PINS and needles

The latest Dev blog is up with more juicy goodness on Planetary Interaction.  CCP Hammerhead is clearly in amusing mode as he writes so its  abit of a trawl to get through the good stuff.

Here’s a quick run down of what it contains, first off hunting for resources:

“The way one goes about this is to launch a satellite over the planet they are interested in and using the new planetary scanning window to get a graphical result of where the specific resource is one is looking for”.

No great surprises there and I have to admit my heart sank a bit here:” uh noes moon probing” 😦         But wait…..

“We use sexy colored spherical harmonics to represent hot spots for the best resources”.

Wowzers! Now that’s more like it – assuming CCP Hammerhead isnt pulling our collective chains here it looks like we could have quite a sexy UI for PI. Or a PIUI then.  🙂

“The Planetary Command Center (PCC) is your base of operations for all of your infrastructure on a given planet. Skills will likely allow you to have PCCs on multiple planets. After your PCC is down on a good location the next thing you want to do is start placing extractors in good locations based on your survey results”.

So we can expect to see a web of nodes (resources linking to a central command point), which makes a fair bit of sense when we think how DUST 514 might interact with PI. For those hoping to specialise in PI (rather than just dip into it) a skill tree of progression is again confirmed which sounds really pretty good.  Why be a Tyrant on one world when you can oppress the masses on lots of worlds?!

“Why waste valuable storage space in your rocket or space elevator (more on that later) when you can do some processing dirt-side and just send up the good stuff?You will be mixing and matching various resources and commodities based on those schematics to come up with intermediate commodities to eventually create final products. Some final products can be produced entirely on one planet but most will require transport to other planets to be produced”.

CCP Hammerhead is a bit vague about space elevators through his post, but the news that you will able to manufacture ‘stuffs’ on the planet and dig a few layers down into the mechanics of PI sounds pretty good.  A note of caution is ringing in my ears however and the spectre of POS management is the cause.  Clearly we can expect minimal use of PI by players ‘dipping in’ to produce raw products: the hard core industrialist and traders however can get much more deeply involved.

“Each command center can launch cargo rockets on occasion and there is a space port PIN (planetary interaction node – undefined by CCP at the moment but “a thingy” pretty much covers it) that acts as an upgrade from the command center. There is also trade hub PIN which lets you buy and sell commodities from your neighbors on the planet”.

Intra planet trading – a really intriguing concept which is fascinating when you look at what it implies, especially for Low Sec and Null Sec Space, as it points to something rarely seen in EVE; co operation between neutral parties.

Overall some tantalising details.  We will be able to find ‘stuffs’ on planets and then make ‘stuffs’ on those planets and even trade those ‘stuffs’ on a planet or between planets.  Planets spin and so is my head at the possibilities all of this hints at.  One things for sure: time to dust of those industry and trading skill books.

C.