[Jackriip]

This is very much in progress and many of the things in the description will be changed and adjusted.

A full balance pass on money, gear, research, missions and NPCs, built around the 6-hour round. Strong crews no longer have top-tier gear within the first hour or two. Instead, gear comes in steps you earn by working your way out from the green zone, and the dangerous zones pay better. Green-zone crews can still get every kind of resource.

Goals

• Progress across the whole round. About an hour in, a strong crew should have good melee, armor and a few guns. Around hour two, ordinary guns and a security-grade suit. From hour three on, advanced and elite gear for the crews who fought for it.
• Danger pays. Yellow and red zones give more ore, better loot, better pay and tougher fights. Green stays viable for every resource.
• Gear comes from the world. Guns and top-tier weapons come from loot, traders and hard missions, not from a printer, the cargo console or the room you spawn in.
• No easy loops. Repeatable ways to print money, research or rare gear are closed.

Round length

• Every round ends at six hours. Ships are told to prepare twelve minutes before, the fleet jumps out at 5:58 and the round ends at 6:00. Transfer votes are off while the timer runs; admins can still end the round or cancel the jump.

Money and trade

• The mining console's cash bill is now a 500-credit bill for 2,000 mining points.
• Titanium no longer pays extra mining points from boulders, and the ore redemption machine shows its real rates.
• Materials market base prices: diamond 120, bluespace 80, gold and titanium 40, uranium 30, silver 15, iron and glass 2 per sheet. Iron and glass never drop below 1 credit, and a market boom tops out at 1.5 times the base price. Stacks still sell whole, so timing a sale still matters.
• Trader contracts only ask for things you have to go out and get: fauna harvests, ruin finds, salvage, raw telecrystal and glacial cores. Kitchen orders, fishing requests and hides are still around. Ore and sheet requests are gone.
• The suit fitter asks for recovered MOD salvage.
• Cargo loans pay their bonus once.
• Nanite program disks no longer export for cash.
• Cargo pays only for an empty gas canister, not the gas inside. Vex and gas harvest contracts still buy gas.
• Traders and the order consoles charge less for everyday supplies: food, medicine, tools, ammo, boards, MOD modules and the like. The riot shield and the laurel cost less too.
• The mining console's MODsuit costs 7,200 points.
• Outpost checkpoints cost 5,000 credits to save and 2,000 to update, a ship bay 6,000 and an advert 500.

Research

• The survey console pays research only, no credits. Survey values were reworked so bigger targets and more dangerous zones are worth more.
• Survey scanners work only at natural sites, and a site gives out over time. Coming back later or swapping scanners doesn't refresh it.
• Experiment rewards belong to the crew, so printing a fresh source disk doesn't pay them out again. Refunds only cover discounts you actually paid for, and merging research notes no longer adds a bonus.
• Restoring a nanite backup needs the programs to be researched on the ship you're restoring to.

Ore and mining

• Every rock wall rolls its own ore. Green zones have every ore type, and higher zones have more ore and better odds of the valuable kinds.
• Asteroid fields don't come back once their site unloads. Ore no longer re-rolls every time you dock.
• Ore vents run out. Each vent makes a limited number of boulders and shares a reserve with its planet, and vents follow the proper rarity of each material.

Anomalies

• Planets have one, two or three natural anomalies by zone.
• Raw anomaly cores and anomaly charts are sold by a trader instead of cargo, and more charts are on offer. Cores cost 8,000 to 12,000 credits and charts 4,000 to 6,000.
• The Event Horizon has no scope.
• Supermatter hazards no longer drop cores, a planet's ice demons can only drop a couple of cores, and trader MOD modules can't have their cores pulled.

