Gas exude and consumption disabled in mutation pool

[dustylens]

Edit: Some will contest this. A great deal of work has gone into producing a gas mining loop with specific shuttles, tools, miles of code, a POI and other means to enable a novel gameplay loop directed at the collection and refining of gas on Frontier. I would urge you to consider the hundreds of hours of time that has been poured directly into ensuring that gameplay loop exists on the server in the unique form that it does when evaluating your criticism of this exploitative system being temporarily disabled until a suitable replacement method can be put into place.

About the PR

This PR removes gas production and consumption from the list of possible gas mutations.

It also increases the flat purchase cost of air, nitrogen and oxygen canisters from 1.1 to 2k.

Why / Balance

For a considerable length of time the production of gasses through botany has sat on the fringes of problematic but fringe behavior. With the occasional spike of interest driving extreme value for some in shifts. Given that this gameplay style is transitioning from the fringe to the mainstream a balance response is warranted.

This system has begun to transition into the mainstream, with the production of plasma via what are essentially self sustaining gas miners. This is far outside of the gas mining loop that has been provided and represents an undesired self sustaining economic loop.

This is supplemented by the procurement of oxygen canisters from trade. Which have also seen a modest price increase. I feel that this price change will have a negligible impact on persons who seek to procure additional gas for their shuttles (these being available in bulk in space and gas grenades being a far better solution for depressurized hulls at any rate) but will knock a little bit of hole in the arbitrage bucket for frezon production chains.

I would prefer harmful and exotic gasses be produced via botmos for the chaos and merryment of the server. However I believe that is a heavier lift than addressing the short term needs of this economic hole demands. That can be tomorrow's project with the simple resotration of the mutation.

Technical details

yml

How to test

Gas production mutation should not be possible.

Media

Requirements

• I have read CONTRIBUTING.md and and am following the Pull Request and Changelog Guidelines.
• I have added media to this PR or it does not require an ingame showcase.
• I have reviewed the Ship Submission Guidelines if relevant.
• I confirm that the content in this PR is my own work, and/or is properly attributed to the original author(s).

Breaking changes

Changelog

🆑

• tweak: Gas production and consumption mutations are no longer possible.
• tweak: Filled gas canisters at trade are now 2000 spesos.

[HandsomeTheEgg]

literally everything can be powerfull if just used correctly or excessive long enought but seeing you even considering removing it fully instead of adjusting it or asking the science behind it makes me speechless. To say its an economical problem is literally wrong because there are no resets...there are no real moneysinks...there are no prestiges or systems that would help with exessive cash...even a miner doing a pure shift mining can make like 6-12 millions of speso and i am sure some might even more so he wont even need to make money for months if he just plays casually . Most of the server have so much money they dont know what to do with it .

[Kvantos0]

The canister price increase is probably warranted and healthy for forcing people to actually reycle their O2/N2 instead of mindlessly dumping cans into the appropriate port. Perhaps consider raising the price of air grenades as well, as they would also contain the gas, just in a more readily usable form, unless capturing air from them is a step that you feel would justify the price difference.
Yes botmos is gaining popularity, because it's frontloaded in effort. You do semi-intensive botany for a couple of hours, depending on your luck maybe even half the shift. Gas mining however while less action intensive and combines multiple sources of money-making is an ongoing effort and setting up for refining does also take some shift-start setup as well as expertise in atmos.I feel you could balance out the persistent seeking of asteroids with gas deposits and the required effort in making gas with plants instead of suspending this loop for an indeterminate amount of time.

To make gas mining more appealing, consider an advanced gas deposit scanner with more range that is accessible through science and could allow people to scan any non-outer ring roid for gas from the comfort of their cockpit, so searching for the deposits is less of a chore, sort of like the long-range and short range anomaly locators.
If you'd instead like to raise the bar for botmos, adding a negative plant health modifier to these mutations would be my suggestion to go with, not nearly as severe as the death gene but something similar. In this case the botanist would also have to either produce dylovene or vitamin to keep the plants alive in an ongoing production effort. This wouldn't hinder an expert botanist that much, but it'd require another layer and perhaps narrow down how many people opt for these as they're more intensive to maintain.

[ray-boop]

I said this in the past multiple times already.

Please for the love of lord kudzu, buff before nerfing..

Botmos IS very strong, everything can be very strong if you do it at a large scale.
Thing with gas plants is like kvantos already said, you have do a lot of work front up (unless you got the ultimate god roll for gasses on first try.. 1% or something) and with mining you have guarantee to get some kind of gas out of a node.

Improving the scanner and gas deposits itself would make it much more attractive compared to the current approach of 5h botmos preperation which you need knowledge to not have the plants die in their own smog.

The increase of the canister value is a good thought but nowhere near the change that is needed.

