. My favorite economy simulator in a game was probably in the old Escape Velocity games. It would be fun if after you're done with this initial step if you guys would consider doing something with commodities and trade similar to those very old school space games.
That dog needs to get away from that teleporter. We don't need any Dog-men or Man-dogs. Tho yeah everything is looking great so far. Keep up the good work. Get the pixels flowin'!
I think being able to sell items will be one of the most important additions to Starbound since it's reached beta. It universalizes pretty much every item in the game so that anything you find, farm or create has some kind of value to it, even if it is completely useless to you at the time. Plus, if farming pixels is straightforward enough it'll make it so that players can have clear objectives they can work towards which aren't directly tied to the progression of the story or main quest. Yeah, seeds should probably just be "unlocked" for a substantial amount instead of being bought for less than what a single crop would sell for. I think the problem here is that players who go for exploration instead of farming get everything a player who decides to farm can get and then some. Yes, risk should be rewarded, but I think each different progression path should have their own unique rewards relating to what you do in them. Combat/exploration could have combat techs, weapons and maybe vehicles , whereas farming could have extra plants and some kind of farming equipment to make plant growth or yield higher. And if you want to do both then the buffs you get from food can make combat easier whereas the seeds you get whilst exploring mean you don't need to spend pixels to unlock them. That being said, I don't think having seeds which can only be bought is a great idea either. A system where the act of farming directly rewards the player with farming related things would be a lot better. For example, crossbreeding plants could give rare hybrids with more valuable produce, or farmed plants could just have a small chance to drop rare seeds.
The trade system in "Uncharted Waters: New Horizons" is the one I enjoyed the most. Each port has its own specialties so that the player can buy them really cheap, and the prize fluctuates as the player sells/buys trading goods from the store. Of course, there are some ports that you can sell some products with really good margin. With the system, you can establish a trade route and make some money out of it. Maybe they can build the economy based on a similar trade-based system. Each planet in Starbound can have its own specialties based on the planet type. For example, a desert planet could use randomly chosen reed-related products as its specialties. Well, just my quick idea here.
The only problem I have with 3dPrinting (and I haven't played lately, so I'm not entirely sure it's still the same) is that the effort required to acquire the item ready for building is very one-dimensional. Say you've chanced upon a fancy painting you'd like to be able to reproduce in the future. All you need to do is scan it and do ANY multitude of different activities in order to get the money to pay for the printing. It feels that you put an effort of random quality (chancing upon the item) and an effort of ANY quality - to various degrees of effort (getting enough gold) in order to complete this task you set for yourself. To me, those efforts don't seem very strongly corelated to the reward I get. You randomly find something and you can do any sort of thing that you want in order to reproduce it. While this is exactly what happens in real economy (you want something, you work doing whatever you want to get money to do it), I think something with a more specific set of goals would be more fun in the context of these mini-quests you set for yourself such as "I want to have this item to be reproduceable in my house!" To that end, how about a system in which you randomly find an item. Then in order to be able to print it, you need to get a molecular recipe out of it. Which you can do by inserting this item in a scanner, which reveals its components. Then you'd have to find those components in the world (the scanner would indicate in which planet / zone / area those resources are more commonly found) and once they are complete, you take them to the scanner which turns them into a fully printable option in the 3d printer? At least to me it sounds like a fun mini-game of hunting for your materials (albeit once, so it doesn't go overboard with it) and still retains the option of mass producing them once you are rich enough for your loftly building designs.
Please put in some loot tables before you go too deep into economic aspect. Its kinda boring that almost everything in the world drops only pixels and steaks.