Weapons and gear

• Melee weapons and guns are sorted into green, yellow and red tiers, and loot, traders, freight crates, NPC drops and ruins follow the tiers.
• Gun schematics, the receivers printed from them and the schematic imprinter are gone. Weapon crafting, gun kits and R&D weapon prints work as before.
• No Quarter's heavy cartridges can be crafted by anyone and fit only No Quarter.
• Military ammunition needs crew reputation to research: SMG, rifle, C-20r and WT-550 magazines need yellow, and L6, Bulldog, sniper and explosive ammunition need advanced. Pistol, revolver and shotgun ammunition is unchanged.
• Cargo no longer sells security gear, single guns or conversion kits.
• Traders sell guns in limited stock, with stronger guns at higher-zone outposts. Sold guns come back slowly.
• Armory caches and freight crates are more likely to hold a gun in higher zones, and otherwise give a melee weapon.
• The strongest melee weapons are no longer sitting on maps or guaranteed from certain enemies.
• High-end MODsuits are no longer placed in ruins. Ruin suit storage stocks a suit to match its zone.
• Free hulls carry ordinary MODsuits in place of command-grade ones.
• Each pirate cache bundle holds one gun.
• Every way into the three trader outposts goes through a guarded weapons checkpoint: lockers to leave your guns in, a scan chamber that checks everyone and everything inside it, and a one-way exit. The guard sells a short personal weapons permit. Anyone caught inside with a gun and no permit, or who forces the door, is treated as hostile and turned away for a while.

Missions and bounties

• Mission pay is lower across the board and climbs with the danger of the zone the job is in.
• The outpost contract board posts new jobs on a steady schedule, and old offers expire.
• The ship mission console offers a fixed set of jobs that refreshes on a timer, so abandoning a job doesn't get you a new one.
• The rarest prizes (elite and specialist MODsuits, the captain's laser and a few unique gadgets) only come from dangerous guarded jobs like named kills, hunts, captures, poacher busts and lairs, and only now and then. A crew can earn at most one suit and one gadget a round.
• Survey missions pay useful field gear instead of guns.
• Delivery missions ask for goods from the field.
• Bringing a rescue survivor back healthy pays a smaller bonus.
• A kill contract can't be farmed by leaving and coming back: the target and its pay only come once.
• Pirate ship bounties pay 20% less.

Zones and reputation

• Your crew earns a reputation by doing varied, dangerous guarded work in a zone, including lair clears and criminal bounties. Repeating one easy job won't do it.
• Reputation in one zone opens the next zone's contracts, better trader stock, traders' back rooms and some research. Imported research still works. Traders say when your crew isn't cleared for something, and your crew hears when better work opens up.
• Reputation belongs to your crew, not your ship. Lose the ship, build or buy another, and the crew keeps its name.
• You belong to one crew at a time. A crew can run more than one ship, and only the crew's leader can bring a new ship into it. Anyone else who buys or claims a ship starts their own crew with it. The crew hears who leads when the leader changes.
• Prize limits and experiment rewards are shared by the whole crew, across all its ships.
• Green-zone crews keep access to every raw resource, ordinary research and the basics every trader sells.

Survival, cyberware and nanites

• Cyberware capacity counts everything installed: chrome, tg implants, cybernetic organs, surgical upgrades and nanite programs. Prosthetic limbs don't count.
• Nanite programs cost capacity according to how strong they are.
• Governor Delete moves to the chest OS slot, competing with the Sandevistan and the other OS chrome, and gives a bigger capacity boost.
• Nanite armor spends nanites on every hit it soaks.
• The reviver implant no longer revives someone straight back into critical condition over and over.
• The nanite defibrillator follows the same rules as a real defibrillator and only signals success when it works.
• The voltaic cyberheart absorbs EMPs again.
• Implant buttons and arm weapons stay down while chrome is offline, and an EMP during Lazarus no longer wastes its charge.
• The Monitoring, spreading and Sting nanite programs work.

NPCs

• NPCs in yellow and red zones hit harder and take more punishment instead of showing up in bigger numbers. Bosses scale too, by less.
• Planet wildlife, nests and patrols are no longer more numerous in dangerous zones.
• A pirate boarding party is one wave sized to your crew, led by a boss in red space.
• Pets, hired guards, recruits, arena fighters and summons don't scale.

Fixes

• The first chaplain of a round gets a null rod.
• Officers' sabres and surgery kits that never spawned on some ships now do.
• Delivery contracts accept genuine Syndicate documents.
• Idle ships no longer hold the limited hunt, capture and poacher jobs away from other crews.
• Traders charge and pay the ship account you pick.
• Commissioning a ship no longer pulls in people from another crew.
• Spent ore vents say so, and refused nanite backups and updates say so.
• The Hoarfrost Matriarch is scaled like the other bosses.

