I’m relatively new to CMSS13, so I don’t really have any input on game balance or deep mechanics. I have noticed something, though, that is a little annoying. Where marines go, its a damn mess of garbage and mags and discarded equipment, etc. Its a pain to deal with, especially FOBs that have been around for an hour or so that no one has maintained and you have to dig through crap to find anything. I imagine it also makes server/game performance worse when you have hundreds, if not thousands, of junk items laying around doing nothing.
My Solution? Recycling. Sounds dumb I know but hear me out.
Whenever a marine tosses trash, empty mags, etc into the Almayer disposals, its funneled to a machine in Req that makes piles of crap into resource bricks that can be redeemed for points/money. Similarly, a machine can be brought to the LZ that can print resource bricks out of salvage and garbage that can be crated up and sent to Almayer for more money/points. Add a garbage bag that can be carried as a pouch or something to help gather crap that can be tossed into the machine when full.
It would give something productive to do for ship side/bravo roles that are just sitting around getting bored, and the reduction of crap on the map might make things run a little smoother. Also, there could be things added to maps to make salvaging/looting worth while, like the money bags and rare gems that float around some maps. Having a side quest to raid the gold stash on Hybrisa for example.
Putting things in shipside disposals already lead to a crusher that creates metal. Good luck getting all the trash from the ground to the ship, though.
Add colored FOB customization stuff to the Marines so that a conditional bravo engineer suffering from perfectionism can draw some conditional green marks on the floor where he wants to place AP ammo
Add a trash glove box to the exterior wall of the Alamo board. Where you can store all the trash from the fob and pull it back out using similar mechanics to the cryo console in the cargo. So the trash will not be stored on the floor, and any willing marine can go to it and open the list, take what he wants + it will be shuttled between the hangar, where it can be processed by MT or cargo technicians (if they will not be lazy)
We used to have mechanics removing the MPE when you throw it away empty, purposely added so there are no packages left on the floor. But when another PR expanded the MRE contents (protein drinks, forks, etc.) this was accidentally forgotten and the change was rolled back. Now we have useless packs lying around everywhere again. (And they are made of plastic and pollute the nature of the colonies, facehuggers and larvas can get tangled in )
The idea was to deploy a machine that compacts it into high compression resource blocks that can be crated and sent back like intel. Didn’t know about the ship disposal though.
pretty sure MRE packs still disappear as long as you take out/eat all the packed food. It will be gone even if fortune cookie, drink pack, water bottle or fork is inside
A lot of the problem is unncessary litter from things we really don’t need to be creating on the ground - burnt out flares and empty MRE packs alone make up probably 10% of the trash.
Another big problem is that all the ammo has to get thrown on the ground, there’s nothing that contains all of it like the vendors on the ship do, so the whole fob is just plastered in ammo crates (often empty, too).
It’s a problem I’ve had whenever I try to introduce anyone to the game - they can’t tell what anything is, their entire screen is a cluttered mess and even telling one person apart from another person is difficult for them. I walk 3 steps away and they’ve already lost me in the sea of garbage and other marines that are 95% similar looking.
I think we really need to remove a lot more clutter, things like flares should just burn away, not turn into husks. MRE packs, the same - if there’s no gameplay utility from an item it should just be deleted immediately.
And the fob should have some kind of deployable ammo bunker instead of all the ammo sitting everywhere on the ground.
It creates a crumpled MRE that drops to the ground, and you’ll typically have other parts, like the sauce and water bottles left laying around anyway, because you’ve taken those out to eat them but they don’t disappear when dropped/used. It gets even worse when some new guy opens and dumps out all the contents including like 20 cigs and matches, which really ought to be 1 sprite with different numerical values like how bullets work, rather than literally 20 different sprites stacked on top of each other.
This is why Working Joe needs to be non-whitelisted on god
DangerRevolution
(Rear Admiral "Cyclops" - Outer Rim Defense Fleet)
13
There is a Garbage Cleaner, runs every hour or so and seems to only be once there’s too much garbage around. However, the simple solution is to throw everything on the Alamo Landing Pad as the Alamo crushes ALL items. It is THE Garbage Cleaner at FOB. It is what I spend most of my time doing as Bravo SL
It runs around the 40 or 45 minute mark. I know because it deletes glass shards which is kind of annoying but I get it, almost no one will use that, but it also deletes rods which drives me nuts because a. those can be used by the desperate b. there’s a stack of 40 rods in upper engineering that almost no one takes that I turn into metal in the autolathe, but for a very long time I would notice it was not there and I would think to myself, “Wow there is someone else who must have played MT as much as me who has become aware of those rods and are consistently taking them every round, maybe I’m not all alone in this job.” Then I realized it was code magically deleting all rods and I was all alone.
