Lounge Guns critiques Star Citizen’s current crafting quality system for being overly complex and discouraging the use of lower-quality materials, leading to inventory clutter and reduced mining enjoyment. He proposes simplifying the system into tiered, color-coded categories with a refining mechanic to enhance gameplay variety, resource use, and player engagement while encouraging community feedback to improve crafting.
In this video, Lounge Guns discusses the new crafting system in Star Citizen, highlighting what he sees as its biggest problem: the current quality system. While he appreciates the introduction of crafting, especially given his love for survival games, he finds the quality system, which assigns a quality level between 1 and 1,000 to minable resources, overly complicated and messy. Higher quality materials improve crafted items, but lower quality ones degrade them, leading players to ignore anything below a certain threshold. This system, inspired by Star Wars Galaxies, is rarely used in other crafting games because it complicates gameplay and inventory management.
Lounge Guns explains how this quality system negatively impacts mining and inventory logistics. For example, in his organization’s mining sessions, they only keep materials above a quality threshold of 700, resulting in many small, unstackable crates that are difficult to manage and transport. This fragmentation causes frustration not only for crafters, who need spreadsheets to track resources, but also for miners who face tedious, repetitive transactions when selling mined goods. The system encourages players to focus solely on high-quality materials, which reduces the fun and efficiency of mining.
He further elaborates on the behavioral consequences of the quality system, noting that most players ignore a large portion of minable resources because they fall below the quality threshold. This leads to excessive scanning and slow mining, diminishing the enjoyment of the game. Additionally, Lounge Guns raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of resource quality on planets, as repeated mining of only high-quality rocks could deplete those resources, leaving mostly low-quality rocks unmined and unused, potentially harming the game’s economy and player engagement.
To address these issues, Lounge Guns proposes replacing the 1-1,000 quality scale with a simpler, tiered system similar to many MMOs, using color-coded categories like common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. This would reduce inventory clutter and make stacking easier while still preserving meaningful quality differences. He also suggests introducing a refining system where players can trade yield for higher quality materials, allowing miners to process common resources into better ones through effort and choice, thus encouraging the use of all resources and providing multiple paths to obtaining high-quality materials.
Finally, he emphasizes the importance of fun in game design and advocates for systems that reward different playstyles and risk levels. By allowing players to mine safely for common materials or take risks for higher-quality resources, the game can cater to a broader audience. Lounge Guns invites viewers to share their opinions and provide feedback to the developers, stressing that crafting is still in early stages and now is the best time to influence improvements. He commits to continuing coverage of crafting and industrial gameplay in Star Citizen, encouraging community engagement to help shape the system’s future.