Zero Maintenance on a harvester and it's impact

Zero Maintenance on a harvester and it's impact
This idea/suggestion is Open. You can respond to ask questions or discuss the idea and either vote it up or down if you believe it should or should not be implemented, respectively. Popular suggestions and ideas will be considered by the development team to become reality in-game.
Proposal
Instead of emptying a damaged harvesters hopper entirely, the contents should reduce at a rate relative to the harvesters extraction. A hopper should be locked until a damaged harvester has been repaired.
Justification
The only in-game notification that a harvest has an issue is a mail that generates with less than 24 hours notification.
Motivation
Having thousands of units of resources be deleted because real life reared it's head.
Due to the real world getting in the way, I realised last night that I'd not emptied a harvester or topped up it's maintenance. The in-game message got generated at 7am, when I was at work. When I did log in, the harvester was damaged and the hopper empty. Completely accept that this is a fault on my part - I forgot that when maintenance runs out that the structure becomes damaged, however having the hopper emptying entirely as well as repair bill feels like a complete kick in the teeth, especially when the in-game mail didn't even give me 24 hours notice about this.
 
We also have an issue if hopper hits 100% I have found power drops to zero. There is something funky going on with harvesters for sure with power/hoppers/maintenance
 
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I believe the cost to redeed is a good thing. Credit sinks are a good thing.

Yes and no. My issue with the current redeed cost is that it's an arbitrary single fee (that I feel is pretty high considering they're a temporary structure). It doesn't vary depending upon how long the harvester has been down or the amount of resources gathered, it's just a "aha, you want your harvester back, give us X credits!". As a game mechanic, it feels really bad and is compounded by the fact that we have no idea how long a resource spawn actually has left - you may put down a harvester and only get a days worth harvesting before having to redeed and move it. We also do pay a maintenance fee to run harvesters (in addition to power), so you've arguably a credit sink baked into them already.
 
Yes and no. My issue with the current redeed cost is that it's an arbitrary single fee (that I feel is pretty high considering they're a temporary structure). It doesn't vary depending upon how long the harvester has been down or the amount of resources gathered, it's just a "aha, you want your harvester back, give us X credits!". As a game mechanic, it feels really bad and is compounded by the fact that we have no idea how long a resource spawn actually has left - you may put down a harvester and only get a days worth harvesting before having to redeed and move it. We also do pay a maintenance fee to run harvesters (in addition to power), so you've arguably a credit sink baked into them already.
I agree credit sinks area good idea, and don't really have a problem paying to redeed the harvesters. While it could be steep, it's not really too bad. I wish there was just a system that said "You have extra maint in your harvesters and that doesn;t carry over, so that's what will be used to redeed and that's it, but then you'll have the crafters doing the math for how long they expect a spawn to last and doing their damnedest to time it so there's practically nothing left when spawn dies to pay as little as possible. I know I would.

It does also bring to mind though, that excess maint in a harvester when you redeed it should remain on it, not be lost like it is now.

Excess power stays, why wouldn't the excess maintenance?
 
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I agree credit sinks area good idea, and don't really have a problem paying to redeed the harvesters. While it could be steep, it's not really too bad. I wish there was just a system that said "You have extra maint in your harvesters and that doesn;t carry over, so that's what will be used to redeed and that's it, but then you'll have the crafters doing the math for how long they expect a spawn to last and doing their damnedest to time it so there's practically nothing left when spawn dies to pay as little as possible. I know I would.

It does also bring to mind though, that excess maint in a harvester when you redeed it should remain on it, not be lost like it is now.

Excess power stays, why wouldn't the excess maintenance?
pretty sure its a bug where the redeed cost is being charged twice so if you have excess maint on a heavy over 9k then it should stay and tbh i already let my maint get low and pay them up to 4.5k when i redeed just to prevent the loss
 
pretty sure its a bug where the redeed cost is being charged twice so if you have excess maint on a heavy over 9k then it should stay and tbh i already let my maint get low and pay them up to 4.5k when i redeed just to prevent the loss
I do the same because any excess just disappears anyway. Didn;t know it was a bug, I thought I recalled live doing the same thing.
 
