Feedback Resource exchange rates are strange and need adjusting

I'd like to discuss the economy a little bit here. Mostly endgame economy, but still.

The problem is, that sometimes you run out of certain resources. For example Tungsten, which is a mid-game one. It also happens to be used for crafting most of the typical modern blocks like wall panels, smooth metals, etc. So what would you do if you ran out resources while building? Well you could always go on a 20 minute long mining trip. Or... you can go to the Ursa Miner and use it for the reason it's there.

But here we come across a certain problem (not the main one, mind you). Resource bars are ridiculously expensive. Let's take aforementioned wall panels as an example. Those are the ones that make up your default ship background. They craft 20 per 1 Tungsten bar. A full stack thus needs 50 bars. One Tungsten bar costs 600 pixels. That puts a full stack of 1000 wall panels (and believe me this is not an astounding amount) at a retail price of 30.000 pixels. Unless you are actively farming pixels, that amount is rather substantial. And that is for just one stack of one block. What if you need more or other blocks that also use Tungsten in crafting?

And here we hit the main problem. So we are short on pixels, what can we do? Oh I dunno, let's sell some other resources that we have too much of or just don't currently need. Oh, wait, that won't work, because merchants give use barely anything for them.

To give you a quick price breakdown:
Resource / Price when buying / Price when selling

Coal / 20 / 0.5 (yes, less than 1 - you need to sell them in pairs to get a single pixel)
Copper / 200 / 4
Silver / 300 / 6
Gold / 400 / 8
Iron / 400 / 8
Tungsten / 600 / 12
Titanium / 800 / 16
Durasteel / 1.000 / 20
Aegisalt / 1.200 / 24
Ferozium / 1.200 / 24
Violium / 1.200 / 24
Solarium / 600 / 12

So why is this bad? Let's get back to the example of Tungsten and wall panels. We need 50 Tungsten bars for a full stack of blocks. That costs 30k pixels. To get that staggering amount, we'd need to sell any of the following:
7.500 Copper bars
5.000 Silver bars
3.750 Gold or Iron bars
2.500 Tungsten bars (to get 50 of the same, yes)
1.875 Titanium bars
1.500 Durasteel bars
1.250 Aegisalt or Ferozium or Violium bars
2.500 Solarium stars

Any of those to get merely 50 bars of a mid-game resource. Have any of you ever even saw more than 1.000 bars of anything but Copper? I am fairly sure that those who did are in the minority. As a side note, you will get at least comparable if not better prices for selling food, which you can grow in large quantities at no cost other than time used while setting the farm up!

Ursa Miner is meant to be a convenience. When we are a few bars short of crafting something or during endgame when we build colonies we can buy what we are missing there instead of spending 20 minutes looking for it. I can understand the high price of bars. That is likely meant to make people go mine and explore instead of just buying all their gear when they are actually playing a new character. What I have a massive problem with is that during endgame the Ursa Miner is nearly useless to any colony builder who doesn't also already farm pixels on a huge scale.

We need to be able to exchange our resources at a far more reasonable rate than this bs.

Another example time:
My current savings are at roughly 300.000 pixels. This is what I saved since I began playing as my current character, till endgame and quite some time after it; I barely died and also saved everything I could and sold all the crap I could. On top of that I have a food farm for some time now, which brings decent enough income. And all that gave me 300k pixels. Seems like a lot? Now consider this:

My current "colony" (that I am still building) consists of only 2 moderately sized buildings. One is the aforementioned farm, the other just has ground floor and 4 empty rooms above it (so far). Those two buildings used up about 5 stacks of wall panels, 2 stacks of titanium panels, and 2 or 3 stacks of glass panels, not to mention some miscellaneous other blocks. If I wanted to flat out buy all of those, that would eat up 166.000 pixels for just wall and titanium panels. That is an underestimate of the total cost, as it does not include the miscellaneous blocks (and you can't buy glass). That's still over half of what I earned through the ENTIRE GAME. When I mention my savings to friends who themselves are approaching endgame right now, their jaw usually hits the floor (which suggests that most players will not have anything near that when playing).

Possible solution:
Now, I do not want or expect the resource bars price to go down. It's so high for a reason. What I would like to suggest is rising the prices at which we can sell the resources we already have. Selling them at 2% of their purchase value (yes, two f****** per cent) is simply and flat out retarded. You need to sell 50 of any bar to get a single one back. Srsly, who's the genius that thought this was a good idea? Any normal person who'd get treated like that by a merchant would not do any business with them ever again.

Give us a decent price for selling resource bars. At the very minimum it should be 25%, possibly more. That way I can exchange two endgame resource bar for a Tungsten bar. Still a shitty deal, but it's at least somewhat reasonable, unlike goddamn TWO! "But that will make it easier for new players to skip content." New players can't sell resources they don't already have, and buying higher tier ones will still have a losing exchange rate, especially if we get only 25% value at selling. Trading in Iron for Tungsten will have a 6 to exchange 1 rate in that case.

TL;DR
Ursa Miner (and likely other traders) will pay you barely anything for your resources, but will charge you a fortune for single bars when you want to buy. That makes acquiring resources for block crafting (and building colonies) nearly impossible without flat out farming pixels on a massive scale, as exchanging other resources just isn't an option. Suggested solution to that is changing selling prices from 2% purchase value to 25% at a minimum when trading in your resource bars.

 

I think anything like 25% and the economy would be broken. The reason is asteroids - you can go there and mine ridiculous amounts of copper, silver and gold ores there in a short amount of time. If you're selling those (once crafted) for 25% and upwards, you'll be earning way too much. I agree that the current percentage is a joke, but I wouldn't like to see it go above around 10 - 12% max.

 

Ooor the basic resources which are present literally everywhere (i.e. copper, silver, and gold) can have a different selling value. We give those 10%, and 25% to planet tier exclusive ores (iron, tungsten, titanium, durasteel, aegisalt, ferozium, violium, and solarium). Thoughts?

 

I'm inclined to agree. Though personally I do think the bars are overpriced. Considering they're already gated to the main quest so you can't, I don't see any reason they couldn't be cheaper.

I should also mention that there's a way to get ripped off less though. The refinery. That gives you 50% of base instead of 20%. Or 5% instead of 2% compared to Ursa Miner prices. But it also takes time to run, which is a pain if you're trying to cash in a large stack.