Consumables Bundles (PBUs, SBUs, etc…I like to call them "XBU"s to encompass them all) were introduced over a year ago, and overall they’ve had a rather lackluster reception and uptake by the community. Ask around, and you’ll get a few critiques of consumable bundles:
Firstly, and the main issue: they don’t rather do much over just buying the consumables themselves. You get a little bit of space savings, sure, but in the era of HCBs and easy access to ship building shipments, that small amount of space savings is often not worth the added cost of the PE/PSS needed to produce them. It could save time dragging things on/off a ship, but that has been rendered obsolete by XIT ACT. Not to mention there is extra “click” overhead added by having to unpack the bundles once they arrive aft their destination, which makes their use annoying; if you forget to unpack your XBU and you run out of workforce consumables, that pack will happily sit there whilst your workers starve.
Second, there is the building itself. PAC is a 35 area PIO/SET building. The 35 area size and 20/40 worker commitment means it does not fit neatly into many base plans as an adjunct service; it seems like it’s meant to be part of a dedicate packaging operation. They can’t do anything other than make XBUs, so if you don’t have a market for them you’re stuck. And with the lackluster demand for them due to all of the points above, nobody is rushing to make a PAC base to supply either themselves or the galaxy.
In short, there aren’t enough benefits to make the consumable bundles an interesting choice, let alone a desirable choice, over just buying the consumables individually. Most players, including myself, come to the conclusion that the “juice” of interacting with XBUs, whether in the production, trading, or utilization of them, are simply not worth the considerable squeeze their use demands.
I think that, to encourage their use, they need an added benefit; a value-add that would justify the increased cost they would demand over just buying the respective consumables outright.
What I would like to propose is simple: change consumable bundles so that while any XBU costs 10 days per 100 workforce to produce, it gives 11 days per 100 workforce when consumed. The deal then becomes the title of this post: The XBU promises that if you spend ten days of consumables on it and/or buy it, you get an eleventh day for free.
I think this would give incentives for both producers and consumers. For producers, the free 11th day would be a value add for potential buyers, and would let them potentially stretch out consumables they would sell for more profit in return for the work they put into making them. For consumers, if they are priced right, they would reward their use with “buying in bulk” savings compared to buying 11 days worth of individual consumables, while still leaving room for buying individual consumables if space or funds are restricted (or if 11 days would just be overkill for the situation).
To prevent exploits around opening the new bundles and reprocessing them, the bundles would need to be changed so that they are consumed directly by the base; they would not be able to be unpacked into their individual consumables. This would also remove one of their pain points: letting them be directly consumed by the base would make them as easy to use as normal consumables, rather than needing to remember to unpack them.
When talking about this on the Discord server, SLKLS did make a good point that there would need to be rebalancing as the higher population tier bundles, like CBU, would gain a disproportionately large amount of value compared to a PBU. They could be balanced by a combination of changing production times and/or changing the types and amounts of non-consumable inputs (like the PE/PSS required now) so that the gain in value is brought in line across the whole range of XBUs.
Lore wise, you could justify it as efficiency: prepackaged bundles help with planning, allowing supervisors to stretch their supplies. Or as SLKLS suggested during the Discord conversation: “Having pre packaged boxes for every worker reduces the amount of damaged or “disappearing” supplies on colonies” could be another in-universe justification.
Anyway, that’s my thought on making consumable bundles more viable. I’d love to know what people think about this idea. And if you’ve made it this far: thanks for reading!