Hi All, I’m sure we all agree that spark plays a major part in this game and we use a heck of a lot of it, and it just occurred to me that maybe we could have a block/component that we can craft that acts like a solar panel. This is not a new idea I know, it may have already been suggested on these forums. I used them a lot in FTB (so many things in FTB id like to have here) and it would be nice to have something that slowly builds up spark for us in the background.
They could be made as an endgame item with an expensive recipe, maybe requiring Lucents or alike and at a significant cost, but would be a nice convenience. They could wear out like other machines requiring repair, thus meaning not an endless supply of spark without input.
Anyway, just bored at work as usual and thinking out loud…
If they need to be repaired I’m all for it. Having a passive source of spark like that would be cool and I like the idea of needing to have it outside in natural light. Since they need to be repaired the spark wouldn’t be free and another idea could be to require a lucent spanner in order to repair it.
As cool as I think this might be, I’m horrified to think of what would happen when the big chunk of people in the game with near-unlimited resources build massive, massive fields of these things.
How do you mean? There is a limit to how much spark a cluster of generators will hold, I believe around 16 million. There’s not a lot of benefit to having that much spark afaik. Also, if it costs more to repair then it would to generate with coal or other fuels then it would be more of a convenience thing rather than a source of income.
It wouldn’t be too difficult to create two generator clusters a space apart, and then a web of panels off of each one… and then move 10 steps forward, and do it again… and again. Heheh
I’m not saying that everybody and his uncle would go out and do it, but I bet there are at least a couple of folks out there who’d plaster an entire planet in the name of passive income. There are definitely casual players who come and go, but this game has a lot of hardcore players who take things to logical extremes that would stress even a veteran QA team.
Well the thing is its not exactly passive income if you have to constantly repair them. If they got damaged enough that the cost of the wear on the spanner (lets say it required a gem one) was more than the typical cost of coal, for example, then it wouldn’t be a viable source of income.
I think if you want passive spark accumulation and convenience and aren’t worried about the cost, set up a request basket for spark. If you don’t mind having to do something tedious occassionally like reparing your panel array, you probably don’t mind farming some peat. If you’d rather have a solar panel rather than one of the alternatives (power coil is upfront cost for spark earning/saving, request basket is convenient, farming peat or kindling is just time/actions) then you are probably proposing something better than the alternatives that isn’t purely a QoL improvement, in which case balance has to be considered.
IRL the time it takes for a solar panel to pay off is something like 2-3 years. Imagine your panel produces 1 spark/s and you only fit 64 of them in a plot (and they can’t overlap) producing 3e7 spark valued at 3e5 coin per year. Would you pay 600,000c for a 1 spark/s machine? I don’t think that affects the balance too much in that case
Although I agree solar panels would be a fun thing to add to the game, I also feel as though there would be no great use for them.
I think the spark system works just fine, and I never run out of spark or even come close to doing… so that being said, I think if something like this was implemented to the game it would force a change to the current spark system (and there’s nothing wrong with it or the ratios)