An advanced Spark generator would be a nice quality of life addition. Similar to how the Titanium furnaces are better than iron which are better than stone or like power coils and advanced power coils.
Maybe something like doubling or tripling the output per advanced spark generator with them being build in the refinery using 1 spark generator and some mats to upgrade a regular to an advanced. As far as mats go, I’d suggest 1 of every elemental shard (blast shard, etc). This would help prevent shard prices from tanking now that elemental creatures are spawning in meteor events. It also provides a small challenge in gathering the mats without making it prohibitively expensive. If you went with tripling the the spark generated I suggest adding 1 gem as a requirement like some crafting requires 1 base or precious metal so it could use any gem.
This would provide increased efficiency in spark generation. An example would be a spark generator produces 100 spark from an unit of a fuel source and an advance would produce 200 or 300 from that same unit of a fuel source. It would just need to be balanced for crafting inputs and not eliminating spark as a crafting constraint/resource.
I’m not sure on this personally. I wouldn’t be opposed to one that maybe burnt things faster but produced the same spark.
But it might take value out of fuel is my concern mainly.
As a side note, did you know you can stack spark generators up to a 4x2x2 cube (16 total) and they grid together to form an array? It increases the spark/s and combines the durability.
Condiering the game, if they did make advanced spark generators like this they would cost 4k power, and each would require 4 regular spark generators, 100 compact [soil], and 50 enriched bonding agent, I think your fuel prices would be fine.
I love this idea. I think double output would be nice w/ a spark generator recipe that requires triple the current ingredients of the same type:
Iron Furnace Base - 3
Any Base Metal - 9
Ancient Tech Component - 9
Cog - 45
If we triple the output, I think the recipe should be tweaked something like:
Titanium Furnace Base - 1
Machined Copper - 1
Ancient Tech Remnant - 3
Nickle Spark Plug - 6
Moonstone - 10
2k Spark
1.5k Workbench Power (4k is ridiculous pls no)
Nickel spark plugs would be made from iron and copper bars. Moonstone would be new a item that drops from meteors / meteor mobs at a rate about the same as gold or elemental shards. It could also be crafted from 1 of each elemental shard. I think new items from meteors for the creation of this adv spark gen would be cool and maybe encourage more meteor hunting groups =O!