StarSim: Mining Conglomerate Trailer #2 

Thank you!

Due to some limitations in art tools available so far, we were unable to get our mining laser in for ships. Currently waiting on the official 3DS Max exporter. The functionality is there currently for special ship mining lasers being the most efficient way to break asteroids without damaging any yield within. "Mining" damage type will give highest yield and quickest time breaking apart asteroids, with lasers/particle beams second with lower yields, and ballistics nearly no damage with no yields. Ship equipment and perks will then allow specialization.

Right, I had the same thought. Asteroids could be resistant to everything but mining lasers to incentivize players to fit mining lasers. That way a mining ship is specific- otherwise all ships are mining ships lol

@@awesomeness55 That's the thought process. StarSim expands out ship classes heavily. Its not just A/B/C class ships that somewhat different amongst themselves, but M-class (military), T-class (freighter/mining/transport), and P-class (personnel) ships that are clearly built for a specific goal.

Elite dangerous?

I believe that is already the case

It’s already like that in base game dude

@@WEET_ unless they patched it recently that wasn’t my experience. I land on a side of the moon overlooking the planet, but when I exit the ship and look up I don’t see it.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!

We'll see on that. I imagine we will see an actual Sim Settlements for Starfield in the future. Our expertise is space, and we'd love to work in tandem with whomever builds the planet-side simulation.

Thank you!

How is it?

@@dickyboi4956 Pretty good, and plenty more coming these next few months. But I'm biased.

​@@dickyboi4956 It's alright --definitely nothing near as good as what is to come or promised-- but what's there is okay. There is a bug where I can't interact with any of the buttons on the mission/message board computer interface when docked. The balancing of the new jobs is kinda wonky too; in hard "protect miner" jobs, it feels like the miners are protecting you more than anything else due to how many spawn and how high level they are. All the jobs have balance problems from what I've seen. The mining jobs tell you to go extract a category of resource such as "uncommon," but don't actually tell you what uncommon is thus you're sitting there for like 30 minutes playing a guessing game. It's not that fun. These two issues kind of spoils what little there is in the mod with how consistent of a problem it is. If you haven't bought it yet I'd wait another month or so -just so the jank can be ironed out and it can be properly balanced.

At the moment, we've been using the same resources utilized by Bethesda as they integrate well with various other recipes for items. There's no reason, though, not to support adding other materials as we can find a purpose for them in the future. Each new StarSim module will layer over the others and offer new ways to utilize the previous content.

@@Vaernus Alright, thanks for answering my question.

Thank you!

Do you mean with regards to going into the station and using a traditional mission board? The decision to build the Station Interface was based on the fact that we are going to add many more stations per orbit as StarSim is built out, and there needs to be a quicker way for you to interact with the station versus having to dock, board, run around finding people, run back to ship, get back to pilot seat, and take off multiple times in the same area. This includes comms with NPCs on the station, technicians, trading, etc. which is currently not activated in the early access version. Only specific stations that require interaction due to storyline will have interiors.

@@Vaernus Thanks for the reply, that sounds plausible, can't wait for the mod to get better!

Mining conglomerate will house everything related to mining and in essence will be its own creation. But we are going to be working on other simulation based creations that can be used on their own or all together if desired.

Yes, due to engine limitations, a new game is required, as existing games don't set up cells correctly.

It has been discussed, but we're trying to limit this to space only to limit compatibility issues for other authors/teams with planet-based content. The more we touch, the more it clashes with something else. What it does do, once we have orbital support stations added in the next monthly update, is provide an interface for surface-based projects to hook into StarSim's space economy. I.E. outposts you build hook in. Simulated businesses on planets hook in. Vendors at permanent locations (like New Atlantis) hook in. Anyone building content for the planet can interface with this as well.

It’s advised to start a new game as space cells don’t generate correctly otherwise due to an engine limitation.

We are getting conflicting reports on existing saves. Our understanding was that the engine does not load new space cells in an existing save. Some folks have been able to load this in an existing save, and the cells loaded up allowing it to work. Some have not. New game or NG+ absolutely work so we're recommending them only.

I loaded it on an existing level 27 character and it worked fine. It did take an unusual amount of time to configure itself when I first loaded in (about 15 minutes or so) but once it did it was smooth sailing. There is a bug however that I sometimes cannot interact with the mission board interface, it opens but nothing I click actually registers and leaving and reentry doesn work. Only way I found to fix it is to leave fhe system and come back.