I do the same because any excess just disappears anyway. Didn;t know it was a bug, I thought I recalled live doing the same thing.
yeah id consider the excess maint loss and the resource dump when maint or power empties more likely to be bugs than anything else. ran a quick experiment on this and pretty sure Yarr has prior where you drop a harv pay a little over double the redeed and the little over will stay
 

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yeah id consider the excess maint loss and the resource dump when maint or power empties more likely to be bugs than anything else. ran a quick experiment on this and pretty sure Yarr has prior where you drop a harv pay a little over double the redeed and the little over will stay
Definitely sounds like a bug then
 
Yes and no. My issue with the current redeed cost is that it's an arbitrary single fee (that I feel is pretty high considering they're a temporary structure). It doesn't vary depending upon how long the harvester has been down or the amount of resources gathered, it's just a "aha, you want your harvester back, give us X credits!". As a game mechanic, it feels really bad and is compounded by the fact that we have no idea how long a resource spawn actually has left - you may put down a harvester and only get a days worth harvesting before having to redeed and move it. We also do pay a maintenance fee to run harvesters (in addition to power), so you've arguably a credit sink baked into them already.
I believe this is simulating the manual labor cost of taking a harvester apart and putting it back in its box. Its free to place it though. No change to this money sink should be added to this proposal.

Recovering resources from a broken harvester - Yes.
More event notifications for harvesters - Yes.
Free harvester redeed - No.

I would like to add though, that excess maintenence paid into the harvester either be refunded upon redeed, or stay with the harvester like power does. That is, anything over the redeed cost. If the redeed would cost 3000, and the harvester currently has 4000 in it, redeeding would refund you 1000, or simply remain in the maintenence pool just like power does.

And while we are at it, allow money to be retrieved from house maintenence pool as well, like it used to.
 
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I believe this is simulating the manual labor cost of taking a harvester apart and putting it back in its box. Its free to place it though. No change to this money sink should be added to this proposal.

Recovering resources from a broken harvester - Yes.
More event notifications for harvesters - Yes.
Free harvester redeed - No.

I would like to add though, that excess maintenence paid into the harvester either be refunded upon redeed, or stay with the harvester like power does. That is, anything over the redeed cost. If the redeed would cost 3000, and the harvester currently has 4000 in it, redeeding would refund you 1000, or simply remain in the maintenence pool just like power does.

And while we are at it, allow money to be retrieved from house maintenence pool as well, like it used to.
I'd be more in favour of a variable redeed cost, so something placed for < 24 hours costing less than longer placed items. I don't know if the date the structure was placed is something that's stored, so this might not even be possible.

Ultimately for me as a player the most important element is how the game feels to play. The items I put in my proposal are the items that I feel are the most unfriendly and least intuitive. The way maintenance works could be worth raising as it's own PV because there are quite a few differing views on it.
 
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I agree credit sinks area good idea, and don't really have a problem paying to redeed the harvesters. While it could be steep, it's not really too bad. I wish there was just a system that said "You have extra maint in your harvesters and that doesn;t carry over, so that's what will be used to redeed and that's it, but then you'll have the crafters doing the math for how long they expect a spawn to last and doing their damnedest to time it so there's practically nothing left when spawn dies to pay as little as possible. I know I would.

It does also bring to mind though, that excess maint in a harvester when you redeed it should remain on it, not be lost like it is now.

Excess power stays, why wouldn't the excess maintenance?
The Redeed fee is 4500 minimum, 9000 max (on a heavy). Anything over 9000 does stay.
 
I like the idea of a loss over time of resources in a damaged harvester. Letting it go to zero and stop working, and have to pay for repairs is a penalty. The total loss of resources is a massive and I think unintended penalty.