Best Of

Hi, Everyone! I have a LOT of important information to share, particularly for the admins!

=Introduction!=

I've been spending the last week since launch doing a lot of research and experimenting and footwork to find out the ins and outs of the economy system in the game. Market orders and offers, Refineries, Autofactories and everything in between that has to do with crafting stuff. Ultimately, I want to get a working supply economy in place that will allow people to refine raw materials at a fair price and a fair profit for refinery owners and then sell said materials to factories for a fair profit for themselves. Then, to allow the factory owners to buy the refined materials and use them to create finished goods and sell THOSE for a fair profit. These are my findings so far.

=Refineries!=

The public refineries on Omni, while well-intentioned I'm sure, have created a massive headache for our early efforts. These refineries are charging extremely high fees for their services in comparison to most people's total bank accounts at the moment, an example being Iriil which is refined for around 100 marks per ton. This amount of a fee results in ballooning the cost to perform every action in the supply chain going forward. One ton of Iriil, if refined for the cost of 100 marks, must be sold to a factory owner at a minimum of 110 marks for any kind of profit by the miner, lest the miner lose money. The factory owner must then carry that cost onto the consumer by raising their price of their finished goods accordingly.

For example, if this Iriil were used to supply one production cycle of HDS Astrium, it would require 120 Iriil (and 16 Astrium) to produce 4 tons of HDS Astrium. This translates to a cost of at least 12,000 marks, valuing the HDS Astrium at 3,000 marks a piece. That one piece of HDS Astrium would then be used along with 32 Elessium to create an EM Battery at a cost of at least 3,000 marks. The problem, is that EM Batteries currently cost 150 marks to buy from the star forges. And herein lies our dilemma.

However, I discovered a solution. A refinery costs 5 marks per ton for the owner to operate it. If they set their fee at 10 marks per ton, it provides the owner with 5 marks of profit per ton, and as refining is a high-volume operation, this translates into a tidy cash-flow over time. The miner can then take their refined material to factories that will buy it at 20 marks per ton, giving the miner a profit of 10 marks per ton, more than the refinery owner, on account of being exposed to the inherent risk of space lane piracy. This also establishes a baseline cost of 20 marks per ton of material when calculating costs for the rest of the supply tree.

-------------------

It is late and I am quite tired, so I will be continuing this tomorrow, as we still have Autofactories and the Market System to go over. Good night everybody!

• The way the game defies IRE veteran expectations. I kept wondering what I was gonna do about bullets, but it turned out I didn't need any. I was worried about flying so far from my home sector before I realized my ship didn't need fuel. I kept wondering how I was gonna afford food, then I realized I wasn't getting hungry or thirsty. I hunted for four hours straight and it occurred to me that I had no endurance or willpower to worry about. At every point where my experience with the other games had me expecting something to be a pain in the ass, Starmourn's like "nah, it's cool, we're not worried about it."
• The hilariously campy dialogue in the level 5 main quest. "Boy, I sure do love my possessions! If someone were to take my things, they'd have a fight on their hands!"
• The Subnet of Litharge. This is, hands-down, the creepiest area I've ever encountered in an IRE game. Sure, Aetolia has a forest made of elf corpses, but that's old hat. Being literal kilometers beneath the surface of the planet, stuck in this old, fetid labyrinth of an ancient and abandoned city, with no light, full of drug addicts and mutants, every room describing how there's barely even any air. And don't get me started on the reservoir. I got actual chills.
• I keep going AFK to get coffee every time I die, only to be surprised that I'm alive when I get back. The death sequence is so short.
• Speaking of defying IRE pains-in-the-ass: we can learn as many lessons as we want? And the lesson takes about four seconds? Holy shit!
• Despite it being gold drops with more steps, finding and selling junk feels so much more satisfying than the old method. I like the risk in having your stuff stolen when you die, too.
• Incredibly quick turnaround on important code/balance/QoL issues. You really get the sense the staff are just busting ass to get this game shipshape.
• The community in the Celestine Ascendancy. I made a mistake, choosing Scatterhome as my first faction. I think it could be good, but it has some serious growing pains. It and I were not a good fit. CA is welcoming and comparatively very peaceful.
• There's something really thematically soothing about idling in your ship while it's docked at a space station.

Starmourn isn't perfect, and it's not as if there aren't problems (it's open beta after all), but so far this game has been a great example of what happens when an IRE MUD embraces the last two decades of gaming. It's just plain fun. Once the emoting system is fixed I feel comfortable saying this will probably be my new home.

@Tecton

Random thought, but when you guys make the profanity filter can it be done through the Mindsim thing and have different settings? I want to use the AncientEarthPublicTelevision setting so I can see Scatterhome people screaming things like "I'm gonna FRUIT you in the ICECREAM you FLOWER TRUCKER."

I love the tongue-in-cheek and very accessible feel of a lot of the game. It's lost the haughtiness and impenetrability of games like Aetolia and Imperian and instead greets you at the door with a shot of whiskey, a mug of hot cocoa and a greeting full of sarcasm and profanity.