[marlyn-x86]

even were botmos to be axed, there exist a population of gas miners who will purchase gas canisters from the cargo bays over mining it after having mined the plasma they need, because the cargo bays are reliable

[the-hivequeen]

I hear peoples' concerns. We have done our due diligence in observing shifts and checking logs and botmos is not taking people 5 hours to set up. It is becoming quick, consistent, and increasingly present on the server. Beyond the fact that it can make an amount of money that would make you weep, it's encouraging the "sit on a trade cargo bay for an entire shift buying canisters" behavior that negatively impacts others. It's one thing to fly off into the distance and print off 100 million spesos and not bother anyone. We've been aware of that for an eon and were happy letting it fly under the radar. It's another thing entirely to take up 1/3 of the sell bandwidth of the server to eke out a bit more cash. When it starts making the Frontier experience worse for others, it is correct for us to step in and make changes.

I am noting the points about air grenades and the canister changes not being enough. We will keep an eye on it and make further changes if necessary. Again, I would prefer not to, and really hope people can just be reasonable with the tools.

The maintenance team has voted and decided to merge this PR. It works in testing, approved.

[Tibels52]

Like do not get me wrong. I COMPLETELY understand the reasoning of "person hogging trade and printing money because they can buy gas cans" issue at hand here....this should not be a thing that should ever be happening. The price of gas cans should probably be made more expensive to account for this which this PR does, but it may not affect the practice with out a major price hike. I don't know all the data at hand here. Which might in all not be enough to cut out this unintended behavior.

But completely removing it out right and removing an entire interaction/game play loop between profession's instead of balancing other aspects in someway via how much they produce or even some other way. Like plant life being shorter, production rates being much lower, something... anything. I hope I'm wrong here but removing a loop in the the "hope" things will be added in the future is just down right a mind boggling decision to me. Because who knows it might never be addressed due to other pressing matters or other priority issues. I love the maintainers and are grateful for the work they put into frontier, I really am. But they have lives and other priorities. This could take a week, could take 5 years. Who knows.

As for gas grenades possibly being an issue, the gas they provide in oxygen alone is so minor its not worth the price of the grenades from TM then it would be to just buy an oxygen canister at least right now. You get more nitrogen out of them then you do oxygen, its not even a can of oxygen if I'm not mistaken. So for the worry of abusing them for gas. I don't see to much of an issue at hand with these. Gas grenades are great for filling your ship with an atmosphere but not really for anything other then that. At least that's what I believe.

[Alkheemist]

going to wait for a bit more community discussion with this one before it gets merged.
Like marlyn pointed out, it may not even fix the problematic behaviour that was noticed, but it definitely kills an entire cross-department gameplay loop.

[tonotom1]

People can reliably create a viable gas mutation plant (and likely get auto-harvest alongside it) with the right chemical mix and procedure and then are mechanically encouraged to propagate the gas-exuding auto-harvesting seed across dozens of hydroponics trays. This procedure likely also increases the amount of yield to around 5 or 6, like a cocoa swab hybrid.

It may be a good idea to infer how encouraging high volumes of auto-harvesting plants may fare for the performance health of a server.

[marlyn-x86]

the auto-harvesting mutation doesn't directly help the gas exudation - the gas is exuded every plant life cycle, independent of produce being ready. Though, it is likely that the plant will become auto-harvest over the span of mutations the plant undergoes

[tonotom1]

Though, it is likely that the plant will become auto-harvest over the span of mutations the plant undergoes

Precisely what I'm bringing to attention. It's not directly influencing the gas mutation, but it is highly coincident due to sharing the same procedure to induce. I also don't have confidence that every player would actually be considerate or proficient enough to commit the critical step of breeding out the auto-harvest.

It's a mechanic that establishes multiple pitfalls and incentives for either maladaptive, inconsiderate, or cyclical action - especially with how you can unanchor trays and then compact them together and theoretically scale until limited by how quickly you can replant, rewater, and compost your trays.

[marlyn-x86]

I'm considering a different system, where the trays instead use specific "feedstock" gases that become the limiter, individual plants processing large batches of the gas so that only one or two plants is sufficient to manage the conversion process, to remove the incentive to tray spam

[HandsomeTheEgg]

Though, it is likely that the plant will become auto-harvest over the span of mutations the plant undergoes

Precisely what I'm bringing to attention. It's not directly influencing the gas mutation, but it is highly coincident due to sharing the same procedure to induce. I also don't have confidence that every player would actually be considerate or proficient enough to commit the critical step of breeding out the auto-harvest.

It's a mechanic that establishes multiple pitfalls and incentives for either maladaptive, inconsiderate, or cyclical action - especially with how you can unanchor trays and then compact them together and theoretically scale until limited by how quickly you can replant, rewater, and compost your trays.

upstream has an open pr where you cant stack trays on top of each other anymore , also breeding out auto harvest is childs play since you only need to overwrite everything into a fresh seed to get rid of it

Discussion has been had, some ideas for supplanting these mutations have been put forward so no reason to hold this up further.

[ErhardSteinhauer]

This issue has already been discussed and put to a vote, so I’m proceeding with merging this PR as is.

In my view, a game mechanic that sits awkwardly between two gameplay loops and can be exploited by a very small number of players to generate disproportionate amounts of income per shift isn’t particularly healthy for the game, and its removal is unlikely to be missed by the vast majority of players.

[Dragometh]

not a great decision tbh but oh well