Hi Toecutter & company, I've mentioned some of this to you before but I've refined this idea a bit. Anyway I'd like to offer a suggestion about the way the cooldown times operate for crafting. In my opinion I think it would be a good balance for new players and old if it were work like this:
-Make separate cooldowns for crafting type--- refining, circuits, components, equipment, ammo, other. Once a top tier item has been smelted and you have to wait in some circumstances 51 minutes, your resource handling is now totally penalized when activities like mining are affected by the crafting meter. It really limits what you can do while waiting for the cooldown (come here and complain about it while waiting
) For example new players would still be able to smelt copper plates while waiting for stuff like 20nm pcbs to cooldown, and continue mining.
-Remove cooldown times on smelting most ores. Let's face it, the current value of ores makes it extremely difficult for new players to advance early on in the game, the mountain to climb early on is too despairing when people see the first three items sell for 1 satoshi in almost every circumstance (some stations pay 0...). You're forced to smelt here to make any funds, yet the cooldown time in place is just another road block. I think it would be fairly relieving to be able to produce low-tier plates without limit. Nobody gets super rich off of producing these but with a proper momentum they can advance at a more reasonable pace by mining and smelting.
-Keep cooldown times on higher end metals like gold-timonium, and gems. Since these items don't get mined often enough from asteroids i consider it reasonable to keep the cooldown here. The cooldown already in place would keep the balance for seasoned players from taking too much advantage.
Equipment manufacturing takes multiple components, plates and other resources. Yet players are forced to buy most of the items from stations or marketplace (if it's available from either), and everything requires an extremely laborious amount of crafting to make use of certain equipment blueprints. I've been working on building something for almost 2 months now and still have a long way to go, mostly because of cool down times shared between every item type! I really think this should be reexamined, perhaps some of what I'm suggesting you would agree with..