Hello, I've been observing this game for quite some time, and I -love- the concept of this game. The complete and total freedom to do whatever one wishes to do within a procedural universe is worthy of giving Josh a lifetime supply of Icecream for making this. After watching the devlog videos, which I was highly impressed with, i had a few questions and a few suggestions to said question if they cannot be answered. The question is simple.

Scenario: Startech Corp has been present within a system for a very long time, gathering resources and mining away happily whilst being provided with a massive amount of wealth. However the time has finally come that there are no more resources to be gathered; all asteroids are hollow, every gas cloud has been refined into fuel, and every Ice block has been melted, leaving no reason for them to stay.

Question: Is there a reason to stay?

From what this author could view during the devlog posts on the forums and videos, there would not be a reason to stay. (Other than to have an out-of-the-way trade post and colony that could only import what it needed to survive ) Now, this scenario is not quite out of the question within the realms of Sci-fi; take the Corescant system in Star Wars for example. The entire planetary system is a giant city that can only import raw materials and export manufactured goods. Or perhaps the Sol system from Star Trek, which has also been heavily overharvested.

So is there a current solution to these problems? if so, let us know. For now, however, let me present a few propositions for solving this potential issue.

1: Infinite system range - putting no borders on systems like the original X games (Not X Stillbirth ) would allow for infinite Zone spawning, and thus, infinite resource spawning. However this might not be the most practical solution, for eventually the AI would be traveling such ridiculous distances that the profit margin would drop faster than *Insert metaphor here*

2: System Specialization - Allow for a planet to become "Specialised" for a specific purpose, be it office headquarters for a major corporation, a tourist attraction by building special stations and planetary structures, or anything else the benevolent Josh may come up with. This could allow for both the players and AI to have points across the star chart that they know a certain good can be; The Jita system in EVE Online is an example of such a place, for this system has become the central trading hub for the entire star cluster, drawing hundreds if not thousands of entities every hour to trade, manufacture, and socialize.

3: ? - To be filled in by le reader, for the possibilities are endless in Limit Theory

4. systems dont run out of resources.
every mineable field "produces" resources at some low base rate.
so while you can temporarily exhaust a system, if you leave it alone, or only take few resources out of it, it regenerates.

thats josh's word btw

welcome to the forums

And, if you take away from a system faster than it can produce, it will likely become highly industrialized in the process. Is this not the case with, say, some countries in europe? They have few natural resources, so they import raw, and export refined. Even if you don't use all the resources in your area, this is often more profitable, and is a likely scenario for any system that reaches some level of maturity. Probably. Or it might get hit by a meteor. Who knows?

I would say that if I had to make a third option, it would be a supply station. If Startech is moving on to other areas, they will likely be farther away from their zones of control, rather than closer. To maintain stability, and profitability, the abandoned system will likely produce all the things that Startech needs for their moving miners. Planets can produce large numbers of resources indefinitely, so this will provide an indefinite economy for the system, though anyone but farmers and manufacturers would move with the company.

msh25563 wrote:Planets can produce large numbers of resources indefinitely

which is something josh wants to avoid, to prevent orbital infrastructure getting useless.

It may be that the Infrastructure can be moved, or re-purposed, though that seems unlikely. But I see no reason why planets couldn't sustain economies. A planet can provide resourses indefinitely, and without some catastrophic incident, there is no real explanation as to why they would stop.
I can guess that if a company truly pulls out of a system, and it is depleted, the colony will whither horribly, and maybe even cease to exist, though I don't believe this is a feature Josh would add. . . .
It may be worth considering though, because throughout history, and the present, there have always been ghost towns. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Oh my god, DLC idea!
GHOSTS IN SPACE!!!!!

msh25563 wrote:But I see no reason why planets couldn't sustain economies. A planet can provide resourses indefinitely, and without some catastrophic incident, there is no real explanation as to why they would stop.

in space you can refine big amounts of ores much easier, you dont have to care nearly as much as on ground about statics and similar stuff.

in all future extrapolations i know of (sci-fi or not) orbital mining and refinement gets cheaper by orders of magnitude.

So we can safely assume that the mining output of a planet is just not competitive by any amount compared to orbital mining.


So i think its safe to approximate this by making planets having very low output compared to space-borne mining operations

I would agree completely, but i was actually refering to food production, timber, various renewables.
This would still be a very stunted economy, but it would keep it going until the system either rebounded, or they found a new specialty etc. . .

as long as it isnt directly usable for extending space operations.

Else planets would be the only thing that would be really valuable in the game

msh25563 wrote:It may be that the Infrastructure can be moved, or re-purposed, though that seems unlikely. But I see no reason why planets couldn't sustain economies. A planet can provide resourses indefinitely, and without some catastrophic incident, there is no real explanation as to why they would stop.
I can guess that if a company truly pulls out of a system, and it is depleted, the colony will whither horribly, and maybe even cease to exist, though I don't believe this is a feature Josh would add. . . .
It may be worth considering though, because throughout history, and the present, there have always been ghost towns. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Oh my god, DLC idea!
GHOSTS IN SPACE!!!!!

... Space Ghost ?

