Question About Component Modding

[DelnarErsike]

Is there a way to make components have a resource upkeep? Currently, the only consumable resources that a players needs constant supply of are reactor fuels, but I'm curious if there's a way to force ships to consume resources other than just fuel, which could hopefully be used to make control over non-fuel, non-luxury resources a lot more important.

I was thinking about doing something funky with splitting reactors into two types (one traditional that burns fuel, one "maintenance" one that burns steel or polymer or w/e) and fiddling with stats so that reactors of both types would be required on ships, but from what I've read online, the game would only burn the "fuel" in one of the two reactor types.

[Drybreeze]

I don't think there's a way to do this.
You can make any kind of fuel-consuming component you like and classify it as a "reactor" and the resource that you want to consume as a "fuel" however a vessel will only burn the "fuel" of the highest tech "reactor" that you install on the vessel... so you're back to square one.

It would open up a lot of possibilities if this one thing was changed so that ALL reactors on a vessel burned their fuel simultaneously... but I doubt that Elliot is going to modify a game that is about to become obsolete with the release of DW2.

[DelnarErsike]

Hmm, sad to hear we can't trick the game into consuming more than one resource per ship/station. I was thinking of doing something like having the traditional fuel reactor have a high energy output and a minimal energy storage capacity while the maintenance reactor would have a minimal energy output and a high energy storage capacity, but if you can't mix and match stats like that and/or the game would only burn fuel in one of those reactor types anyway, then I guess that's that.

As for DW2, until the game is actually announced or rumored by a credible source, I will assume that it's not in development. Seeing as I'm primarily a Civ5 modder, this is usually when I'd say that DW:U would benefit from releasing its gameplay source code to modders, but I know that DW:U doesn't have its code split between engine and gameplay parts the way the Civ series has had since at least Civ4, and reorganizing a codebase like that be quite a huge effort. This isn't even talking about sorting out copyright stuff with the legal team, e.g. I know that the Civ4 lead designer had to deal with 2K's legal team for quite a bit before all the potential legal issues were sorted out with publicly releasing a major part of the game's source code.