WIP Useful Space Stations (idea)

Okay, so I've been playing a long time, and when I heard about space stations I was super excited, I think a lot of people were. But there are several issues that, as I play through for the umpteenth time, make me feel like space stations might as well be a creative-only decorative piece.

I understand that space stations are pretty much exactly that. You finish the game and get to spend a while building a pretty station in your favorite system, but then what? Not really much of anything, currently. So I'm proposing a rather large and ambitious project. I call it Useful Space Stations.

Below are my short-term brainstorming thoughts. To be clear, while these are my ideas, I currently do /not/ have the skills required to make them a reality. If someone more skilled than me would like to pick up this project, please let me know. I'd love to help you, or give you the project, but otherwise I'll be working on this myself slowly over time.

I'm also open to criticism and new ideas, I'll add or modify things here so long as they make sense. I do not intend to provide anything 'free' in this mod. The theme is to make them useful, not overpowered. To this end, careful consideration and balancing will be required.

Useful Space Stations -

Problems:
Stations are too late-game content to be useful
Stations serve few practical uses compared to custom built bases
Station expenses are difficult to offset because they don't pull in currency on their own

Solutions:
Add an early-game station transponder quest reward
Add station parts that serve unique, practical uses

Ideas:
Add options to enable 'visitor' NPCs, which can offer trades
Add station segments that serve more practical and unique services, such as employing station hands with varying roles.



Station Segments:
Visitor Housing- Similar to normal colony rooms, these rooms allow tenants, however these tenants will automatically deposit rent at a higher value and rate (possibly dependent on how large/extravagant the station is). These tenants are also temporary, and 'leave' (despawn) after a certain number of rent payments. Visitor type is not dependent on furnishings, but instead (possibly) draws randomly from all possible tenant types.

Trading Center- A place where merchant npcs either spawn or wander to (preferably wander to, for aesthetic purposes). These merchants can vary from vanilla merchants to supply merchants and possibly a few unique merchants (such as an ore/bar merchant that sells them at a discount). May also include a storage space in which players can place items to automatically sell and buy items over time from a select list.

Holodeck- A sort of training area, with a console for setting the fauna risk-level and type. These enemies will have no drops, their main purpose being to test weapons and armor in a controlled environment. Will include an emergency kill switch to 'flush' enemies from the room. Doors should remain sealed unless all hostiles in the room are removed, to prevent station (and theme) breaches.

Meteor Attractor- A room designed to draw in asteroids with metallic contents in a safe and controlled manner. This area then fills around the border with meteorite that can be mined by the player.

Mess hall/Freezer- A place to store food necessary for the crew to perform their functions. Extended lack of food on the station may result in a desertion mechanic in which the crew abandons ship.

Treasury- A place to store pixels to pay crew wages, necessary for the crew to perform their functions. Extended lack of payment may result in a desertion mechanic in which the crew abandons ship.



Visitor NPC types:

Vacationer- An NPC that will rent out station rooms temporarily, paying a more exorbitant amount to vacation on a space station than normal planetary-tenants.

Merchant- Vanilla merchant NPCs attempting to peddle their wares in the trading center of a space station.
Contractor- Provides contracts for station crewmembers, potentially allowing a player to custom tailer their crew to fit their personal aesthetic tastes.

Crewmember- Running a space station is a full time job, so it seems odd not to have a running staff. Crewmember types aim to fix this by adding some themed members to the ship's repertoire. Though it would be preferable to be able to use the normal NPC template with some behavior changes, it's possible that a pet-like system would be more predictable and manageable. By tying them to an item with a set radius station builders can keep them from wandering too much.



Crew Types:

Overseer- Boost to overall station effectiveness

Miner- Will automatically gather and bank an amount of materials based on the number of Meteor Attractors and capped at a certain amount per miner.

Chef- Provides the necessary food for the crew. Essential to crew performance unless the player intends to provide the food themselves. Having a chef means that only pixels are required to feed the entire crew.

Janitor- Decorative NPC

Communications Officer- Increases the number and turn-around of merchant visitors

 

These are excellent ideas, and I'd be willing to help with what I can, I'm rather rusty with the modding of starbound, due to me leaving that scene due to frackin universe creators cyber bullying me when I inquired for some modding assistance. I haven't done anything for a year related to starbound or starbound modding but today I made the decision to come back. Why? Because I searched the forums on here and found a lot better and more of tutorials on a lot of things I struggled with when I began to mod. I am an artist not a programmer, so I would love to assist you with the art aspect and some minimal coding "by coding I mean I can enter custom fields in json and text files. I can't do lua script at all unfortunately." I actually saw someone made a race mod for poptops and I am contacting them as well as the creator of Pandora's box mod for permission to help and contribute to either or both mods. If you need to contact me my e-mail is: geekyraptorstudios@gmail.com

 

Really like this idea, if you need an artist I'm game.

 

Darn shame that this hasn't progressed, because all the points you make are spot-on. As implemented the space station is frankly not at all useful.