More Balance Changes

The core mechanic that drives the game is recipes, but they are rarely tweaked.
There’s a lot of potential for interesting new gameplay that could be created simply by adjusting old recipes or creating new ones.
For example recipes can have more than one output, which makes them very fun to plan around, but this is largely ignored.
Settler tier buildings could take construction parts which would give a lot of them more use like HYF does with MHL. Some FLP would make sense for a chemical plant.
There’s also recipes that feel somewhat redundant (see PSS, PSM, and PSL) which could either be consolidated or made more meaningfully different.
Large portions of the existing recipe chains feel like they haven’t had as much refinement, especially at higher tiers where there are too many items that only have one use.
Extractors are largely one dimensional, what if we had alterative recipes that consumed some resource in exchange for increased yields.
One mechanic that could be created entirely through recipes is tooling that is required for production.
What if there was a recipe along the lines Raw Material(s) + Tooling (using an existing item) = Output + Tooling
I don’t think any of these changes need or even should be made. But it’d be nice to have some kind of change.
The last time we saw any recipe changes was 3 months ago. Its strange such a core part of the game sees so little iteration.
I’d love to see more changes like the SI balance tweaks in Prestige.

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Recipe changes are some of the easiest changes that the devs can make, but they are also some of the highest risk. The entire PrUn economy has built up around the existing recipes - players have carefully worked out optimal production chains and ratios, etc, so any change could potentially disrupt their plans in a major way. Even adding new variations of existing recipes can have unintended consequences, and the devs have expressed concern about that in the past.

So while I agree with the above post, I’m not expecting any significant changes in the recipe tree until the next universe.

Right, they can’t refactor the entire economy in a single update but what’s the point of early access if they can’t even make regular balance tweaks? The economy has some ability to adapt to changes so I don’t think it could absorb at least a single recipe change every month or so. Any major update or feature comes with this risk. This version of the economy will be reset eventually, but that’s potentially years away. I’d rather see some minor market fluctuations now than be stuck with a stagnant recipe system forever. I think a critical element would be announcing any changes as far as possible ahead of time. People are smart and can calculate new ratios and adjust their production. This is what the game is about after all. If someone wants to build a massive processing chain with carefully balanced chains there are lots of games out there that offer that.

Another option is gradual transitions of recipes.
Let’s say you want to change A + B → D to A + B + C → D
Instead of changing the recipe in one shot which could be disruptive
you could make a gradual change, first by introducing the alternative recipe as a secondary option
and slowly adjusting the yield of it and reducing the yield of the old recipe.
This means more frequent changes could be less disruptive than what we saw with SI.

Imo this is actually a bit tame. I think it could be fun to see some real curveballs thrown in. This is supposed to be a dynamic game after all. Factorio provides a more compelling “build giant ratio-based chain” game.

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What’s the goal of this recipe? Unless there’s some property that alters the Tooling consumption, then that’s equivalent to a recipe with the consumed amount of Tooling as input without Tooling as output. If you’re trying to emulate capital, it’s already in the form of building materials, so you could set the Tooling there instead.

They wouldn’t be exactly the same.
Building capital depreciates and applies to all recipes.
This applies to only certain recipes (so you could have different amounts and types for each recipe)
and can be added later.
Plus you can control the degree of tooling depreciation per recipe or not have it all.
Not that it makes it a solid option. Its the clunkiest recipe change I have suggested.
I’d rather see more building specific tooling like with hydroponics.
But the point more is, the recipe system has a TON of potential.