Can asteroidbelts or planets after all (in real) be depleted?
On earth millions of people are working on this task and even after hundrets of years they didn't manage to deplete all of the stuff.

And asteroidfields are huuuuge (but i don't know how it is going to be in LT).
Our "small" asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has about 5% of the mass of our moon. Thats 0,36745 * 10^22 kg.
And if only 1% of the matter is usable for ships that would be still enogh to produce 122 billion (!) spaceships (which are as heavy as a Atlas V)

(i hope i've got my maths right)

But in the end i just would say that a asteroidbelt won't get depleted. They just have to move to another area of the belt.
And the assteroids don't deplete complete, mining only should get terrible slow (like in real life)

Theoretically all matter can be put to use... However, beyond the very extremes of the known physical universe, no matter is ever depleted, just rearranged. You are after all hydrogen that has been processed for several billion years, just a ripple in the stream of atoms that once made up your food and once made up the dinosaurs and will one day make up something else. Computers are just sand, very carefully arranged with trace impurities also very carefully arranged.

Excluding LOD trickery, seems that the % of matter which is conserved in wrecks will be an important balance issue for the density of mass in the LT universe. if it is perfectly conserved and asteroids regenerate, than mass will forever increase, if they retain 0 mass, they will need to regenerate at a rate fast enough to support mass empires, if wrecks recycle part of the material, how much should they recycle? Good to have rapid prototyping for this, no?

But again I wonder if the lod trickery can make this a non issue, because even if a system has too much or too little of anything for a healthy balance, could not the Lod ultimately bring it back to equilibrium? Like dropping a rock in a pond, it will spread out and eventually return to something stable...


Edit: that metaphor brings up an interesting idea, if the universe has some ultimate equilibrium like a water level on an infinite pond, could there also be the equivalent of waves, tides, and other water body associated events? adding variations to the global and local resources?

N-Joy wrote:Can asteroidbelts or planets after all (in real) be depleted?
...
But in the end i just would say that a asteroidbelt won't get depleted. They just have to move to another area of the belt.
And the assteroids don't deplete complete, mining only should get terrible slow (like in real life)

Possibly relevant (from June of 2013):

[color=#BF0000]JoshParnell[/color] wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:Will each player's created universe be so huge, filled with so many mineral-laden asteroids, that no player -- even one controlling an army of NPCs -- will ever run out of good resources to mine?

If that can happen, will new asteroids with different concentrations of different resources spawn?

Will player-controlled and NPC-controlled organizations compete for resources?

One of the lures of prospecting (and a powerful gameplay motivator) is the possibility of the "lucky strike" -- the rare discovery of an incredibly rich find, the stories of which become legendary. Any chance of something like that in LT1?

Correct, you should never run out of resources to mine. When you strip a region dry (which would take some serious time in and of itself), you need only expand into neighboring territory and find new riches! In theory, the universe is infinite. In practice, it is limited by the precision of your CPU's arithmetic. More likely, it is limited by your RAM. At any rate, I don't foresee many people ever reaching a point where they can't expand any further (although, technically speaking, it could happen, especially if you are running in 32-bit mode and simply acquire too many different types of items to fit in the process' address space). But no, you do not have to worry about running out of resources. And even if you did....

..yes, I am planning to have asteroids respawn (somewhat slowly). I always hated the feeling of having sucked a resource dry, in RTSs or otherwise. Respawn is a wonderful thing

Yes, in theory a "lucky strike" should be possible. As with most things, distributions of minerals will follow an exponential or erlang distribution. So you will find a lot of "standard" belts, some high-density ones, and, with extremely low probability, an absurdly-rich field. I imagine there will be stiff competition over that system, though, so be prepared to fight

Ah, I guess that last bit answers the one question I left out. Of course factions will compete for all manner of resources!

Thanks Flatfingers, didn't know this thread. (That's one of the reasons why we need a wiki) ^^

Hi again, guys. I don't mean to resurrect an old thread. just didn't want to make a new thread when this one existed.

I just finished watching Update 16 on YouTube -- which discussed projects and mining.

So if I'm interpreting the information here correctly: asteroids will slowly generate resources, but for practical reasons, if you get a large enough fleet or if there are several NPC heavy systems in a cluster, then the systems will eventually be drained of resources to the point where mining no longer generates a viable income. Naturally, the systems will be industrialized, but the neighboring systems will suddenly experience a dramatic increase in mining. The miners from those systems may eventually drain them, and it may become impractical to mine or trade in the system at the center of the cluster, effectively making the system a "ghost" system.

Now, I have no objection to ghost systems, but I'm wondering if a chain-reaction scenario could occur, where many NPCs move in one direction, depleting the resources there, and snowballing (accumulating) more NPCs as they go.

Even this scenario wouldn't necessarily be that bad, and I realize it probably wouldn't last forever -- since they'd eventually reach a cluster of unpopulated systems -- but if too many ships end up in one system, the system could become inaccessible to the player because of the heavy load it would put on the player's computer to render it.

Is this possible? Is this scenario addressed directly, or is it just very unlikely?

This also leads me to another question : Will markets continue to fluctuate in systems very far away from the player?