Spicing up excavation

[Danjal777]

Hello all, excavation is a great game mode in my opinion, but there are some things that bother me and at times it gets too repetitive.  So I have some suggestions that may make it more interesting and challenging.

First lets talk about the issues i see:

1. The excavator:
   -has the worst built in battery in history
   -looks like a garish Grineer device
   -explodes when it is finshed

2. The power packs:
   -come from special battery toting troops
   -conveniently fit perfectly with our excavator
   -leave trash all over the battlefield

3. The rewards:
   -no matter where you are, you always get cryotic
   -mods, and credits are overabundant in the game
 

So my solutions to these issues (mind you, purely my opinions):

So first off is how the extractors work, you can drop an extractor in any tile where there is a clear path to the sky, equip it in the gear wheel and it creates a ring on the ground when you primary fire, it drops down and begins extracting.  If you right mouse, it sends out a pulse of ground penetrating radar that highlights resource rich areas and relics underground.  Each tile has a ten minute cooldown, and only one excavator can be active at a time on a tile.  Players can equip special excavators that you can build in the foundry, these will increase variable such as the amount and rarity of resources, speed, depth, and area that the excavator works on.  These special excavators have a cooldown of five to ten minutes between uses, if they are destroyed, they can no longer be used in the mission.  You will always have access to a default excavator, it should be updated to look more tenno and maybe even allow you to customize its appearance.  The rewards need to change as well, when you scan the ground with the radar, it will highlight rich patches of resources, excavating in these patches will give you that particular resource (limited to common and uncommon resources like alloy and plastids).  In the ground you will see various relics, chests, and rare resources.  Targeting these areas to get that item requires you to wait for the excavator to drill down to that depth, then the item is revealed and obtained.  If an excavator is destroyed early, it triggers the tile cooldown and you must find another dig site, you can dig in one spot for as long as and as deep as you would like, but you will get diminishing returns and eventually no real benefit, to finish the excavation, you much activate a panel on the excavator which will begin a ten second countdown that anyone can cancel.  After the countdown is complete, the excavator rockets back up into the sky presumably to meet up with the lander.  As for power, the excavator will never run out of power, but is not at peak efficiency.  In order to speed up the process, you can tear out power cores from tougher enemies and rig them to the excavator.  These are obtained when you kill enemies such as heavy gunners, bombards, tech crewmen, ancients etc.  Their corpses persist longer than usual and you can tear the cores out of them, then you just walk them over to your excavator.  Some cores are better than others and will last longer, you can attach up to five (more for special excavators) and they will burn out over time.  If these heavy enemies' bodies are destroyed then they leave a piece of their armor or torso behind for you to tear the core out of.  Cryotic can still be obtained, but only on ice planets.

[NeithanDiniem]

problems I see with this: 1: You are charging resources for me to play a mission effectively. 2: You are leaving positioning of excavators to me, which can cause problems. 3: You are requiring significant changes to the way the map generates by not only having place-anywhere excavators, but also randomly generating resources. 4: Most resources would make no sense to be mined by an excavator. 5: If your current excavator blows up early, you now have to wait a good amount of time before you can start mining again. 6:You add a depth aspect to the game, which makes the excavators be variable in time for deployment and reward rather than a set dependable time. 7: you can only do one at a time now instead of multiple. 8: Keeping the bodies of the enemies around rather than just the cores will have a larger impact on game performance than just the cores would. 9: you have variant designs for the excavators and the cores, making it be highly varied in how long it takes to do the mission.

To condense: you would need to remove the existing excavator model, set spawn positions, power core enemies, code behind the mission, add in a new way for map generation to process random resource generation, new deployment system for extractors that would clip heavily with map assets and have possible issues with enemy AI targeting or pathfinding, new models for variant extractors and modular attachments for rigged cores that would also have clipping/accessibility issues with some placements, new enemies to carry the cores that can then, once their bodies are destroyed by a skill, leave behind a new interactable piece of their corpse that would give you a core, require a pretty heavy rework of the mission voice acting, require new UI menus for customizing the appearance and function of our excavators, and heavily change the expected mission completion time due to variant deployment time of excavators, depth of resources in the ground, type of resource, number of rigged cores to the excavator, and type of extractor used. All better variants would need resources to build and deploy, and each time they blew up you'd lose your resource investment entirely. I really don't feel that the pros outweigh the cons.

