Game Projects

Base Mechanics

This is a bit different.

Like Caverlasting and Skygarden, your base is handcrafted and unchangeable. Unlike them though, you can add as many plant plots as you have room for. Turning your ship into a living garden by the end is pretty satisfying:

Rooms themselves have empty space for bigger plots. Room size can be expanded a bit, but there *are* limits here, unlike everything else.

You can stack plants around a particular fixture so when you interact with it you also interact with the plant(s) there.

Beyond that you aren't adding to your base in any capacity. Fixtures can be upgraded but that happens within the confines of the fixture itself, rather than you adding more reactors or whatever.

Your base itself is a 3D ship laid out a bit like it is in Astero. You can't just move from room to room freely -- there are connection points, so there's a bit of navigation gameplay here. It is handcrafted however.

Space Stations

Space Stations are where you:

Buy seeds (you don't get anything from your own plants).

Sell Crops and products made from them for money.

Use money to buy Probes of various kinds. Or sell them I guess. No markup or anything.

There's one space station per solar system. Your scanners can always pick it up -- you don't have to search for it or anything. You do have to actually get there though.

Space Station stuff happens from a specialized fixture once you've actually navigated there (which is a different fixture). You never leave your ship.

Stellar bodies and Probes

Stellar bodies have resources. There are quite a lot of both stellar bodies (it uses Aphelion) and resources. They are handcrafted though and vaguely realistic.

The Hangar room stores your Probes and also lets you deploy them. They're single-use and catered to a specific kind of stellar body -- asteroids are more general-purpose while moons and planets have types that you'll need different Probes for (also the gravity factor will change things). You can always buy any kind of Probe at a Space Station.

The amount of Probes you can hold is limited, but this can be upgraded infinitely -- there's a kind of minification process happening that gets better the more exotic materials you throw at it.

Probing will gather resources for you, which takes actual time like everything else. You can deploy multiple Probes however. You can also leave the area and come back to get the resources later.

Upgrades

Outside of room capacity (which *is* actually limited, and pretty hard to upgrade as well), upgrades can be done ad infinitum, however it gets harder and harder over time.

Upgrades run on a PGCS of all resources in the game, as well as refined and/or composite versions. The fixtures you need for these various processes are always available, but the Power isn't necessarily going to be there -- it'll require upgrading your Internal Reactor (will probably have a different name from the other one).

Your Scanner can detect resources in various systems. For sanity, there's no limit to their ability to do this, but time is a factor (an upgradeable one thankfully). You can scan stars for whether resources you need exist there, then scan to see which type of stellar body supports them (this takes less time if you're in the system), then scan for various concentrations -- the higher the concentration, the more you actually get. That last one is faster if you're around the parent stellar body in question.

Like everything else, Scanner time can be upgraded.

I'm thinking upgrades are a -25% time reduction, but I may want to experiment with it a bit. This is cumulative though, so a 6 hour process turns into a 4.5 hour process, and then that turns into a 3.375 hour process, etc. Rounded down.

Refinement and Composites

Resources can be Refined, crafted together into Composites, and both of those can also be Refined or Composited, etc.

Refinement and Composites processes cut the amount of the material in half.

There are specialized fixtures for this kind of thing. It takes real time for them to process materials. Additionally, there's a limit to how many they can do at once. It isn't based on the amount of the material you put in though so larger batches are more efficient. Like everything else, these limits can be upgraded forever.

Crafting Engine

How to make a particular Refined product or Composite isn't immediately obvious. There are a series of controls on each of these fixtures that adjust temperature, pressure, etc and there's some fixed range that'll give you the product you want. Everything is t2d'd here so you can get really weird materials that are unfortunately useless if you just experiment.

Instead, you have to look up the recipe in a Terminal fixture (or something), and remember it when you go back. You can do this piecewise since the Fixture will remember things you've set, but taking notes is probably a better idea.

Programming-wise, the PGCS runs a random function on raw material(s) and stores the product internally so the Terminal is just pulling from that list. It's also instant.

Useless experimental resources do have an effect on the Genetics system. I'm thinking you'd have to look up their properties in the Terminal however.

Actual Farming

Farming happens in Plots. Plots of various size are items that can be bought at Space Stations. Larger plots support more plants, but take up volume, however this doesn't scale linearly -- a 5-plant plot might take up 5 volume while a 10-plant plot takes up 7. The value calculation is based on the number of plants you buy, so a 10-plant plot will cost 10x as much as a single-plant plot.