Upstream tg files touched (all marked VOIDCREW EDIT)

code/__DEFINES/dcs/signals/signals_atom/signals_atom_x_act.dm, code/controllers/subsystem/stock_market.dm, code/datums/components/spawner.dm, code/datums/mapgen/CaveGenerator.dm, code/game/machinery/computer/crew.dm, code/game/objects/effects/spawners/random/random.dm, code/game/objects/items/defib.dm, code/game/objects/structures/lavaland/ore_vent.dm, code/game/turfs/closed/minerals.dm, code/modules/admin/team_panel.dm, code/modules/admin/topic.dm, code/modules/admin/verbs/debug.dm, code/modules/admin/verbs/secrets.dm, code/modules/jobs/job_types/chaplain/chaplain.dm, code/modules/mining/equipment/monster_organs/regenerative_core.dm, code/modules/mining/machine_redemption.dm, code/modules/mob/living/basic/icemoon/ice_demon/ice_demon.dm, code/modules/mob/living/basic/lavaland/hivelord/hivelord.dm, code/modules/mob/living/basic/lavaland/hivelord/spawn_hivelord_brood.dm, code/modules/mob/living/basic/lavaland/legion/legion_brood.dm, code/modules/mob/living/basic/lavaland/legion/legion_tumour.dm, code/modules/mob/living/basic/lavaland/legion/spawn_legions.dm, code/modules/mob/living/living.dm, code/modules/mob/living/simple_animal/hostile/megafauna/legion.dm, code/modules/power/supermatter/supermatter_extra_effects.dm, code/modules/reagents/chemistry/reagents/cat2_medicine_reagents.dm, code/modules/research/techweb/_techweb.dm, code/modules/spells/spell_types/conjure/_conjure.dm, code/modules/surgery/organs/internal/cyberimp/augments_chest.dm, code/modules/surgery/revival.dm

Changelog

🆑
balance: Money, research, missions and gear are paced across the 6-hour round. Dangerous zones pay more, and green keeps every resource.
balance: The mining console bill is 500 credits for 2,000 points, materials market prices are lower and booms are smaller.
balance: Traders charge less for everyday supplies, outpost fees are lower, and cargo no longer pays for the gas in canisters.
balance: The survey console pays research only, and survey scanners wear out a site.
balance: Ore is spread by zone, asteroid fields don't respawn, and ore vents run dry.
balance: Melee weapons and guns found, bought or looted are tiered by zone.
balance: Military and explosive ammunition research needs crew reputation, and lair clears and criminal bounties earn reputation.
balance: Mission pay climbs with zone danger, the rarest prizes come only from dangerous guarded jobs, and pirate bounties pay less.
balance: NPCs in dangerous zones are tougher instead of more numerous.
balance: Cyberware capacity counts everything installed, including nanite programs, and nanite armor costs nanites per hit.
add: Crews earn a zone reputation that opens better contracts, trader stock and research. Reputation stays with the crew when its ship is lost.
add: A crew can run more than one ship, and each player belongs to one crew at a time. Only the crew's leader adds ships.
add: Trader outposts have guarded weapons checkpoints with gun lockers and personal weapons permits. Armed trespassers are treated as hostile.
add: Rounds end with a fleet jump at six hours.
del: Gun schematics, receiver printing, the schematic imprinter and the cargo security catalog are gone.
del: High-end MODsuits and the strongest melee weapons no longer sit in ruins or on hulls.
fix: The reviver implant no longer loops revives into critical condition, and the nanite defibrillator follows defibrillator rules.
fix: Cargo loans pay their bonus once, and kill contracts can't be farmed by leaving and coming back.
fix: The voltaic cyberheart, the Monitoring, spreading and Sting nanite programs, and several cyberware shutdown gaps work again.
fix: The first chaplain gets a null rod, and missing sabres and surgery kits spawn on their ships.
/:cl: