It's expensive on purpose, it's a design choice to ensure that there are always pixel sinks. If it wasn't extremely hard to get the pixels you want then within a few months the world would be saturated and demand would be tiny. As it is people will always be trying to reroll to get that one thing they want, in the color they want.

Gives players a market to sell pixels, gives devs a way to earn cash, and helps servers by providing CPU sinks so players have reasons to optimize their code and ways to spend their bucket without additional server strain. Downside is that it sucks as an experience to use, but over time it'll suck less as the world becomes more saturated and demand falls. I hate lootboxes but in this case given there isn't another way to take pixels off the market it makes sense to gouge on creation.

I've been totally unable to load the overview page for over a week now. That's a pretty big problem imo. Any ETA on the fix @o4kapuk ?

@artch said in PTR Changelog 2020-06-05: Decorations:

@cookies said in PTR Changelog 2020-06-05: Decorations:

How about we can also convert a pixel back to 2500 bucket? (Probably with a cooldown of 100 ticks?)

CPU to pixels conversion is supposed to be one way only.

I think this is the right approach. As much as it would be a neat feature, that would definitely open up pay to win. Just think of the advantage of buying some sub tokens to get pixel cpu on shard3, or buying more than your cpu cap.

Yeah I can understand that, although this is a case of an energy-powered structure so having a .energy specific store is pretty intuitive, imo moreso than "one type of the resources you put in the general store disappear". How will the dropped resources behave then? Randomly sprayed under each warp container? This will drastically increase the pain of having skipped ticks.

Also, withdrawing all energy from a container before it renews becomes extremely powerful as harassment. If they had a 100 .energy buffer that keeps gets refilled internally/from creeps that can't be withdrawn from it would take 100ticks of room control to have the network fail vs 1 tick.

Formal suggestion: Internal deposit-only .energy store (like a nuker) of 100. This gets consumed every 100 ticks to maintain the network. If it's empty it gets refilled as highest priority from the internal store, but can also be creep deposited. Reduces complexity of warp container usage too since its more fault-tolerant and you have security that the container will be powered for next round.

@o4kapuk said in Discussion: long-range logistics revamp:

They drop onto the ground. We can't keep them inside because this way it's possible to fill them with minerals (either due to user's bad code or attacker's malicious code) efficiently preventing further recharges.

Dropping on ground seems very burdensome behavior. Would it be possible to make defunct warp containers have an energy reserved store of 100 units that creeps can put into a container to recharge it? That store represents what the container will use for it's next recharge cycle, and gets automatically refilled from general store if there is 100 energy available.

Then dead warp containers have their main store locked until they are recharged, but the resources don't fall on the ground. I'm not even sure what fall on the ground means given that the stuff inside isn't inside any one container.

Random other thought: What if you could use batteries with warp containers for energy supply? Just as a possibility for actual things a commodity can be used for.

@Atanner just created something for this ask: https://atannergaming.com/screeps/ more details in the slack #announcements channel

@u-238 Same thing is true for sub tokens, and they can be sent via terminal. Another endpoint that's on an account level would be acceptable too.

Edit: To clarify for Mr. Uranium, being able to send credits does not require to be in the terminal itself, they can be sent from account.

@deft-code I don't think that having the random high-process credit transfer transactions adds market richness, it's just noise. I'd also disagree that sending cpu tokens should be the credit transfer option.

We have credits, why create another resource to trade in proxy of just sending credits? It'd be like if the only way to give someone money was by giving them stock market shares instead of just money.

I know, but I'd prefer if we didn't need to use workarounds like that. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to send it as an account resource.

I just want to send 100k credits for services rendered, or set up an automated payment system for contracts.

I don't think it's gamebreaking or unreasonable, just a quality of life change. The 5% fee can stay.