Year 17 - Day 26

The last few days I've been working on various small items and polishing off some defects. I have taken some time to re-examine the colony mining code that I completed last week and decided to make some changes.

I had originally planned for a colony to have a Mining Module that could be upgraded to Level 10, and at each level a new Automated Mining Unit (AMU) could be inserted. Each AMU would basically produce the effective deposit yield, which would be affected by things like colony morale, damage to the AMUs, and the Mining skill of the Mining Administrator.

I realized this was just over-complicating things a bit, so I changed it so that each time you upgrade the Mining module it will take one AMU to do so. The damage multiplier will then be determined by the damage level to the complex as a whole instead of individual items making it up. This will also simplify the combat code later on when I add colonies to the combat system.

I also started coding the basic framework of Manpower Hours for colonies and realized I needed to rethink how I was handling colonists. Colonists are basically treated as "items" in the game as far as the code is concerned, but I don't want them to take up space in the warehouse of a colony.

So then I started thinking "do I want them to take up space in the cargo hold of a ship?" So now I'm trying to decide if I want to change it so that colonists and other life-forms have to have a specialized ship module and can't go into a Cargo Module. So it would be something like a Passenger Module, which is where any lifeforms besides the Crew on a ship would be stored.

One consequence of this would be that a newbie ship, which can only have one module, would not be able to carry both cargo and lifeforms, other than the crew in the Command Module. I'll be pondering this one for a bit.

Year 17 - Day 24

Wow, I didn't update at all in 2016. That's mainly because I made very little progress on anything. I've been back at it for a few weeks since the Christmas holidays and I'm beginning to make progress again.

Today I finished up a major component of colonies: Mining.

Any colony can build a colony module and upgrade that module to a maximum of Level 10. For each level you can install an Automated Mining Unit which will allow you to harvest the yield of the deposit the colony is sitting on. So if your colony is sitting on a Metals deposit that yields 10 / hour and you have a level 2 Mining module with 2 amu's installed you would be mining 20 metal ore per hour.

In the screenshot the deposit shown is much larger than it would be in the game. I want to make a conscious decision that it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for a colony to be self-sufficient just on the deposit it is located on. This should encourage trade and exploration. 

I still haven't implemented the Manpower functionality for colonies, but eventually you will have a certain amount of Manpower Hours based on your population and the morale of the colony. You can then assign those hours to various modules and their efficiency will be determined by how well they are staffed.