As a hydrogen supplier, I’ve been seeing the plight of Fuel Engineers who can’t make money because players start with a ridiculous amount of fuel 1500 STL in total, and most players sell that making it so that Fuel Engineers can’t make money as the market is overloaded with fuel.
The Market Maker selling price is too low to make a profit, or even break even right now, so the current Fuel Engineers are in danger of disappearing. If new players keep coming in, then STL fuel may never be sell-able.
There are a few solutions available:
Quick Solutions:
Making the Market Maker price higher(8 might be enough to get some profit at current prices)(until fuel supplies dwindle, then reduce it back to original level of 4/STL)
Cutting starting STL fuel down to 200-400 STL, which would allow ships to get to most planets.
Cutting FTL fuel down, enough to get to most core planets.
Cutting down amount of workers required to run refinery
Long-term solutions:
Different grades of fuel, so beginning fuel is not the preferred fuel.
Recipe changes(different recipes that produce more fuel, like with the Smelter).
The Fuel Engineer is a new profession, so this is the feedback I’m seeing right now.
I started as a Fuel Engineer because it seemed logical to me that in a spacebased game fuel would constantly be in demand. I was however sadly completely wrong.
I basically had no way to make any money, as Frostwood said the baseprice for fuel is too low and the amount of fuel everyone starts with is rather ridiculous especially considering loads of people do not plan on using the fuel anytime soon so they are selling it.
Cutting down starting fuel is basically a necessity, maybe also make the starting fuel unsellable. That should open up the market at least a little bit right from the start.
I also like the idea of different qualities of fuel, though a wider variety of recipes would probably be sufficient to make this profession more viable.
Personally, I started the fuel engineer package knowing it would be a slower start (based on my previous alphas). Of course, I also ran high-risk operations in the previous alphas and Early Access startups, so this is nothing new
I managed to sell a moderate amount of processed fuel early, before the great fuel dumps happened on the exchanges
I think the biggest issue is the starting fuel everyone has. Adjusting fuel prices (especially w/ one price at start and another at mid-game) isn’t an option I believe. Higher MM prices probably won’t happen either, as MMs are specifically designed to be last-choice options.
That leaves adjusting starting fuel for all players, which I see as probably the best option.
Or, like me…I’ll just wait the sell-off out. And have a ton of fuel to flood the market with when that occurs. There is definitely a higher fuel useage this run than in the previous, with a lot more STL AND FTL travel happening, already in this first week of the game world.
Fuel demand will increase greatly as time goes on, and will quickly outstrip that provided by the starting packages. Our biggest issue with fuel demand is that there are not enough resources being produced that require shipping.
Halving the amount of starting fuel would be a good temporary solution, but is something that likely will only be implemented after the next reset. As ErrantK stated, this would quite negatively affect players who do not choose a starter world. However, it will generally only be experienced players who would do this.
Frostwood’s suggestion about using the REF to produce fertilizers or precursor goods is something I would support.
Once galactic resource production has increased, there will be much more demand for fuels, but for now, its a very difficult start. Perhaps starting packages could be given a difficulty rating to assist in influencing new players away from starts that may be too difficult or drive them away from the game.
Yes, we monitor how many players choose a starting package (and location) and estimate how many we need. This process will probably be based on more statistics later on.
