The Consumable Bundles release will be released on TBA
General Notes
If your APEX console is stuck in a loading state after the update, please make sure to refresh it once after the update to ensure you got the latest version.
New features
Consumable Bundles
We are introducing consumable bundles. These bundles contain basic and luxury consumables for a specific workforce that will provide for 100 workforces for 10 days.
Pioneer bundle PBU
Basic
Amount
DW
40
RAT
40
OVE
5
Luxury
COF
5
PWO
2
Packaging material: 50 PE (was 4 PSS)
Weight/Volume: 14t, 9mĀ³
Settler bundle SBU
Basic
Amount
DW
50
RAT
60
EXO
5
PT
5
Luxury
KOM
10
REP
2
Packaging material: 100 PE (was 6 PSS)
Weight/Volume: 21t, 14mĀ³
The new UPCK command allows to unpack bundles. It is available as a context action in the INV command. Alternatively it can be opened when clicking the little U overlay on a consumable bundle inventory item.
Manual unpacking might become a barrier to the widespread adoption of Consumable Bundles. Is it possible to add the following QoL improvement before the release?
During the workforce consumption event, if there are not enough consumables to fulfill some workforce tierās needs, that tier automatically unpacks its consumable bundle.
Or:
During the workforce consumption event, if there are not enough consumables to fulfill some workforce tierās needs, that tier consumes its consumable bundle instead.
The second option can work like a consumable with fractional consumption:
I think the idea of consumable bundles is a good one and could reduce some of the base management overhead that burns players out, but making a building to facilitate it (and by extension presumably dedicated bases for some folks) is missing the mark. While it might seem to reduce the overhead of loading up ships with what a single base needs, it looks like it would in actuality be trading it for moving more loads of greater quantities of the constituent items between production sites and the packaging hub base (likely with station warehousing in the middle, as theyāre the effective storage points for any sizable empire), then the same in reverse for the finished packages.
Rather than a base building, I would like to suggest that having these facilities be rentable units at stations in much the same way warehouses are might make the most sense, bringing that functionality to the logical aggregation point. If the same is desired on individual planets, it might make a good candidate for a planetary infrastructure project ā again akin to how warehouses work.
This is a fantastic QoL concept, but I fear is fatally flawed, because as designed youāve made it actively economically unfavourable to use the packages. Making packages has a cost both in materials and labour, so the packages will be more expensive than the raw materials, and it looks like the packages are both heaver and bulkier than the constituents? So a high-flying player who cba with lots of clicking would need to find a supplier willing to make the packs, pay them a premium for them, spend more shipping getting them to where they need to go, then manually remember to unpack them? I think thatās too economically unfavourable to be viable. Fortunately there is a simple way to introduce an economic balance: make the packs denser than their constituents in at least one metric, preferably both. Then at least there is a shipping/storage advantage to using them.
As designed it is economically enormously unfavorable to use the bundles. Not oniy due to the building cost, but also the pss cost. Currently, it adds $6000 of PSS cost to $13,000 worth of pioneer goods. Plus the cost and opportunity cost of the building itself which is about $1,000 more dollars. And you justā¦ Lose this pss when you unpack the items?
Additionally, you still gotta handle shipping the items to the packing center anyway so it doesnāt really make life easier at all. I love the concept and this is something which has been ruminated about for years, but I wouldnāt use this as designed. Itās too expensive and not actually any better.
Rwinner makes the case on discord that PE makes much more sense as a packing material. Additionally, he opens this up to being a planetary population infrastructure building which charges a small tax to perform the operation. I like this much more than using a production building to do it, since at the end of the day you arenāt actually making a product. Youāre just performing inventory manipulation. Iād really want this to be able to be done on the cx as well however, since me and so many other people use hub-and-spoke logistics. If it were only possible to wrap items on a planet, I think weād barely see any usage of this feature even if it were free.
Agreed with all the comments so far: this looks like a fantastic idea, but itās too expensive.
A question for molp and the team: are you envisioning that manufacturing companies or consumable production companies would make these packages and then sell these packages on the CX? Or are you envisioning that every (large) company would build their own PAC for their own purposes?
I think Iād personally be interested in both modes:
In many cases Iād like to buy prepackaged consumables, but Iām only willing to pay a small premium for the convenience (a few percent, not the 50% premium as currently designed)
I make some of my own consumables, and buy the rest at a CX. Having to fly materials from a CX to a planet, wait many hours and then fly back is, I think, too burdensome. Iād love to be able to quickly package up stuff directly at my CX hub.
Some half-baked ideas that probably wonāt work, but Iāll mention them anyway:
Maybe have a BMP be able to produce a ābarrelā or some type of reusable container for stuff. Consumables can be instantly packed or unpacked into a barrel anywhere. The barrels are reusable (which keeps cost down). But now you have to ship empty barrels back, which I donāt love
If packaging up goods is going to take many hours, then there the resulting package should be less volume/weight than the individual components. This is one way to have the āsum greater than the partsā that lowstrife described
I agree that making it a production building adds too much cost and complexity. Also, rather than being a QOL that reduces the tedium of managing and loading a bunch of items onto your ship, this simply transfers that tedium to a few producers who are willing to do it for a fee.
This also assumes that the premium price will be high enough that a sufficient number of people will start making them. More likely - the price will be too high and the packages wonāt be available in sufficient quantities to make them reliably usable. Anyone who is really interested in using them will probably end up producing these themselves which defeats the point of this trying to be a QOL feature.
