First of all, I miss old school space exploration as well, it was very fun, at least for some time before you saw all ruins. I regret that there isn’t even extra z-level in each direction to experience just a little bit of what we used to have. Same goes for gateway, I miss it and I hope we will find some real use for it one day.
But it is what it is and exploration that we received instead is probably one of the biggest, most complex thing ever implemented on Bee and even people from other servers recognized it as impressive PR, without a doubt it was biggest and coolest thing implemented in SS13 that year, maybe even in few years. We should really have more appreciation for this system.
That said it needs to be tweaked and expanded upon
Foundations are here, most things are already coded. We need variety, more types of ruins-different bioms, abandoned shuttles and since there is an option to intercept why not have missions to intercept actually working shuttle with target that could be player controlled (and vice versa, why not have syndicate and pirates attempt to intercept exploration shuttle…just give us those sweet sweet space battles with 2 or more shuttles), different challenges in them (including player controlled characters, we need to work on their objectives to not be just either murderer who will be shot on sight or completely blank friendly character that doesn’t have anything to do once they reach the station)
I can’t agree with people complaining about discovery points and research disks.
Research is and always has been broken, historically you either had to do some repeatable crap that wasn’t very enjoyable or you had to do nothing and just click on console when enough points is produced by servers. Even now researching tree is still not about any choice, by the end of longer shift almost everything will be researched, it is not about trying to weight which technology will be most useful to deal with current situation on station but about just having something researched right now or in 10-20 minutes.
In another topic where fusion was discussed I suggested implementing mechanics of doping materials with energized particles to get new materials-which could be used to construct mechs etc with different properties than their vanilla version and to lock some technologies behind additional materials that would come from cooperation between departments
Research should really come with a choice and consequences of that choice, we don’t need to unlock every technology during every shift, let’s have some variety depending on the situation and what each scientist prioritizes.
That said beside console clicking research should be playing with artifacts.
Right now I don’t even know half if not most of what artifacts can do. Why is that? Because they have no purpose for station and crew, there is just a pile of them in exploration room or in space outside of it if artifact produces harmful gas and that’s about it.
I’m not playing other servers but when checking few out I remember one of the codebases had separate lab for dealing with artifacts (I assume from their version of space exploration or mining), with multiple devices that allow to test them. Don’t know what that was really about, maybe someone knows more cause I can’t even recall which server it was right now, but maybe it will serve as inspiration.
I just wish there was some use for artifacts and for scientists to have some actual work to do. Maybe artifacts would not have any effects and only show them when analysed by scientists? Or maybe better, they could have 2 effects, one of which would be hidden and could be only revealed during experimentation?
Of course scientists messing with artifact could also bring additional discovery points to promote science department being actually fully operational and doing their job and not to make it like they are depended completely on outside factors (explo players that are basically away all the time)
Only when reading this thread, when someone mentioned miners I realized what seems to be part of the problem and why some people may not like exploration. Explorers and Miners are very similar jobs, they require similar type of player and gamestyle and offer similar power gaming rewards and the only result of having both of them on station, which may be also why there is some animosity, is that resources are getting spread too thin among them. I know this is sacrilegious but if anything was to change maybe we should just merge two roles together, even have additional exploration shuttles and just have more people focusing on both mining and getting discovery points and artifacts which would make them more effective and could limit amount of explorers being stranded forever in space since more people would be there to watch each others back
TL;DR
If I knew how to write it shorter I would.
Don’t be a baby, reading is not that hard even when it comes to blocks of text written in broken english