A collection of ideas accumulated since my company turned to 100% shipping and trading in Dec 2025. Some ideas are related to future updates or plans from dev team (such as shipping routes) while some just came to my mind on a random afternoon. Some ideas are different approaches to a same/similar issue/topic so there will be overlaps.
Very long post but I decided to put them together since there’re some interconnected ideas.
Labels:
minor changes/implementations upon existing system
major changes/implementations or require a new system
need universe reset or fundamental gameplay design/policy change
related to or is a future update or planned feature
draft idea
Storage Buildings
Stockpile
- A type of either partially sheltered or not sheltered storage site and only have limits on volume.
- Can only store ores, minerals, metals and alloys.
- Area cost 15~20 (maybe upto 25) and can only be built on rocky planets, but require less construction MATs than STW (maybe even less than STO) and doesn’t need environment specific construction MATs.
- Inspiration is from reality: We don’t build a fancy climate-controlled warehouse to store copper ores or steel rolls, instead we just pile them on flat land or at best build a shelter.
Private Warehouse Rental Service
- In short, it’s a contract that a player sign with others that one of them provides warehouse capacity and the other pay and use it.
Motion: Use More Planetary Warehouse Units
- Motion to authorize a player to use more warehouse units, limit on rentable units for an authorized player is max 100x of a regular player
- Available since warehouse lv 2.
- Planet warehouse can be upgraded to above lv 20 but upgrade MATs can only be provided by those authorized players.
- Envisioned use case is for planets with small amount of players yet have needs for more warehouse capacity. Current system have a level-dependent fixed limit for every player, which means only method to be able to rent more units is to upgrade the warehouse. Yet that would very likely end up being too costly as upgrading a warehouse mainly contributes to total units count rather than unit limit per player.
Shipping Routes
Shipping Routes
- Planned feature. Based on my understanding, this would at least require Basic licence. Devs haven’t post anything solid on this topic so here’s all my ideas.
- Limit one route to/via/from any base.
So for example you have a Promitor-Avalon route, you cannot create a Promitor-Boucher route as this will make Promitor have 2 routes. You could however have a Boucher-Promitor-Avalon route instead. - Space Stations can have infinite routes.
HRT-Promitor, HRT-Avalon, HRT-Boucher… - No restrictions on ships assigned to a routes.
- Automatically operate based on pre-configured rules.
- Route limit for a base could be increased by constructing a special building at the base.[1]
Faction Government & Politics
Tariffs
Access Restrictions
- Allow/reject access for ships according to set of rules, restricted ships cannot land at location.
- Rules includes shipyard the ship was built at, ship owner’s faction, and ship owner.
- From planet level to faction level, set by respective governing body.
- This would be a source for conflicts for example you could secure a planet this way. But at the same time it should have a method to fight against this mechanism.
Logistics As Profession
Logistics Profession As Starter Option
- Start with 2 MCB ships (1000t/m³), enough fuel, and a base with some STO.
- Under current game design and gameplay policy this have to be restricted to Basic/Pro players. And it requires a completely different tutorial as well.
- I personally think this is too radical and is very unlikely to be implemented, yet I like this idea so never abolished it.
Service Depot
- Apply a repair cost reduction for ships at location, but require 200 area. This is to prevent production bases planning on having this building.
- Small percentage reduction (15%) in all (or most) repair materials. For optional shielding plates and modules: additional grade dependent percentage reduction. E.g.: BWH have an extra 15% reduction (30% total) and AWH have an extra 30% reduction (45% total).
- Require workforce, workforce efficiency is an additional multiplier on repair cost reduction. Workforce would be SET, TEC, ENG at a ratio of 6:3:1.
Exact number of workforce required is a configurable value (with cooldown) rather than actually tracking how many ships are repaired, so if plan to repair 1 ship per month it only need say 10 workers, 15 ships per month would increase to say 100.
Overcapacity would have a negative impact on workforce efficiency. - Gain an expert in maintenance after certain amount of parts used for repairing.
- This idea emerged when I was considering AWH ship designs. AWH right now have poor performance unless you live inside a grinder. Removing AWH from repair cost makes no sense as it expose to environment so certainly will wear out.
