I generally like the changes to beacon fuel, but one thing that bothers me a little is that I can no longer efficiently ‘top off’ my beacons. I tend to play a little irregularly, so with the old fuel I liked that I could always just top off my beacons every time I played, whether they were low or not - just in case I didn’t make it back on for a while.
With the new fuel, if I top off the beacon, it’s not a great feeling because I’m “wasting” a lot of the fuel. It’s like I have to play a game of “chicken” with how long I wait to top it off. The longer I wait, the more value I get out of the fuel, but I also risk not making it on in time and losing everything.
One possible change I thought of would work like this: you can add as many days of fuel as you like to the beacon, but to make the fire burn you have to “stoke” it. Stoking the fire will keep it active for a limited number of days according to fuel type (same values as now). This would keep things basically the same, just without this little logistics issue.
That might be interesting… personally I kind of just wish Beacons were like Portals. You have fuel that you add to it like Oort crystals but can drop in one to top off kind of or something. Or something like that. It would be easier so you don’t waste as much fuel or have to wait until it is smoking to put one in and use it the most efficiently.
I think part of the new beacon fuel reasoning is to try and avoid somebody putting down a plot or 10, dumping a year’s fuel in it and then dropping off, leaving the claimed land uninhabitable. With the current system long lasting fuel is expensive, and someone going through the motions to acquire it would be less likely the person who drops off immediately after never to return.
I like your idea of “stoking” the beacon, so you could have extra fuel loaded but it only activates if you interact with it - kind of like a furnace where you don’t use the whole compact block to cook 1 item, but the leftover heat (in the furnace example) stays available until you activate the next cook. Cool idea.
I think you should be able to stack fuels like the descriptions suggest, but like Prome3us said:
I think a good solution would be:
a) You can only add one of each fuel type (14 days + 28 days + 58 days + 84 days + 112 days)
b) You can only add a piece of fuel once the burning fuel gets down to half the time of the fuel you want to put in.
That way you don’t have to play “chicken” with your beacon, just top it off when you are able to, and you’d have a window of time where you won’t waste any fuel.
The numbers could be tweaked a bit for balancing, especially at the lower end, but with the rarity of shadow orbs I think the last tier should last longer or at least stay the same.
I don’t understand why shadow orbs have been made so ultra rare. …I understand the concern regarding beacons just being put down and fuelled for months on end with nothing being done to them by new players and then abandoned but we already have the limitation of being able to create higher tier beacon fuel by the machines, spark and power needed. If someone has gone to the time and trouble of making/buying these prerequisites then why the additional road block of making the necessary resources practically impossible to find. Gems and titanium are easier to find in comparison and a lot of people still don’t have them for all their tools and weapons etc … it’s not as if the market is flooded with gem items at low prices that anyone can just buy as many as they want. If higher tier beacon fuel was at a similar level to gem items then only those that are interested in staying around are going to spend the coin on them given the choice between a new shiny slingbow or some fuel for their beacon.
Yeah, I don’t think they should be as rare as they currently are. Perhaps they are harder to find than intended. I haven’t seen any devs mention it so hard to know how difficult they wanted the orbs to be. I’m hoping they will make them a bit more available. Let them be found on tier 3 planets as well for example.
Part of the reason why gem tools are still hard to find is because of the shimmering orbs. They are required to make the enriched bonding agent that is used to make the gem tool. The other parts of the reason being the elemental shards, and gems.
That is kind of what I mean… I am fine with maybe a fuel type that is 1 day or something that you can add to your beacon to help top it off after placing one of the others. I have no issues with keeping the limit to 4 months but it kind of isn’t fair to force people to have to EXACTLY log into the game at a time that is close to it being expired versus maybe coming in and adding an amount to cover the difference.