The mission sounds like it would be more tedious to do, especially if it shows up in a sortie. The last thing Id want to deal with is someone placing the excavator poorly and locking me out of being able to deploy for ten minutes to fix their mistake while under fire from sortie level enemies. Id also dislike it if they were not using a good variant because if I have the most efficient type for the situation and they use their extractor instead, the mission takes longer. And lastly there is no way for me to know the rough time an extractor would take to get the resource due to all the variables that affect the time it would take to extract the resource. I don't feel that this idea fits with the game too well because it becomes a competition to deploy your own extractor on the map before someone else, who you may not know if they have a good extractor, get to the room before you.

[Diarmut]

This is good, but a little complicated, I think your scanning idea can work very well, as the "seeing through things and looking fro chests and such" already exist with the codex scanner. So that could just be implemented for Excavation.

[Danjal777]

1 hour ago, NeithanDiniem said:

problems I see with this: 1: You are charging resources for me to play a mission effectively. 2: You are leaving positioning of excavators to me, which can cause problems. 3: You are requiring significant changes to the way the map generates by not only having place-anywhere excavators, but also randomly generating resources. 4: Most resources would make no sense to be mined by an excavator. 5: If your current excavator blows up early, you now have to wait a good amount of time before you can start mining again. 6:You add a depth aspect to the game, which makes the excavators be variable in time for deployment and reward rather than a set dependable time. 7: you can only do one at a time now instead of multiple. 8: Keeping the bodies of the enemies around rather than just the cores will have a larger impact on game performance than just the cores would. 9: you have variant designs for the excavators and the cores, making it be highly varied in how long it takes to do the mission.

To condense: you would need to remove the existing excavator model, set spawn positions, power core enemies, code behind the mission, add in a new way for map generation to process random resource generation, new deployment system for extractors that would clip heavily with map assets and have possible issues with enemy AI targeting or pathfinding, new models for variant extractors and modular attachments for rigged cores that would also have clipping/accessibility issues with some placements, new enemies to carry the cores that can then, once their bodies are destroyed by a skill, leave behind a new interactable piece of their corpse that would give you a core, require a pretty heavy rework of the mission voice acting, require new UI menus for customizing the appearance and function of our excavators, and heavily change the expected mission completion time due to variant deployment time of excavators, depth of resources in the ground, type of resource, number of rigged cores to the excavator, and type of extractor used. All better variants would need resources to build and deploy, and each time they blew up you'd lose your resource investment entirely. I really don't feel that the pros outweigh the cons.

The mission sounds like it would be more tedious to do, especially if it shows up in a sortie. The last thing Id want to deal with is someone placing the excavator poorly and locking me out of being able to deploy for ten minutes to fix their mistake while under fire from sortie level enemies. Id also dislike it if they were not using a good variant because if I have the most efficient type for the situation and they use their extractor instead, the mission takes longer. And lastly there is no way for me to know the rough time an extractor would take to get the resource due to all the variables that affect the time it would take to extract the resource. I don't feel that this idea fits with the game too well because it becomes a competition to deploy your own extractor on the map before someone else, who you may not know if they have a good extractor, get to the room before you.

Thank you for the feedback, especially by numbering them out.  Allow me to defend my points and perhaps refine them in the process.

1.  The creation of special excavators work more like a booster to that particular excavator, they are by no means mandatory to farm more effectively yielding relatively small benefits (+10% or so).  This will likely only be implemented by the most hardcore min/maxers of farming for certain resources.  The default excavator works just fine and you have an infinite supply of them.

2.  I most certainly am leaving the positioning of the excavator to you, which can cause problems and great benefits as well.  If you decide to focus on farming relics and don't care about resources, then that is a strategy you can employ and get a relic on every successful excavation.  Alternatively, you can focus on digging up rich amounts of resources.  Some players may try to find spots that have both options.  Control over RNG is never a bad thing.  Even still if you just drop one down where there is nothing, you will get common resources.

