Pneumagination Resource Gathering

Today we’re gonna be talking about my new plans for how resources will work in relation to purchases from customers.

This was one of the last major mechanics that needed its plans to be overhauled as the game leaned into infinite world generation and resource gathering. As explained before, the world is made up of brushes that each can have a different texture on each of their sides. Breaking a brush will give you a blank brush and seperate items for every texture on its face. These items can be combined together to create different items in a simple crafter.

Now- the original plan was having an accessible shop to acquire everything that wasn’t a brush or item. This being decorations, doors, lights, functional items such as registers, stoves, storage cabinets, ect. The problem is that the shop system’s money could not be generated outside of sales, and if the player had no uses currently for the money it just sat there. I think it may be better to instead turn this shop system’s currency into any resource in the game.

Basically this just immediately turns the shop into a crafting system like Terraria- where you don’t need any specific placement just the right amount of items. It could be interesting however to adjust what kind of shops you make to fit the resources you need. I’m not sure though what would be the most interesting way to handle what resources you obtain. Is it the exact item the customer purchases have a pre-set needed resource to give? Can customers pay with any resource but some will only carry a specific one and you need to win over those people? Can players just set a register or place of checkout to only accept specific payments so if a customer doesn’t have the right resource they leave in anger? HMMMMMM, all 3 might be interesting together. Maybe customers carrying specific resources could be simplified into their “interests” in specific items being ones that match a kind of resource.

If for example though that say all Ice-Cream items only paid in the resource of Dirt- players might never want to open an Ice-Cream shop. Maybe one way is that customers would pay in any given resource wanted for Ice-Cream, but if the Player set it to Dirt then they could charge more for the item and recieve more Dirt. This could also be randomized to the exact customers in the area however- maybe for every chunk there is always a set exact amount of 100 or so people that will show up with their own interests in items and specific resources they have on them- and the player can adapt in each location to the customer’s needs to get maximum profit. They can also choose to just do whatever they want and still net whatever items they want. There is a dominant strategy- but it could be that strategy just ends you up with more Dirt than other things, and that maybe you wanna try a location in a different area of the world to see if you can find another dominant resource that you actually want.

On another topic of automation- I’m not sure exactly if the Shop or gathering currency will be just directly accessible through GUI. I think my ideal for Shops is to have an extremely simple crafting-table sort of prop you can place that will give you all the shops you unlocked- but if you remember from long ago, players unlock each shop by discovering catalogues in the world or through some sort of task. It might be interesting that each catalogue as a prop on its own can be clicked on to pull up its GUI- the classic way of having different crafting tables for every single category of something you scatter in a big crafting room. Players can choose to either just use the main crafter anywhere they want, or have layouts that make sense to them (and for them to build creative things around each catalogue).

Onto gathering currency, its mixed. I want there to be some way of getting resources “wirelessly” from any location in your render distance, but that just promotes people to sit AFK somewhere and watch their resources go up. Having players needing to trek to every single register in their (lets say 100s of hours later) giant city might not feel as rewarding from all the hard work they put in. I guess the best solution is to have all registers be able to have nodes that can transmit resources to any storage system.

I mean the big thing in this game is having this node graph to connect electricity, compressed air, audio, video, ect. Doesn’t hurt to also let items just be sent to whatever place you want them to go in whatever way you want. Hell I could have a node that can just check what type of item something is and output it to different storages depending on if it matches or not.