Turning extra crew members into a resource drone + resource sink.

[Khold90]

So, many games have a "send X NPCs off for 18 hours to gather Y resources" and I figured why not use the crew members for that.

They will need a ship of course so why not have 3 tiers of ship.

The first tier would be the same cost as a current RJ.
The second tier would be the RJ costs x5.
The third tier would be RJ costs x10.

Each tier upgrade lets them equip their respective MK tier weapons and equipment. That in turn gives them various stats while in mission that you can tailor to your needs and the difficulty of the planet.

Then with there being a potential 33 crew members (and the plat for slots) we could have 7 slots (also for plat) for ships.

For those of us who will want to build them up that's millions of resources and 3 digits of plat taken out of the economy and the output is a glorified resource drone, but myself as a player means I'll need to go back into RJ to farm up and valence fuse all that equipment, spend the time collecting and customising the crew members I want with the stats that I'm after, as well as logging in to send them to work.

As for ideas for the loot tables with them being basically resource drones you could have what the resource drones collect with 150-500 (depending on the planet) endo in the drop table. The stats might speed up how long they take, or they might be slower but collect more resources, or they might need to be tankier for the higher level planets so the ship isn't too damaged to bring all the resources back.

Yes it turns them into spreadsheets but I think there would be enough players invested enough in building them up and the "head canon" of them in their own smaller ship doing missions instead of sitting around wherever they sit around when all but 3 aren't doing anything to be worth some investment.

[(NSW)BalticBarbarian]

What level of players would that be aimed at? Standard resource drones are aimed at the very novice players, since that's when the tiny amounts of resources they collect still matter.

By the time you can afford (Railjack cost)*10 resources, what are the resources that you would need gathered so much? And for how many months in a row would you need to be deploying those new "drones" to recover their cost (especially the platinum cost you're proposing)?

I already have a bunch of old-school resource drones sitting in my inventory, and I don't remember the last time I actually deployed any of them. Unless the "resources" the proposed drone types gather are all vaulted relics and built forma (which is never going to happen), I really don't see myself (or most other players) wasting our time on something like that.

[Khold90]

It's less about the rewards and more about utilising the crew members.

I've been playing on and off for 7 years now and with 7 ships all using 10x RJ costs I still have to do a ton of farming. I would absolutely do it since I really like the idea of crew members but now that I have 3 "good enough" elite members I basically haven't touched the system.

It is absolutely not for everyone, especially given the sheer quantity of players who have basically completely ignored RJ and only considered it because liches/sisters are locked behind it.

But massive grind for what is essentially cosmetic RP would still get a couple people interested. If we could even walk around on their ships there would be people planning on which crew members are on which ships, coordinating fashionframe, paying closer attention to crew member stats for the bonuses they might give.