Printed items, value, authenticity

Aye I have to agree. I was already planning on ripping apart one of the local small moons just to get building materials, if I now don't have to do that every single time I want to build something. Thats great.
It also allows for different play styles. If you like to mine (like I do) then you can do so, replicate your gear in case it gets lost or whatever.
If you like to explore the vast space, loot dungeons and abandoned planets, build a huge pile of pixels... then you can do that because you don't need to spend a week mining stone to build a palace for yourself. Just spend some of your hard earned - stolen - pixels

 

@Quenton, I think the balance mechanics come into play when you realise that in order to replicate that super awesome gun you have, you also have to risk losing it without getting a recipe for it. I wasn't so sure about that "lose the item, possibly get a recipe" mechanic at first, but I'm warming up to it.

Scanning stuff might be a way to get rid of excess materials, giving you recipes for those so you can print them when needed, as well as getting rid of excess outdated weapons/armor. In a multiplayer environment you may then proceed to print some of those outdated weapons for your friends, but if they want a weapon as awesome as yours, they still have to go explore.

Of course, this means that scanning weapons in a single player game in order to print them is a waste of pixels/ink.

 

Added advantage of printing up 20 tables and chairs sets to decorate your newly built apartment block, rather than making each one.

 

I looked at the screenshot again and noticed the red text. When you scan an item it destroys the original. I missed that before. That's a good balancing mechanic right there. Plus, you might not get the blueprint for it after all. I guess one needs to weigh the risk.

However, let me clarify what I was thinking about exactly:
Does the 3d Printer work with any blueprint you have? If so, then what's the point of gathering resources if you can just buy something out of thin air? If that's how it works, what then is the point of exploration if you have no needs to drive you onward? Honestly, who cares if it's got that "printed" cheap item tag on it? I wouldn't care too much myself, especially if I am playing single player. That's the part that I am dubious about.

 

Good for consumables and other things you might need to mass produce.

 

Tiy said on Reddit a short while ago that item durability might be in the game. If it is, the printing mechanic would make loads more sense - you have this heart-wrenchingly beautiful, complicated gun, but it's about to break, and probably you'll never find one like it again. The printer's a kind of kill-or-cure solution - if it works, you can use your lovely weapon for ever more, albeit perhaps with slightly lowered stats. If it doesn't, so what? It would have wound up breaking anyway.

In this hypothetical Starbound, I guess the lowered stats and chance to lose the item are present to encourage exploration - a newly discovered space-gun's probably more effective than your old one, even if it doesn't share the same sentimental value.

 

I honestly think it is what they said on the tin, which if I remember right was a way to keep lower tier ores worthwhile to collect still.
Basically it'll let us convert that copper we find everywhere into decorations, low grade fuels, basic necessities. I think we'll craft guns possibly but not print.
They already said the tiered armor can't be replicated because tier ores can't be handled by the machines. Like startrek replicators can't produce somethings. Edit: Retracted. They never say it, but it would be very weird if you could. It would make high tier ore lose most of its value after a blueprints obtained.

Otherwise, I could easily scan high tier armor until I get a schematic then go around printing copies for everyone on the server.
So guns and armor very likely not "Almost any object you find in the world".

 

They did? Where?

It's possible that printing schematics and crafting blueprints are separate things. I agree that it's worrying to think that you could just farm pixels from iron ore or whatever to make higher tier stuff. Or actually that's not worrying at all- unless it ends up being faster than taking the risk of gathering the higher tier stuff directly.

I.E. Turning those piles of dirt into something better than garbage = good. Deliberate dirt gathering becoming a regular part of endgame = bad.

I doubt they'd screw this up. =]

 

Seems like a useless system. I honestly don't care whether my items are rare or not, as long as they have the same stats.

This is the reason I have never gotten into TF2, because I think the system is retarded.

 

...Well, here's my Idea. Simply put, printed items will have a lower selling value. In fact, since pixels are printing fuel AND currency, it will be less than the amount required to produce them, most likely. Printed items do, however, offer some significant advantages: In case you are playing on the "Drop stuff on death" mode, they will be a significant help in batting your way to the place where you died, or be a half decent replacement for some of the things you lost. I would not be surprised, however, if pixel printed items will have some sort of durability, unlike their original. I mean, it is 3d printing fuel: it isn't very sturdy. Sure, with the right technique you can craft pretty crazy things with it IRL, but it always is a bit fragile.

 

But who's going to sell their endgame weapon?.. It's not about the money, just the stats. So even if it has a nametag saying it's a fake, most people won't care because it does a lot of damage. For it to be balanced they need to make the printed weapons nerfed and cost a LOT of pixels, or just have it so we can't print rare items. Also will we just need pixels, or will it require pixels and some sort of printer ink?

 

This would break starbound for me pretty badly, having to grind just to keep the same level tiered equipment you have is not fun when there are 100 levels to acquire. I hope that the point of the printer is for co-op play where you can get everyone similar tiered items faster.

 

Here we go, source is old preplanning ideas chat. Also I was remember wrong, but-
http://community.playstarbound.com/...-crafting-printing-dyes-homeworlds-etc.15335/ Link to the original thread.

12:50:04 <@Tiyuri> there are 10 special ores
12:50:04 < plaYer2k> when the same printer is used my different people and that should affect each other, then i thing a queue that places all requests and visible
when opening the printer would be the a good solution ... so opening it (Item1: 5 chairs (by playerA), Item2: 3 weapons (by player, Item3: 1
helmet (by player) etc
12:50:09 <@Tiyuri> that only appear within their tier
12:50:16 <@Tiyuri> and are used for crafting armor and weapons that belong to that tier
12:50:20 <@Tiyuri> then there are ores that appear in every tier
12:50:22 < Elruflon> then you use gemstones for dyes then?
12:50:25 < Arpege> So 3D printing ink is one of the most valuable resources in the universe, since it allows people in space to construct almost anything they need
12:50:27 <@Tiyuri> and are used for crafting printer ink or have other general uses

- Tier ores for armor, others can be used for 3D. It would seem pretty backward to me if I could mine enough gold to print something that needed tier-ore to craft.

It negates the need for high tier ore in the first place after anyone on server gets a set of blueprints.

 

Woah woah hold up, where did you hear this exactly? Last time I checked Tiy said item durability sucks, because all it does is perpetuate pointless and tedious as hell grinding.

 

Ability to print items could be very interesting from multiplayer economy standpoint. If only original items can be scanned and made into blueprints then player can make career as explorer, obtaining rare items and selling their copies to other players. And with chance to destruct without getting blueprint that's extra decisions, "keep it for myself, or roll dice and potentially earn a lot of pixels from selling copies, or get nothing"

 

I would love to see scanned items depreciate with each printing. Like every scan you make gets a little worse and worse until you have essentially a value-less faulty item. It would handle the balancing and make authentic items even more valuable because they'll be needed to "renew" a scanned model.

 

Here you go. Tiy's comment is the third down, with the special flair.

(Obviously everything specific in my post was hypothetical - I was just sort of riffing off the idea.)

 

Don't antagonize me!! If you keep it up.. im gana push the "Guide" into the printing press!

 

I hope we don't have item durability. It's annoying enough in other games, but with Starbound's capacity for many interesting items, I'd hate to have to worry about them breaking.

If they just become unusable on 0 durability and you can repair them, then that's different.

 

Well this is kind of sad news. I wouldn't mind one use items like bombs and stuff or things with a certain of number of uses before needed a recharge.. but degrading weapons/armors/tools is.. minecrafty. :/

Also means if you run out of stuff you might have to goback to lower threat tiers just to farm material to investigate higher ones, instead of to explore. zzz.