Influence Quality of Products in Recipes
What it is: Giving modders influence over the quality of the resultant products at the prototype stage. This could take several forms, listed below, of which some (or all?) would be awesome. Each would apply to individual results of a recipe, and still be gated by currently unlocked quality tiers.
1) Bonus/Penalty percent to each quality tier, with|out ‘sliding scale’ (explained below)
2) Bonus/Penalty to quality tier directly (explained below)
3) Min and/or Max quality tier to result
4) Dis/Enable current RNG system on top of these effects
5) Just flat *declare* what the Quality result will be.
For clarification, How recipes observe the tiers of reagents – whether an average or some ‘highest’ or ‘lowest’ rule or whatever else – would be unchanged from the base system. I’ve a few examples below that should highlight how these might work.
Example: Enabling 1) and 4), and distinguishing what I mean by ‘sliding scale’:
- There are two recipes, Early and Late. The Early Recipe is what the player gets at first, but later in the tech tree, they unlock a Late Recipe with better bonuses.
- “Early” Recipe gives a +30% | +20% | +10% | +5% bonus to get a tier 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Result respectively.
- “Late” Recipe gives a +60% | +40% | +30% | +15% bonus to get a tier 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Result respectively.
- The machine and modules confer a 7% bonus to Quality. (not sure if this is how it works exactly? I’m sure someone’s going to correct me <3 Either way, just drop-in replace the actual system with whatever I’m doing here)
- Crafting with a tier-1 ingredient with the Early Recipe means there’s a final bonus of +37% | +27% | +17% | +12% to get a tier 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Result respectively.
- Crafting with a tier-1 ingredient with the Late Recipe means there’s a final bonus of +67% | +47% | +37% | +22% to get a tier 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Result respectively.
- Whether “Sliding Scale” is enabled or disabled makes no difference when crafting with a tier-1 ingredient
- With “Sliding Scale” DISABLED, Crafting with a tier-3 ingredient in the Early Recipe means there’s a final bonus of +17% | +12% to get a tier 4 | 6 Result respectively.
- With “Sliding Scale” ENABLED, Crafting with a tier-3 ingredient in the Early Recipe means there’s a final bonus of +37% | +27% to get a tier 4 | 6 Result respectively, because the first two values “slid up”.
Example: Enabling 2) and 3) and 4)
- There is one recipe, and it gives a flat +1 Boost to Quality Level, with a max of 4.
- The machine and modules confer a 7% bonus to Quality, as above
- Crafting with a tier-1 ingredient means there’s a +7% | +7% | +7% chance of getting a tier 2 | 3 | 4 result, with NO chance to get a tier 1 or 5.
- Crafting with a tier-2 ingredient means there’s a +7% | +7% chance of getting a tier 3 | 4 result, with NO chance to get a tier 1, 2 or 5.
The rest of the combinations seem like they’re self explanatory, though I can give examples if needed. I also have a bunch of uses for this across mods.
Per-item Quality unlocks via Tech system
What it is:
Giving modders the ability to, for each item, unlock progressive Quality tiers behind technologies. If nothing is gated, then the item follows the global Quality unlocks as normal.
Influence More Attributes that come with in-game effects beyond Quality
What it is:
Giving modders the ability to, for each item type (power poles, turrets, etc.), have tier systems other than Quality that can influence diverse attributes. This would include having different icons, and some rules for governing how they’re displayed. For example (one of several), influencing the range OR damage of turrets.