Allow us to select all of the processers and select one type of product to make. Maybe let us route all of them to one location as well.
2 Likes
“One minor thing that would be another great change would be to improve the extraction time setting UI. Even hash marks for common times, like 24 hours, 48 hours, etc, would be a nice improvement to avoid “dialing in” the extraction time. It would also be very nice to have a “global” extraction time set for a planet so I can set a common time for all my ECUs in one go without having to go to each one.”
I have definitely desired this suggestion in my own experience with PI. Adding onto it, even if we could manually type in the number of hours/minutes/seconds it would be quicker, in my estimation, than awkwardly clicking along a slider for just the right cycle time. What do you think about that?
4 Likes
Please add “Access Customs Office” right next to “View” and “Warp To” in the Planetary Colonies window so we can easily start moving stuff around as we’re warping to the customs office.
Otherwise, this is everything I wanted.
1 Like
Auto route to the nearest storage would be nice, and cut a lot of clicks
5 Likes
First of all, thank you for spending time on this aspect of the game. Any rework is very much appreciated and long due.
One more pain-point that could be fixed with the same release is the routing materials from Storage Facilities or Launchpads to Factories. In setups using dedicated factory planets, people are dropping for example P2 PI into Launchpads, route these to P3 factories, and then to P4 factories, and pick up the P4 from the Launchpads. So if we could open the Launchpad/Storage Facility, select a material and set multiple target locations, that would be awesome and greatly reduce the number of clicks required.
Further explaining with example:
I have 3 Launchpads, 3*6 Advanced Factories, 3 High-Tech Factories and a Storage Facility. Input P2 PI is placed into the Launchpads. From here, I need to route 2 types of P2 PI into the linked 6 factories, and do the same for the other Launchpads too. P3 output will be routed to the P4 factories, and P4 output to the Storage Facility.
If the setup of the P2 requirements could work in a way that I click on Coolants for example, then select all 6 factories in a row, and then click on Submit. That would save 18 clicks per P2 per Launchpad. So setting up a P2->P4 factory planet would reduce number of clicks by 108.
Thanks for considering
4 Likes
Good day
Ty for reduce the clicks 
the ability to save a particular setup would also be nice
and the link upgrades could use a look at , now if you upgrade a link you do so with 100% (double of furst)
usually you only need 30% to 50% more, so you use cpu and power to upgrade a link you really only need half of the upgrade .
maybe upgrade the links in steps, 25% / 50% / …
i hope the new planetary colonies window is not much bigger than the old one
1 Like
Appreciate any improvements, I understand the bang for the buck tradeoffs needed to be made.
It would be nice to disable the holograms, I get they are fancy, and maybe cool early on, but as a more advanced user I don’t need them anymore.
I also agree with the desire to improve extract time intervals. A drop down would be easier (then maybe some simple increase/decrease from preselection).
I’d like to group and safe layouts of the extraction heads, make it a 2D version of managing scan probes and it would have a consistent look/feel for players (and maybe even some shared code).
That’s my 0.02 ISK
2 Likes
So glad to see PI getting some love!
Have you considered moving the planetary interaction window in a window much like the Map/probe scanner that be resized/anchored/full screened as desired?
I too, would enjoy if the holograms are disabled, because they make the buildings very hard to see when zoomed in to a very fine scale as the holograms cover multiple buildings. Maybe there could be some sort of zoom scale, where the holograms will not show up if you are zoomed in beyond a certain amount. The other changes look very nice though.
4 Likes
Being able to move extractors around would make this much better.
4 Likes
I’m looking forward to using this. I setup triple P4 factory planets using roughly 24 factories at a time and the routing is my major pain point.
I would like to see the need for setting up routes partially removed. More specifically outputs should still be directable but inputs should pull resources from any connected storage.
It would also be nice if all resources would be directed to one factory at a time in order to avoid splitting the last batch of PI over several factories and getting nothing back.
I would also like to see general inventory management improved. Moving materials to multiple planets involves a lot of splitting of stacks which takes a lot of time and a lot clicks with interjected typing. Something as simple as splitting a stack into groups of N units, with a final stack of whatever is left over, would remove much of that pain.
Thanks so much for this attention to a widely used feature! Interaction with Planetary Industry (a more grammatically correct name for the feature. This suggestion, (I wasn’t the first), earned me a post-like by CCP Guard) is required to produce a large and increasing number of items. It requires a lot of characters doing it, or an insane number of clicks to scale up for a single real player. I don’t know how else to say that more developer attention is justified, for more improvements to usability and Art.
2 Likes
This is all very good stuff. Some initial thoughts on what is missing:
The customs office bug that causes the window to close when exporting/importing. (Please. For the love of Bob!)
I would like to see some improvements to the customs office as well. Like getting rid of the dropdown menu and displaying which resource is routed to/from the launchpads. Personally I have all the info about which launchpads does what set up on bookmarks which also provides me with easy warp in.
Color correction for planets that causes things to be obscured. (Damned ice planets)
The hologram also tends to be a problem when selecting factories because if you want to save cpu/pwr on links you build them as close as possible.
I don’t see any QOL improvements for the extractors/extractor heads which is a large amount of the day-to-day maintenance.