Storage considerations here are a factor, which I'll get to in a bit.

Humidity and Temperature

Each room allows you to set the Humidity (0-100%) and Temperature (0-100C) of the room. Rooms can't be more than 25 points off from any adjacent room in 3D space.

Various plants have different ranges of these where they operate. Like everything else, this can be targeted with Genetics -- it's possible to have a plant with no constraints whatsoever but it takes a lot of experimentation, time and work to get there. This also won't happen at the outset because you need resources to run Genetics, and resources require Probes which cost money, so you need a good farming system at the outset.

More plant stuff

Each plant has a Grow time and a Yield range. Obviously it has a specialized product as well -- maybe a fruit, or sap or whatever. Making it more complicated than that doesn't make sense because of the real-time nature of the game.

Plants don't require maintenance and will always exist in whatever end state they reach. This game shouldn't be a part-time job -- you can check in on your plants months later and they'll still have the products they ended up with there.

Plants whose genes haven't been tampered with won't produce seeds. Those that have will produce 1 with a 25% (upgradeable via Genetics) chance of a second. They won't ever go above 2.

Genetics

Genetics allow you to alter a plant's grow time, its yield and the concentration of refined product targets in its product (as well as maybe recursive definitions there depending on how complex I want to make the products system).

It involves making some weird material through that system, grinding it into Dust, and then sprinkling it into the Plot. When a seed is planted there, it'll use up the Dust and the plant will take on those new properties, as will its seed(s). You can't use the same type of Dust more than once on that plant or any future seed or altered seed.

You can also make Hybrids of genetically-altered plants -- just take two seeds and stick them together in the Hybrid machine and pick which value you want for all of their properties. Obviously they have to be the same kind of plant. This process probably takes upgradeable time.

Yield probably has hard limits but product composition sure doesn't. I'm thinking also maybe there's a difference between maturity time and time until harvest just so there's more gameplay here.

Plant Products

This is pretty complicated by design, particularly as far as Space Stations are concerned.

Crops have some particular product -- maybe a fruit or a piece of bark, etc.

There are then two refined products that come from that, one of which comes from the other one. There's also less yield at every step than from the product itself. Each plant also has a collection of Phytonutrients and that last product has varying amounts of those.

Creating either product requires the appropriate fixture. I'm thinking there will be one per type of product. They do still have time and limit constraints though like other fixtures (which can be upgraded).

Phytonutrients

Phytonutrients have plausible names (based on actual lists) but are procgen.

Each plant contains a list of them, and the end product has varying percentages. This is upgradeable via Genetics.

Phytos are the best-selling product in the game, however it requires three rounds of refinement and really getting mileage out of it requires a lot of Genetics as well.

Values

Values are fixed, with the exception of phytos. Each refinement step is worth more, and upping the concentrations (or sourcing better plants) is the way to go here.

Phytonutrients are pretty valuable but their actual value differs depending on the Space Station in question -- there will be bonuses though, not detriments (so the value will always reflect the minimum it sells for)

Reactor Costs

Each fixture around this system requires additional Power, and this tiers up as well. Power is distributed according to what you're actually doing -- so if you're low you can cut back on other tasks and only do one batch at a time. Refined products do however cost more Power than you have starting out, so some Reactor upgrades are essential to get there.

Shop Stuff

You get a full readout of all of this when looking to purchase Seeds -- all the plant properties, all the values of its products and phyto spread (plus their base values). You can also see what phytos are actually worth at that particular space station. Scanning can tell you more about adjacent ones.

Space Corn

To prevent Softlocking, it's possible to get a batch of Space Corn for free. This takes time and also this crop can't be modified and overall sucks. But you can use a harvest of it to buy more seeds if you don't mind a lot of waiting.

Starting out, you can buy Space Corn but it's terrible so it's maybe only valuable if you have spare plots and are low on cash.

Reactor stuff

The Reactor provides fuel to all your various internal fixtures. (Aphelion stuff is handled by a couple Drives/Engines instead. instead). It can be upgraded, and you sort of have to do this to be able to use later stuff.

Once upgraded, you just always have that amount of power available. Upgrades aren't limited in any way.

Power is assigned to processing tasks you actually do. Given the real-time nature of the game, you'll be setting things up and then leaving, so using up all of your reactor power is pretty essential. Granted if you upgrade things to the point where they happen instantly, reactors aren't a huge concern so long as you have enough for the particular fixture you're using at the moment. It takes kind of a lot to break the game in that particular way, however.