I would much rather see this as a warehouse enhancement (both on planets and at CXs).
Regarding the idea of giving the packaged goods less mass/volume makes sense when you think about it. If youāre shipping individual items there is going to be a lot more packing material than if you ship them in bulk. Thatās not just saving from the package containing the goods but also shipping material (cellophane wrap, packing peanuts, etc).
I can definitely see the market for ease of access to WF consumables. However, I would be against the new buffer āUPCKā only to cut down on unnecessary complexity. This seems like something that could be a few buttons in the āWFā buffer as such:
Thanks for all your feedback so far, it is much appreciated!
A few thoughts:
Yes, the idea was to allow relatively new players to package the bundles and sell them on the CX. Thatās why PAC is a PIO/SET building.
We decided to use PSS because it is underused.
This would be possible as well, but requires more dev timeā¦ It also wouldnāt go well with the above mentioned idea that we want to have another product that new players can produce for older players.
We also think that the price of PSS will go down as the demand increases.
Weāll have another look at the numbers and get back to you.
PSS makes sense for the higher end items. For example for Scientist upkeep, itās only $18,000 in PSS out of $550,000 of consumables. As a percentage itās far less significant.
But for pioneer items, itās way too large of a share. So it needs to be a cheaper item to get it to a more reasonable percentage of the cost.
I also think āgetting backā 75% of the plastic when you unwrap it would go a long way to making it more economical as well.
How new is ārelatively newā? At current prices, one bundle of scientist goods would cost about $700k. Absent a loan, I think it would take a good bit of time before a new player had enough income to support producing the higher tier packages. At that point they probably wouldnāt be considered a new/relatively new player anyway and would be moving on to more advanced productions themselves.
I think these could be pretty nice for LM sales, but I donāt see myself ever using these. They might be worthwhile in some contexts (traveling consumer goods dealer?) if they were more compact and lighter than the sum of their parts, but they might still be too expensive then.
Even if these induce increased production, PPS is likely to remain expensive enough that it would make most of these fairly unattractive.
I donāt understand why settler labor was included for these. Not to insult warehouse workers (been there, friends have been there, a plurality of my IRL city has been there), but packing boxes seems to be the least-skilled job represented in the game. It seems like pioneer work all the way.
Maybe Iām off base, but will there really be enough demand for a dedicated building to do these? Would these be better as (yet another) BMP product? Especially considering the input costs for high-tier packages as mentioned above, these buildings seem fairly inflexible, which is a bad place for a new player to be. Perhaps other kits than just workforce consumables would help this, for example a CoGC upkeep kit, though I canāt think of a whole lot of other good packages.
I appreciate the goal of deepening PSS demand, but I agree that wasting PSS just to make workforce consumables a little more convenient seems like a bad value. Maybe the building could have a few different production processes for different sized packages. PE for consumables for X workers for Y days, PSS for 10X workers for Y days (with improved mass/volume parameters relative to PE), PSM for consumables for 100X workers for Y days, etc. Big players especially are willing to pay for convenience, but the markup per batch seems excessive.
Iām guessing the CX price floor of PSS is around 500 (based on the cogm for a highly-integrated company).
My other concern is the recipe times. 6 PSS for a settler consumable package would take my 3DPrinter about 17 hours (and thatās with a 170% efficiency bonus. Production time is about 24 hours at a 100% baseline efficiency).
For a company trying to keep 1 single PAC running full time, they would need about 4 PPFs running full time (depending on efficiency), so now the base area requirement is approximately 99 (requiring 240 SET and 20 PIO, so add another approx 50 base area of habitation). This is non-trivial, so I suspect the only companies who will get into packaging will be companies who can dedicate a full base to it
āI built a building that consumes plastic; oops now I need 12341092847 PPFs to supply itā is already the standard workflow for anyone who runs UPFs. Might encourage people toā¦ shock horrorā¦ buy their inputs!
I put together a quick sheet to calculate the estimated production costs for the respective bundles:
Itās really just an estimate, since it isnāt including construction, repair and shipping costs. But it shows, that a pioneer bundle would already be 36% more expensive then buying the consumables seperately - without any margins for the producer.
Counterpoint redid the package material requirement. I adjusted the numbers in the original post. This should bring it down to < 5% of the bundles worth.
I still donāt think the fundamental reason for these to be used by a seasoned player exists.
Theyāre heavier and larger than individual consumables.
The boxes need to dramatically reduce size (primarily weight) for them to make any sense for me to buy ever. And not just a little, it should be something like vacuum packaging. If keeping enough RATs and DW for my bases no longer took 500t on its own but instead was only 200t, thatās a big difference. Itād be worth the effort of having to manually unpack them.
With the packs currently, theyāre instead going to take 600t, cost more due to labor and PE/PSS, and I have to remember to do another step to unpack them. There is currently 0 reason for me to use these in place of my current process.
Well, there is 1 reason. To reduce the time & tedium of purchasing/loading/offloading 6 different consumables for each worker tier to 1 product. The discussion is whether or not that is enough of a reason.
Before XIT action, there might be enough of a reason.
Now? When I make a spreadsheet and powerload it? For me, personally? I donāt think so. The cost is one thing, the shipment penalty is another. I load 60-90d of consumables when I repair the base, and usually it just barely fits in a 2k ship with repair materials. Barely. Now? Iām not so sure.
