I suggest integrating the new resources of Krypton (KR) and Rhenium (RE) into more recipes so they will be broadly used across a wider playerbase.
The addition of KR and RE being required for the construction of Gateways was a great challenge, but at the low scale both resources are required at, even for the bulk gateway production that is planned, I believe they will quickly become obscure and underutilized resources. The playerbase producing RE is also extremely limited, as only dedicated gateway groups are pursuing it.
On a similar note, Colony ships don’t have a use case outside of the new sectors and so are very closely tied to RE demand.
Current estimates are that we will produce enough RE in the next few months for all of the gateways that might possibly be built (there is RE demand in Gateway upkeep, but it is a very small fraction of that), and the amount of KR being extracted vastly outweighs its rather limited usage - many players are extracting it but there is only a single demand that is rather consistent, and roughly an order of magnitude less than production rates.
Both of these are without widespread colonization of resource taps, as they are largely confined to gateway building groups.
A gateway only needs ~20d worth of a dedicated base in the new sector for all its RE needs - for the sheer scale of gateways and the effort that goes into them, this seems vastly disproportionate. Especially so since the only use for RE right now is in gateways.
Including KR and REO products in new recipes for existing materials would add demand. For example, RE could make sense to go into PT or EXO, while KR could potentially be used for MHL.
There are certainly many ideas for what recipes would work, but regardless I think the inclusion of recipes that use these resources outside of gateways is critical to making them part of the game outside of the very limited number of players building gateways.
An MM requiring RE or RE alloys would go a long way in enabling players other than gateway constructors to use the new metals. It would create a market for RE, since currently only gateway producers are realistically going to be mining it or using it. A UTS recipe using RE would enable starter players to buy and utilize RE. On the higher end, alternate recipes for DCH/DRF could work. Or repurpose the CC recipe to include some RE and increase the MM price to make it competitive. Right now there’s no reason for RE to be sold on the CX, because there are no non-gateway uses - anyone producing RE is using it solely for their own gateways.
Possibly, the future infrastructure updates in the roadmap for space elevators and space stations will also need the infrastructure items that RE goes into, which would be an excellent usage - though still concerns me whether these would be at the same scale as gateways where RE is a fraction of the cost and barely needs more than a single base to provide the RE needs.
Bear in mind that RE production is overrepresented due to only being rushed so much because many groups spent the last year stockpiling every other component we could make, and RE is the only bottleneck to building a full gateway. Once we catch up, I don’t see RE bases surviving past a few bases to match gateway production rates (from rough calculations about 6 bases across the universe should do that, plus 1 or 2 more for upkeep) and maybe a few more being maintained in expectation of the infrastructure update.
I do like the mechanics of the new sectors, and I want to see them as more than a temporary addition that cannot survive past the initial gateway rush. But with the current uses of RE, they won’t expand to players outside of gateway groups, and for the amount of work that was put into developing them (both by the developers and the players), to me it would be a shame if they were to largely disappear after only a few months.