I will definitely check out the changes on SiSi!
1 Like
Big fan of these changes and I’m totally on board with keeping the storage sizes the same but I have a few suggestions from the perspective of a dude running a ~1,000 planet chain maintained by 80 people.
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In the Surveying Program window it would be extremely helpful if the “Extraction Area Size” slider was significantly larger and had some standard duration markers listed underneath that - when clicked - snap the slider to that specific amount of time. I ask this because this slider is what PI folks spend most of their interacting with in this window but it occupies a tiny portion of the window to make room for mostly irrelevant information. Trying to select the right amount of time for your cycle is really annoying
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Would it be possible to create a “multi-route” option for when you are creating routes from your storage? What I mean is when someone double clicks a commodity in a storage to start creating a route (an option the guy making your gifs didn’t seem to be aware of) they can hold the shift key to then select multiple industry facilities and then when you “create route” or double click the last one (again, yes this is already an option rather than clicking that button) it will route that commodity to ALL those structures. This would do far more to save time for those of us that run the upgrading type planets than any of the other great changes you’ve introduced.
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Please get rid of the “nugget” mechanic for resource replenishment. I’d estimate that 90% of the guys getting into PI are completely unaware that this is a thing and they do a fantastic job of sabotaging what we thought was a viable setup. It’s a “haha, you thought there were resources here you noob now you have to rebuild that colony all over again” mechanic that adds nothing to the experience and only serves to frustrate the uninformed.
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In the same vein as the last suggestion: how about just getting rid of link CPU/Powergrid power consumption? It would be a big mechanical change but I’m not sure what this feature adds to the player experience, it just makes PI more annoying cause we have to tuck everything obsessively close together and completely rebuild our colonies when the situation on the planet changes, it also renders massive >30,000km radius planets entirely useless. I wouldn’t complain if you didn’t do this but it would definitely be nice.
31 Likes
One change that would probably be a lot easier to implement then layouts while achieving most of the same thing for P1/P2 planets would be some kind of default storage button that would route all factories and extractors to/from that storage since setting up those routes easily takes the majority of the colony setup time and they’re often to/from the same launchpad.
1 Like
The changes are very welcome, but why we still have to setup all factories one-by-one?
Why cant we just select multiple factories (via drag a rectangle over the factories - or SHIFT click to add factories ) and then give them commands that apply to ALL selected factories.
Same goes for routing wares:
Select the warehouse/LaunchPad -> double click the commodity that needs to be transported -> select multiple factories at once. Then the wares will get transported to all the selected factories.
That would reduce the necessary clicks to a minimum.
(…and please give us an option to completely disable the 3D Models - nobody needs them - they are always in the way)
5 Likes
Oh and 1 more suggestion I forgot in my last post.
- Is it possible to reduce the cooldown timer for loading and unloading things into and from the customs office? I understand that this timer is there to regulate the interaction between whatever server controls the colonies and the server that the system is running on but your hardware has improved a lot in the last 7 years so I figured I’d ask.
6 Likes
Awesome blog
Personally, I still hope for opinion to upgrade Processor in similar way as Link upgrade work
that would let player to reduce amount of Processors they need on planets which lead to less link/route needed. At end it would mean way less clicks needed
3 Likes
Firstly, thank you for at least starting to to fix PI, though I do admit still a long way to go.
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Could you make it possible to make templates if you are setting up many planets and they are all roughly doing the same thing, it would help to be able to save a template and adjust the inputs and outputs accordingly.
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Extractor Control Unit need to be more mobile on the planet, having to reset them all the time is a pain, maybe making it something like a mobile harvester you can move around the planet would be helpful, and the Extractor Head could work the same, just less need to reset everything if you need to move it.
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Why do we have to have multiple nodes of the same type e.g. Basic and Advanced Processors why not just upgrade a single node in the same way as the command centre.
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I know it was mentioned in the Dev blog, but why cant we have a restart all button somewhere on the planet screen, if there are no real updates it would save massive amounts of clicks.
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Larger storage is always a win also begin able to connect storage to storage so that you can have automatic buffers would be helpful.
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Massive CPU and Power grid upgrades to Gas Command Centers, given the distances involved on the planet, Command Centers have never scaled well when used on Gas planets. This has been a problem forever!!
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Overall PI could use some simplification, there is a lot of redundancy built in which could be solved by putting the infrastructure of the Processors over to the owners of the POCO as a central hub similar to any station we know and have the interface be linked with industry. Then have resource gathering managed by pilots using planet.
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Remove the pointless 10% NPC tax and the Skill that reduces it to 5%. Never got why that was added.
5 Likes
Wow, finally PI got some love <3
I’ve abandon this minigame just because of this clicking routine every 3 days. My 5 cents on what could be improved:
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Corporation storage in the POCOs - this is the most anticipated change to reduce logistics needed.
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Add “formations” to extractors just like it is in scanning. Or at least make them “stack” to each other without overlapping. Really - setting up all the extractors that won’t interfere with each other is a pain.
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Allow us to save our own “schemas” as presets of entire colonies. So moving everything to another planet wouldn’t be a nightmare.
7 Likes