Stuff I've been wondering about

[kevinTOC]

I've been wondering about some things in SB:
I imagine that some of these questions have already been asked or answered, but eh.

• How will the economy work?
• Would the economy be entirely player-driven?
• Would the currency of SB be dynamic? (Could it inflate/deflate, etc.)
• Would it potentially be possible for when a faction becomes large enough to make its own currency?
• How would people buy ships? Is it just you put up a blueprint, and people just keep buying, buying, buying. Or is it more like actual stock, as in: a player designs a blueprint, then builds, say 5 ships, and then put them up for sale. Then there'd be 5 ships in stock for players to purchase? (Btw, this would make for a far more realistic economy, since you wouldn't have an unlimited amount of product, devaluating the currency as more of it is in circulation)
• Would market offers for resources be player controlled, or would we have random resource offers popping up here and there?

These are just some question I've been wondering about. Mainly about the game's economy. I haven't seen much discussion around this on the forums.

 

[cranky corvid]

There will be non-player manufacturing at the start. The game will run an economic simulation in the background that keeps track of the inputs and outputs within each station and uses them to determine the local prices, although the stock of base resources can never run out, only become really expensive. Since prices are dynamic, inflation and deflation can be a feature of the economic system. I doubt the game will offer support for faction-made alternate currencies.

I recall that a developer mentioned that even non-player factories would have limited stock. It may be possible to take a blueprint and have a ship printed based on it at a stiff premium; however, more manual production methods are supposed to be more cost-effective, and ship manufacturers may be reluctant to share their blueprints, so in a lot of cases you'll probably want to buy from factories or dealers.

 

[totoro]

Local mining jobs turn in materials to the station, and the hauling video talked about selling entire asteroids to the station. I'm betting a vasama will always be purchasable, (no generator, fcu, mfc) and everything else will need to pull advanced mats out of a finite pool. (at a premium, natch)