Transportation Profession
Sunlight
Imagine a profession that makes transportation a smoother, more reliable part of your gameplay. Not everyone wants to run a store and constantly deal with transporting supplies, right? This profession gives players who enjoy the simple life of transporting goods the confidence to pick up a delivery, knowing they’ll get from point A to point B without wasting time on full storage or worrying about someone else grabbing the order first.
Currently, transporting goods involves a lot of workarounds like managing storage facilities and having to own both stockpiles to make a contract. You need a title or temporary ownership to make deliveries if being paid by contract, and even then, there's always the risk of theft, not having access to the right delivery spots, or needing to run to the contract board just to make a deal. Don’t get me started on if taxes are involved.
Here’s where delivery vehicles come in:
Package delivery truck: A large storage vehicle that’s slower but keeps track of fuel and distance traveled.
Off-road jeep: Perfect for hard-to-reach locations and stores.
Trains, drones, and more: Imagine these as additional options to make delivery even more fun, and versatile by filling different roles.
Packaging plant: Increases the amount of transportable goods for all current vehicles due to better storage packing. This would show how much waste goes into consumerism. It's as simple as turning 500 rocks into 1 rock box that can then be turned back into 500 rocks. Only used for raw goods for bulk shipping. Crops, rocks, ores, parts, and not for end products.
Delivery stations: Players can place orders, a supplier fills the order, and transporters will pick up the listing and then deliver it to another station that is set as the destination. This delivery comes with a fee for distance, fuel, and time, which goes straight to the transporter. It’s like a mailbox system. The driver can’t take items off the truck the station will pull them out of the truck upon delivery.
This makes it possible to buy items when no supply is available, set up trade routes, and manage full or empty storages much more easily.
Specialized Containers: designed for different kinds of items, increasing storage efficiency. Such as, display stands for food or objects, barrels, crop boxes (for a specific crop), crates (decoration), a nail box (lower the weight of nails), a Toolbox that will only hold tools for blacksmiths, a bread box, bakery display, a paper holder that only holds paper, baskets, etc. These containers will allow players to organize and store things more effectively. As well as, help other professions focus on auto crafting or getting supplies, without needing complex store setups to feed supplies into machines.
Don’t forget the perks:
Level 3: Faster vehicle speed or more weight capacity.
Level 6: Less vehicle maintenance or reduced fuel consumption.
This concept is all about making transportation easy, fun, and an integral part of gameplay without requiring endless workarounds. Let the pros handle the logistics so you can focus on what matters most!
D
Dennis Scholz
Merged in a post:
Transporter Profession
Krisocka
Logistics and movement of people is a major point of friction for Eco and leads to frustration at best and people outside of the major hubs of the server quitting at worst.
One thing to help with that would be a way of automated transportation.
The profession would be able ro make Bus and Ferry Stop points, waiting areas and loading/unloading areas.
A stop can be placed anywhere, but to use it for travel it needs to be connected by road blocks (stamped/ramp, stone road, asphalt to another stop) or water (for ferry). The only addition needed should be a waiting/exit area for people to get transported from/to, but there should be vehicle loading/unloading and goods loading/unloading areas should be able to be added.
These dont need to belong to a transporter to make towns able to fund a station to get Transporters interested to connect them even if they dont expect enough users to recoup the setup cost of a station.
At intervals configurable by the Transporter people sitting in the waiting area, vehicles in the parking area (maybe only at a certain Tier?) and goods in the loading area are transported to the station the person chose instanteneously (too many things going wrong with having dummy ships travel around or leaving people in limbo for some time), though it may be a good idea to have the players need to wait in the waiting area before teleportation for the duration the travel would take.
At the bus station (or when sitting down in the waiting area), the user can choose a destination (and see if it has vehicle and goods transportation) on the network while seeing the next time a transport is happening and the frequency and being able to choose under which transporter they want to ride under and their prices. (Which should be able to be set by station or by distance)
How to balance all this?
A transporter needs to put work into the network for it to function and some material components to represent wear and tear (from wooden wheels to combustion engines).
This should be done at a central location that also limits the availability of their services. For example a rickshaw parking spot needs to be placed in their head quarters for every station they want to service.
The higher the intervals the higher the labor/maintenance cost for the transporter, but the least frequesnt interval should be around 15 or 30 minutes. Otherwise it would disadvantage low density areas too much.
The transported person should also lose some amount of calories to represent the time in transit. A transport of goods should also have
If goods should be transportable needs to be debated more in depth, as logistics is one of the major friction points of Eco. Its really disadvantages players with less time if they are not, so I'm in favor of it. There should be a limit on throughput per cycle depending on upgrades though.
Evil_bob
would give new players that join late game something to do