Resources, Research and Crafting

A Sector Darkly (ASD).

Since the story of the game places you in an unknown sector of space, your supplies are low and availability may be limited.

Survival Elements

• Your crew consumes food and water. It is not meant to be a punishing mechanic, rather a consideration and overall part of the implementation of exploration. The goal as previously mentioned in the exploration diary design intent, was to make you feel small, and space big, that feeling of a small ship vs the universe, your ship is your home, your crew is your family.

Expeditions

• If you want to explore and really upgrade and prepare yourself for what's to come you have to prepare for expeditions that take you far from any friendly port. That requires ensuring you have enough sustenance for the crew, extra ammunition like missiles, rail-gun rounds, sensor-probes, fuel, point-defense ammunition (where applicable) and supporting drones: miners, repairs, salvagers. Journeying down a long wormhole exploration depth-chain can take time to find the exit again, be well stocked.

Crafting Recipes

• All is not lost if you run low on supplies. The process begins with the fact that your ship has an industrial fabricator, (think large 3-d printer), and is capable of crafting items you need from materials you gather. These materials can be gathered from mining, salvaging wrecks, exploring planets with away teams, and drones. The convenience is, you can dispatch drones, they do their thing and return, while you keep exploring, but don't leave them behind!

This is the space station crafting interface. Recipes on the left. The station detects if have enough of the components to craft a recipe and you go from there.

• Each item in the game has a crafting recipe. Need water? Find an asteroid with xyz. Locate a derelict with supplies. Need more ammunition? Locate the resources and craft them on the fly! You can also craft components and sell them for profit.

Research

• This leads us to research. You are allocated research assistance (aka points) for completing tasks for the alien factions. Use these points to research blueprints for various items, then craft or purchase the components/materials to build them and fit them to your ship.

The research tab, once a blueprint completes, you collect it, then you can switch to the crafting tab and craft it

Summary of the Entire Loop

• The whole loop is as such: gather resources (quite easily done, many ways and many locations available), research blueprints for advanced components, or craft currently available components, equip to ship. Low on supplies? Send out your crew in shuttles on away missions, on successful completion, they will return with items. This means you can scan planets for raw materials you want before deciding to send an away mission there.

  
  

• And in true ASD fashion, nothing is fake or ambient. When you launch your crew on an away mission, they will use available shuttle-craft, launch from your ship, fly to the destination and as they are no longer aboard, (any bonuses they provided are temporarily unavailable), once complete they will return. If they are injured or end up in stasis, they will send an automated distress beacon alerts you to their condition and you can go collect them.

Next up we'll talk more about the crew and away mission systems