Bonuses for planetary production.
Mining on a planet is much more difficult than mining in zero gravity. The game seems to reward leaving a planet to get into space rather than giving different environments specific environments.
My thoughts would be to make production require oxygen. If you want to produce ingots or manufacture components, it should require a supply of oxygen. To produce in free space, exploration of asteroids to find ice to generate oxygen would make the game a bit more interesting as there would be a hard cost to production rather than just chucking ore into a refinery and waiting for the easy-bake oven to finish.
This would also give an advantage to planetary mining (on planets with atmospheres). An unlimited supply of oxygen means hauling ores that take a long time to process like uranium and platinum to a planet would make more sense for long term production. This would also give oxygen farms meaning again.
The use of oxygen should be a variable that a single player or server admin can select as well as a modifier regarding how much consumed per clock tick of refining. (setting the amount to 0 would mean that no oxygen is required... which mirrors the current set-up).
I've searched for a mod that covers this and can't find one. I've had modders develop mods from my suggestions before. So maybe someone would want to try this as a proof of concept. It would simply (said lightly) require refining and assembling blocks to consume oxygen gas while they are "working". For the mod, the ability to edit how much oxygen per game-tick should be editable in the block description (XML) of the block.
Consumption of oxygen in production wouldn't be for everyone, so if adopted as official it should be on a slider that defaults to 0 and then slides up to ridiculous levels for those who want a really crazy challenge. But again, it should default to off in the vanilla game and just be there for those who want to make things interesting.
How about no
How about no
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