Beacon Fuel Shards

[Krollbar]

With beacons in their current state (for us mere peasants who do not have gleam club), we want to get our money’s worth when we fuel our beacons. The problem is if we refuel early all current fuel is lost; you can add time to a beacon, but fuel remaining is irrelevant. This results in some of us playing Beacon chicken - if I use a greater beacon fuel I don’t want to refuel a couple weeks early because it’s not super cheap.

The quality of life improvement I would suggest is to either have a beacon fuel shards option like with portals - you can top a portal off without losing remaining fuel - or allow us to overfuel beacons by at least 25-50%. That way when we top off there is less waste

This should cut down on instances of beacon sadness from beacons expiring since you can now top it off a little early without feeling ripped off.

[ctrl-64]

I’ve been saying this for years.
The beacon fuelling mechanic needs to be updated.
I made a similar suggestion:

@ctrl-64

If you put fuel in ANY length of time before it expires, you are wasting fuel. (This is horrible for people that try to max efficiency like me)

Beacon fuel should ADD to the time, but there should be a limit on when you can refuel again, like you can only fuel a beacon until the remaining fuel is less than half of the amount you are trying to fuel. That would work with all fuel types.

For example.
If you were trying to refuel a beacon with one that lasts 2 weeks, you would have to wait until it has 6 days, 23 hours and 59 seconds for it to consume your fuel to have now 2 weeks 6 days 23h.
As well if you put a 16 week fuel you would have to wait till there is 8 weeks left to top it up to 24 weeks.
Of course the amount of time per fuel type can be tweaked for balance or whatever.

The problem with the current system is that if you don’t want any losses you have a window of exactly ZERO seconds to refuel before your plots go wild.

I am obsessed with efficiency so I will always use the longest lasting fuel.
And when you are using the max fuel type, you have a lot of resources to gather. You’d want to make that stretch as far as possible.

What I am proposing is that window of opportunity (to refuel without losses) gets expanded to half the amount of time of fuel you are using. (Or about to use, or whatever.) Increasing that window for no losses is an IMMENSE QOL feature.

(okay, I tweaked the quote to combine 2 messages in the same thread.)

[Ocfos]

It adds up, if you have more than one beacon.

I’m up to at least 6 beacons, so even doing it with two weeks left on the clock, adds up to over three months worth of wasted fuel.

I’m not even one of the worst case scenarios, either.

[almund]

@ctrl-64

I am obsessed with efficiency so I will always use the longest lasting fuel.

Wouldn’t aiming for effiency just cause more problems to you that you would need to fuel on specific time or you would lose something?

[Ocfos]

Yes, that’s the point; We aren’t allowed to be efficient, without risking everything.

[DKPuncherello]

This.

I regularly refuel 30+ beacons with tier 3 fuel and 3 or 4 weeks left on them. Not the biggest downer in boundless by any means, but still, somewhat undesirable. That’s a lot of wasted fuel.

[Krollbar]

It could be that once upon a time beacon fuels lasted half as long, and our current state is already a bonus but I still want fuel to carry over. At least some of it…

[DKPuncherello]

I agree. I see why you shouldn’t be able to just shove 20 greater fuels in a beacon at once, but perhaps a 3 week grace period on greater fuel, a 2 week period on improved fuel and a 1 week period on basic fuel? That is:
If you put in a regular fuel with 1 week left you end up with 5 weeks
If you put in an improved fuel with 2 weeks left you end up with 10 weeks
If you put in a greater fuel with 3 weeks left you end up with 15 weeks

[Krollbar]

Perfect solution.