Hack the Printing Pod

[speckle21]

A very late game discovery from the more distant worlds in the space map could be the design schematics or machine components of the printing pod itself. Since we know from the lore that Gravitas blew up the planet with their temporal energy generator, it might be that the printing pod and its associated engineering lab were blown in separate directions. If the dupes eventually find the lab in their space travels, they could bring back the data and the tools to hack the pod.

What would happen is that it might be possible to make the printing pod print certain things on command. Instead of randomly, maybe the player can choose particular care packages. Even more awesome is if the hack includes "upgrades" that were meant to be in the pod, but never installed before the explosion, so the pod can be upgraded to print things it couldn't print before. I'd love to be able to directly print thermium or other materials that my particular game doesn't have anywhere.

Since this is a VERY late game discovery it's not too OP for the player.

Maybe the hack has extreme requirements to use per run, like 100t of regolith must be fed in or 200kw of power. Basically make it EXTREMELY costly so its still worse than a good space program. But if you don't have wolframite, it's your only choice. 

An alternate hack is power from the pod. The lore says the pod has an unimaginably powerful energy source that lets do things like print matter directly from energy, maybe the hack can let the dupes tap that. While the power tap is installed the printer will no longer be able to print, but most late-game players stop using the pod anyway. The power-tap could provide say 100kw or so. 

Maybe a final hack is the ability to print Dr. Olivia Broussard herself as a dupe. She's got perfect stats and you can only print one of her. But it would be a tremendous kindness to get her mind out of the printing pod.

[Sasza22]

Very late game you don`t typically need the pod to print you specific materials. Maybe unrenewable resources like wolframite if you didn`t have the proper space destination spawn.

Lorewise you are the pod if i understood correctly. You definetly don`t want to break it. But maybe printing yourself as a dupe could be an option. I`m not sure if the pod has the full dn sequence but if the dupes are capable of reverse engineering the thing then everything is possible.

[speckle21]

20 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Maybe unrenewable resources like wolframite if you didn`t have the proper space destination spawn.

 

That's exactly what i was thinking. Also print things like seeds or critters that might not be available anywhere. In the end the player can choose what to print, that's the whole point of hacking the pod. 

[meepmoop]

I think we already have an answer for nonrenewable resources though and its space.

Space as it is now, has very little to offer other then light and some rare materials. maybe tweaking the planets/destinations a bit (making glimmering planet a certainty, making all resources reachable through space) would be much more simple and direct answer, that kills two birds with one stone -

1. making space more useful

2. unattainable resources.