3.  Yes.  I am making a game mode more dynamic and interactive.  I do not believe this to be impossible or outrageously difficult.  The issue lies in how the developers feel about this mission.  If they are satisfied with it, then they certainly have every right to keep it as is, but I feel it is starting to show its age and really doesn't make much sense at all.  As far as randomly generating resources, they simply need to make a grid, have object show in the grid the same way you see though things with the scanner, you drop your excavator there, which acts like any character and sits on the ground.  It then digs into the ground, using the scanner or the excavator radar you can see the depth it has gone through in real time, other wise a simple display is shown on the hud representing the richness of resources (shown as a percentage), the amount harvested, and the depth left to special items.

4.  We have this issue already with cryotic in the jungle.  The resources are the same that you can farm on that planet, with maybe a small chance for a resource that doesn't naturally show up there.  The actual function of the excavator is not explained, but I assure you if they can dig up a relic unharmed they can dig up nano-spores and alloy left behind ages ago.

5.  Wrong, if your current excavator blows up, you simply find another site on a different tile.

6.  Symmetry is not always a good thing, maybe you only want  500 of a resource from a dig site, two minutes in and you are on your way with your spoils.  Perhaps when you scan a tile, it has three relics that you can detect under its surface, you decide to get the shallowest the first time on that tile, then when you come back, you decide to get the next deepest one, then that one needs to be defended a little longer, finally you come back to that tile a third tie to get the last one, will you have to dig all the way down to it.  This gives you a feel of actually digging these things up, other than a type of mobile defense mission that involves exploding spaceborne drills.

7.  You misunderstood me again, you can only do one per tile at a time, each set by a player, so in essence you could have four excavators active at a time spread across four tiles, this would be unwise unless all players could hold their own and defend them.  More naturally, they would do one or two and team up, alternating their special excavators.

8.  I don't think this is really an issue, after all have you seen the aftermath of an excavation?  There are power cells everywhere.  But for the sake of argument, lets say that they are a problem, then have the enemy die as usual, but when their bodies disappear, they leave the torso, or armor behind that you harvest the core from anyway.  This isn't counted as a body, but as an item just like the current power cells.

9.  Yes, once again, that choice isn't a bad thing.  You only HAVE to do one excavator to finish the mission, but if you really want to have fun harvesting resources and excavating actual relics, then I feel that this is the far superior game mode.  

 

As far as your next two paragraphs, I feel like your biggest concern is not the game mode, but uncertainty.  Yes there will be chaos, but you will actually be excavating things.  They could take it a step further and place rare weapon parts, ayatans, or ship parts in the mission.  Once someone finds that, I am sure everyone will be rushing to defend that excavator.  The excavators are more like the tool you excavate with, when you build one, its yours.  you could take nine different ones into the mission if you wanted, some people might actually do that.  To take it a step further, you could put additional armor, or sentry guns on you special excavator instead of resource augments.  Sure someone might come in an plop down an excavator that you don't agree with, but then you could just got to the next tile and plop down your own.  

Finally all of your technical concerns, while warranted, are unnecessary.  Look at archwing, if I put that idea down on the forums you would chew it apart saying that its far to technical for Warframe...yet it exists.  Steve is currently working on a space battle simulator where players operate different parts of the ship, fight off enemies that board them, and in turn board ships to disable them.  All in real time, no scripted events.  They do this because they like the challenge, they are afterall Digital Extremes

[Danjal777]

2 hours ago, Diarmut said:

This is good, but a little complicated, I think your scanning idea can work very well, as the "seeing through things and looking fro chests and such" already exist with the codex scanner. So that could just be implemented for Excavation.

I'm not saying it would be an easy change at all, but when you go into a mission with the descriptor as excavation....I kinda feel like I should be excavating things.  Much of the tools to do it already exist, its just whether or not DE want to change it.

[NeithanDiniem]

Good to know I was mistaken on the number of deployed extractors at once. That clears a problem up at least.

It wasn't about the technicality of the idea, its more about how viable will the idea sound to DE when you lay out all the changes required. You can take existing methods and systems though and adapt them to work with your idea without changing the idea too much, making the idea more viable.