So StarSim itself will have gates connecting all orbits hooked together into various "gate networks" as a way to travel. This is especially important for ship simulation as gates are easier to understand for AI ships to "path" to the correct orbit (they can look at how each orbit connects to any other to determine a way to travel there). This is coupled with grav jumps requiring He-3 and you can't let AI ships (or the player) get stranded. We have concepts like tug services if the player were to jump outside the gate network without topping off their He-3 to get picked up, docked to an AI tug ship, and jumped into a nearby gate network. Player could then travel to the closest He-3 depot to top off. As for pure seamless travel, we've investigated so far. Something akin to elevators in Fallout 4. One concept we're looking into for orbits used in Mining Conglomerate and future StarSim modules is expanding out each "orbit" cell to be substantially larger. I.E. you could have sub cells connected via seamless travel local to the given orbit. No load screens required. Still looking into what can be done in the engine.

@@Vaernus There is a mod on the nexus that does seamless travel but it is outdated. One thing I discovered using it though is that the space is all connected. You only have to quick load and quick save to load in the planets and the mod provided a macro where you simply press it. What is interesting aswell is that at the centre of the star system there is an actual star, fully animated with markers and everything!! It seems as though seamless travel was cut content. Maybe due to engine limitations or perhaps creative decision. Eitherway though it looks promising. I do like the idea of using gates as well. Anything that allows us to navigate without using menus is great :) If you guys pull this off you’ll be heroes! Not being able to use my ship as a traversable vehicle is the only thing holding me back fully diving back into it again.

@@chrisclark6705 Yea currently we sit in one gigantic space cell in a star system. I want to say its max size the engine supports. There's some fudging of numbers when attempting to travel from planet to planet as the actual space between them would be larger than what the engine supports (say 2 billion meters), but you could in effect have a No Man's Sky-like approach to travel between each. We'd most likely have gates connecting between star systems at specific points (with minimal load screens), and then X3 (Egosoft's space sim we're using as inspiration) had the concept of "trans-orbital accelerators" which were basically rail guns that fired off your ship at crazy speeds and caught you on the other side. These could have a more controlled process of sending your ship to another planet/moon in a given star system without a load screen, with the appropriate Papyrus code to not require a quick load (a simple MoveTo upon arriving should suffice).

@@Vaernus Ok. Now you have me officially excited to play this! That sounds amazing!! That would be really cool to see. Then you could have NPC using the portals and so forth and then if you are a pirate, you could travel around waiting for any stragglers that are out of sight of any authorities. This would basically complete the experience for me! I’d definitely be purchasing this then! Absolute game changer.

@@chrisclark6705 That's the thought process, yea. Though my gripe with the X series was that it was one gate network. I wouldn't expect pirates and such to survive long as militaries wiped them out. Not exactly hidden. However, we would be setting up a series of gate networks. I.E. you'd have the "Settled Systems" network which interconnects the core star systems for UC and Freestar, with some fringe unexplored orbits. There could be completely undiscovered gate networks open for Constellation and other explorer groups to investigate. With the appropriate secrets to find. Finally, gate networks generally controlled via factions like Crimson Fleet, Ecliptic, House Va'ruun, and Spacers making it very difficult for militaries to actually clear them out as the grav jump "wells" are known points that would be heavily defended. Almost like the 300 movie with the Spartans, where they'd blockade those points armed to the teeth, and you'd either need a massive fleet to break through, or find a grav jump point that was overlooked.

Was this a new game? We're getting reports that its sporadic with the engine when trying to load new space cells in an existing save. Nothing we can really do about that as its a limitation of the engine with a few systems that only work on a new game.

@@Vaernus Yes! New game on my series X

@@Vashir91 Did you receive both message boxes when its initializing? The initial one should pop up immediately on load, and the second one after its fully initialized the simulation?

@Vaernus Yeah! It's when I go to the station, the interface is unclickable for me

@@Vashir91 I'm at a loss then. QA through Bethesda and our local testing on Xbox works fine. Not sure why Xbox is working differently for some, though we're hearing more issues with Xbox side than PC. The files for either are identical as its scripting only for this. Wondering if there's something else causing this based on load order and other content being loaded in. We'll continue to test to see if we can identify any issues. We do have a patch already pushed and waiting for approval, so maybe the fixes in there may resolve but there's currently no ETA for when it is approved.

Not directly, but they do provide input for what we work on, and all projects go through their QA for approval.

@@Vaernus but none of these approved mods are canon to the universe?

​@@bobman3093 Not sure on whether any of our content would be considered canon by Bethesda. You can mark content as lore friendly.

@@Vaernus thanks for the info

It is purchasable for 500 Creation Credits.

@@quarteronion 😂 no thanks I’m good

Nah man these people definitely deserve to be compensated for their work these are like entire dlc

@@thatgreenpotato1027 plenty of free mods about mate, I’ll be fine, in fact I can mine better than this on star citizen everyday for free and the game costs less than starfield, modders are hobbyists not devs

As intriguing as this mod seems. I'm reluctant to pay for mods by individual creators, mainly because you get stuck as interest wanes or something happens and the creators don't want to update it anymore. It doesn't seem like someone will be able to adopt it and fix it, or run with it. You know, like a free mod.