So I rethink about ship repairing: Ship crews replace worn parts with spare parts, so you need a lot of spare parts, and they can do it anywhere. But if there’s a group of specialist, they can analyse worn parts with tools and experience, this reduces requirements for brand new parts.
Service Depot As Service
- Contract to provide repair service for other player’s ships
Logistics Office
- Small building size (~20 area) but only one per base.
- If present, allow one more shipping route being planned from/via/to the base.
- Allow more shipping routes by assigning logistics experts, 1 expert adds 2 more routes.
- Deactivated if Logistics Centre is present at base.
- Does not gain expert, therefore rely on company level experts concept which allows experts to be assigned across multiple bases rather than tied to one base forever.
Logistics Centre
- Requires 150 area but only one per base, this is to prevent production base planning on having this building.
- If present, all warehouse at this base would increase their capacity to 135%, and allow infinitely more shipping routes being planned from/to/via the base.
- Gain an expert in logistics for certain amount of cargo handled by this base.
Packaging Centre Redesign
- Roughly equal to 3 PAC buildings in terms of area, construction cost and workforce requirements. Categorized under logistics.
- Packing become very fast. Process rate should be designed that for one building alone is enough to process output of several fully developed production base (e.g. able to process 10k units of DW per day). In this way, packaging centre only becomes viable when there’s a large-scale steady flow of MATs to be processed, making it viable for a logistics base rather than production base.
- Some MATs would have a “packed/compressed” variant which changes in weight and volume, those variants could have a separate recipe.
- Gain an expert in logistics after certain hours of operation, same as how experts are earned now.
Container Ship
Containers
- Constructed from (some if not all) existing ship cargo bays. Example: A LCB could be converted to a 2000t/m³ container, with a slight increase in weight and massive change in volume to say 225t / 2050m³.
- Once converted, it acts as a portable shared inventory with an unique ID. The ID is for container market and contracts.
- Could have a condition percentage just as ship, lower condition reduces container capacity.
- Require dedicated storage sites. On planets, the site is space elevator. Each container takes up certain amount of site capacity (say a 2000t/m³ takes up 4) so the site need to expand according to demands.
- Could be disassembled, but doesn’t return all materials even at full condition.
Central Truss Spaceship
- A new category of ships, similar to concept art - ship 3. Unable to land on planet surface, does not have a cargo bay but use container modules instead. Require space elevator to be able to arrive at a planet. Require a base permit in order to be operative.
- Construction require both a shipyard and a space elevator, so that the ship is built in orbit rather than on planet surface.
- Cargo are stored inside containers and containers are attached around central truss of this ship. Therefore it have a variable operating volume and diameter. Loaded with more or larger containers results in a larger diameter and volume.
- Perform FTL travel similar to Colony Ships, but require infrastructure. The infrastructure operates similar to a lighthouse which only acts as a guide for the ship.
- Blueprint for this category of ships is infinitely scalable, but larger ships require shipyard to have corresponding skill/research points.
Container Market
- A LM style market that only exists along with space elevators and space stations. Container owners post availability, estimated departure & arrival time, and unit cost.
- Customer accepting an ad would be shown a command to book capacity, and have temporary access to corresponding container inventory. Customer could book more capacity than actually used by MATs (book capacity for 30k FF but only loaded 20k).
- A contract would be created automatically when customer confirmed booking, between customer and container owner. Contract conditions as follows:
Conditions Party Book 123.4t / 56.7m³ of capacity in container CNT-1A2B3 Customer Pay booking fee of 12,000ICA Customer Lock container CNT-1A2B3 for shipping at Hortus - Promitor (VH-331a) Container Owner Unlock container CNT-1A2B3 for unloading at Huber Station Container Owner
Infrastructure Integration
Infrastructure Operating Cost
- Players with experts in maintenance could operate infrastructures at a lower cost, however the expert must be assigned.
- Players operating infrastructures receive expertise rating, which naturally drops over time. Higher expertise rating lowers number of experts required to reach a similar cost reduction.
refer to Logistics As Profession section Logistics Office and Logistics Centre part of this post ↩︎