So I recently learned that, at launch, the ability to scan seeds for printing wasn't an intended feature but rather a bug that was quickly rectified, an action that many players took for an actual bug itself until told otherwise. Besides being a disappointment, though, this raises a question: if we can't use it to scan and print items that we might want large quantitied of, what exactly is it really good for? One of the major problems faced by Starbound and many games like it is the issue of the grind. Grind is an undesired aspect of many games and yet is often a major factor and necessity of player action, whether it's for purely material resources (gold, crafting materials, special items, food) or something a bit more permenant (levels, skill points, techniques). Many ideas have been put forth on dealing with grind, and in the material sense the 3D printer offers a great way to minimize grind: yet in the case of a perfect example of such - being able to scan and print seeds, an item typically used in quite large quantities - the 3D printer has been denied the capability to shortcut the grind of acquiring more seeds, be it by stripping the planet bare of its one or two native plant species or repeatedly planting and harvesting a scant few base seeds in the hope - HOPE, as harvests sometimes only give one seed back for one seed planted - of increasing your base stock. Whether it's ensuring we've a healthy stock of supplies like food and medicine or giving us that last bit of crafting material for a new set of armor, pixels and the 3D printer have the capability to let us cut out the grind and focus more on exploration and adventure, and to deny this capability would be a great disservice to players and the game itself. Building Up No matter how you look at things, everything starts to look pretty similar once it's broken down to its constituant components. Maybe a few more protons here and there, maybe a different allotropic arrangement than some other materials, but once you hit the atomic level there aren't too many ways you can divide things. Whether it's an iron bed or an iron chest or an iron bar, it's still going to be made largely from the same base material: why restrict 3D printing to the first two yet not the third? And if iron, why not other elements, other materials? Little difference between iron and uranium other than proton and neutron count and a scant few other details: as long as you've the pixels to foot the atomic bill, the printer should be able to handle one just as easy as the other. Being able to print all objects, including base materials like iron and uranium, is a considerable anti-grind and anti-frustration capability. If one starts on a planet with plenty of crafting ores but very little in the way of coal or wood, they can scan their first piece of coal and refine their other ores to pixels which can then be converted to fuel; if they need one last piece of material for some crafting project of great import, they can likewise scan and print that last batch rather than scrabble about planetside for that last evasive piece; and if large quantities of a certain otherwise-rare material is needed, like seeds, leather or hardened plate, one can, again, skip the frustration of grinding the RNG and go straight to printing those materials off and getting on with actual adventure. The primary challenge of making all materials printable is giving them a properly-balanced pricetag to ensure printing is viable while not allowing for a glut of materials. The refinery breakdown system gives a decent baseline to go by, and doubling or quadrupling that to a priceline of 10/20/30/50/100/200 or 20/40/60/100/200/400 per piece of copper/iron/silver/gold/platinum/diamond ore should be sufficient. Breaking Down The 3D printer allows us to convert pixels into objects: what's to stop it from doing the reverse? We have the refinery, but that only applies to basic ore types: being able to salvage pixels from all manner of objects, however, kills an entire flock of birds with one stone. Salvaging allows us to clear out our inventories of raid spoils without feeling as though we're wasting the fruit of our efforts, direct the fruit of our labor in a different but desireable direction and act as a more function-friendly mass-scanning and mass-disposal system. The Salvage function, accessable from the same menu as the tech and 3D printer interface, opens a container similar to that of the ship storage locker, but with the addition of 2 function buttons: "Salvage" and "Scan". Salvaging does a clean sweep of the entire salvage container's contents, tallying the total value and giving back 25% of said value as pixels, whereas Scanning does the same but scans the first iteration of each item stack, thus letting you learn the blueprints for a wide swath of different items in a single click. The major concern of such a salvaging system is in ensuring that the payoff from salvaging is large enough to make such worthwhile but no so much that it outstrips all other pixel-gathering methods. Reducing furniture values fo 10% of their current iterations should be sufficient (for comparison, a typical chest is currently worth ~500 pixels and would give 125 on salvage at current : now imagine the payoff from an entire dungeon's worth of furniture at that general return value).
I agree, but I think it would need to have specific upgrades that allow it to do all. I don't think it should be able to do all that right off the get go.
Also can we add a TUT somewhere telling you how to scan stuff with the 3D printer? I had no clue all you had to do was drag and drop from the hotkey bar. I thought it was bugged out cause I din't know how to scan very annoying and needs a TUT cause how was I suppose to know? Also Upgrades would nice as this Sounds very very very OP but with upgrades to get to higher levels would be nice like needing wood to upgrade to copper copper upgrades to iron then Sliver and Then Diamond Also you only unlock the ability to create the item you still need to scan an Ore to build it. And then to balance it Diamonds cost a ton of Pixels I'm not sure how many would be fair but an asston of them for diamond. I miss this mod from minecraft Tekkit it allowed you to turn other items into other things. But It was balanced and you needed like a ton of items to make enough power to make stuff. IE If you put wood in there you'd need like a billion logs just to make a single Diamond
I guess the main use of the 3D printer is to be able to replicate things that aren't craftable - mostly decorations. While seeds aren't really craftable, you can grow and farm them. This is definitely a good feature to have. However, a secondary feature of the 3D printer could be to replicate things that are actually craftable or farmable, but at a higher cost. It might be more efficient to grow a farm or go mine some ores, but if you're rich you might consider spending pixels instead. You might want to print a single seed, because you ran out of them, and get your farm back up and running. Printing that seed might be expensive, but it might be worth it. From a 'lore' perspective, I think it makes sense to be able to store 'prototypes' of seeds. Much like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway where they keep spare copies of seeds just in case we run out.
