Or recycling items. Isn't it annoying when you spend an hour finding a really rare or or item for armor. But when scrolling through the things to make when you accidentally click on the wrong thing and all the bars you spent hours finding end up as a second hammer, or maybe an extra helmet leaving you 1 bar short of completing the set?
I don't know... Does that mean that i can take any item I find and transform it back into its materials? Just imagine how many iron bars/batteries/laser orbs, etc. you'd have after a while. Maybe it's enough to have a "are you sure youwanna craft this?" popup.
I think perhaps if it had a random chance to give you some of the items that you put in it it could work with the recycling idea.
It would mainly be if you accidentally crafted something or there might be something that uses a rare material so instead of having to find another one, you can just recycle the materals of something you might not want any more and isn't worth selling. You could also have some item that are only used to save space, a "Giant iron bar" / Battery cell / box of laser orbs, that could be made of 10 or 100 regular iron bars, so you could have a total of 25000 iron bars as "Giant iron bars" only taking up 1 space. (And it might get a bit annoying if it asks you if you want to craft someting every single time you make something.)
Perhaps there could be a recycler machine that you can use to get back some of the things that you used to make the item. For example if you used 4 iron bars to make a sword you could get 2 of them back by using a recycler.
Could be a costly mistake then. Only getting halve the materials would sort of wreck the whole point of it. If you have 10 iron bars and you want to make two things that use 4 bars and 6 bars, but you accidentaly make two of the 4 bar item. Then you will left with 4 bars, two short of the second item. I got the idea when i started making the shadow armor in Terraria. I beat the eater of worlds but accidentaly crafted 2 helmets, and I didn't have any of the materials left so I had to go back and defeat it again. (We need more info on starbound, I can't keep comparing everything to Terraria) Please explain why you think you should get less materials back from recycling.
Well, if you recycle something you would get like random 30% of the ingridients back, so that things that you found double or something like that will be less of a pain.
I already said, imagine what happens if you transform every item that you happen to find and that you would normally throw away. You would probably not need to mine, farm, scavenge or whatever it is that makes sandbox games fun. All you would have to do is transform everything to its basic materials. Of course you would still have to mine etc. In order to find rare materials that you can not get through reverse crafting, but it would make things a little to easy IMHO. As for the idea of fusing materials so that they take up less space, - why have a limited inventory space in the first place? -this is an idea that maybe deserves a throught however.
Interesting idea, I think it should be that you can recycle anything crafted for free and get a little less than half of the items used to make it, or you can pay a reasonable fee to recycle it and get all of the items used back. The cost is so there is a penalty if one crafts an item to increase inventory space available and wants all the items back when he/she returns from the trip (basically abusing the recycling system).