First off, the spawning of resources would probably still need to be in set locations on the tiles to prevent any horrendous clipping issues and to prevent out-of-bounds spawns of the resource/item nodes. The location, when approached and interacted with, would send down your excavator to the set spot and mine out the thing there, like it does now. That would kill off any major clipping, misplacement, and alignment problems that could arise. The last thing you would want is a troll preventing you from getting the resource spot you want because they keep deploying their extractor somewhere completely useless just for lulz. As for how many spawn at one time, Not so sure. If you have a set number spawn in the mission, you have killed the endless state of the mission and it is now limited. It may be good to have the same endless system happen, but have multiple drilling spots available at one time, with a cooldown between deployment of any drills in the mission. It could give a vague description as to what type of thing you would be digging up, letting you have a bit of choice there, while preventing players from drilling 4 spots right at the start and from then on and vastly multiplying reward-for-time-invested for the excavation mission type. If you make excavation too good for resource collection, you've created a new problem. Cryotic should probably still be a bit common of a resource to get, perhaps as its own resource node with greater amounts of resource mined (since you aren't getting it every time) or as an additional reward with all drills as it is now.

Next: the cores. It would probably be best to just make the item stay as is due to your idea requiring new enemy models to be made to have that armor piece you take the core off of. Really what DE could do to help keep the cores from piling up is make them decay over time and eventually just explode (not causing damage, mind you) and fade away. That would prevent them from piling up, and visually get rid of them. Right now though they already despawn once a limit hits, so it wouldn't be changing too much. What I want to see more of is a reason for the enemy to be using those cores. Honestly I think it would be better off (with the current excavation system, mind you) if we were hijacking enemy drills and stealing the cores the enemy would have used to power the drill, so with your idea maybe DE should look into giving the enemies a reason for having the batteries on them to begin with rather than significantly changing the cores themselves. The reason would also need to be relative to the faction, like why would infested have a core? Better that the core was infested itself as some kind of bio energy pod or something that you can rig up to work with the drill.

Next, I would say that the scanner should make a spot appear on the surface, rather than in the ground. Being in the ground causes problems due to the culling planes DE uses to prevent other tiles from being visible through the scanner or windows/holes when you physically cant see them. Steve recently started using them even more and made mention that he was going to be rolling them out to more things to boost performance. Those planes are typically a bit close to the mesh of the object to prevent unusable space or glitches if they intersect another tile. Having the marker for the resource or item be projected on the surface would solve that problem while still offering a visual representation other than light beam from space. As for seeing the depth of the drill, it could just utilize the current progress bar system we have. Seeing it actually drill down to the resource has the same problem with the culling planes.

Next: I couldn't see DE letting people put offensive capability on their extractors, thats your job, not the job of the drill. The drill should probably be restricted to utility boosts. We already have deployable turrets and the link, and it is our job to protect the drill rather than the drill itself. Keeps the drill from being self-sustaining for the defense-part and makes us have to do our jobs properly to get rewarded. As for having what is essentially craftable boosters with the resource amount or rarity "mods" for the extractors, not too sure on how DE would respond to that due to them wanting to make a market for themselves for those boosts. Perhaps the boosts we get from mission and rare crates would instead be items we'd have to consume to activate, and thus we could use those to build a utility mod for the drill, or perhaps they are a rare item you can get from excavations missions themselves as a rare item you can get from a relic spot. Not too sure if DE would want the booster drill "mod" to decay/run out or not. Its a problematic subject though that DE would have to figure out what they are comfortable with, profit-wise. Speed of drilling, durability of drill, those kinds should be fine without causing any possible profit problems for DE I'd imagine though.

As for Steve, yea he created a new prototype game mode to show that it is possible in the game using incredibly basic code functions that would need to be heavily fleshed out to be viable. Theres still a ridiculously large amount of coding needed to get close to a new game mode with that. This however is an already working thing that is already fleshed out that would need modification, which can break things that are already functional. Its more approachable to add something new to the game that doesn't break much due to the modularity of the addition, compared to changing something that already works that players depend on can be harder to go and modify heavily due to possibly getting it wrong. They can do it, but they'd need to see a need to go in and do the work or that the work would improve the system without requiring an extensive redo.

 

Edited February 18, 2017 by NeithanDiniem

[Danjal777]

2 hours ago, NeithanDiniem said:

Good to know I was mistaken on the number of deployed extractors at once. That clears a problem up at least.

It wasn't about the technicality of the idea, its more about how viable will the idea sound to DE when you lay out all the changes required. You can take existing methods and systems though and adapt them to work with your idea without changing the idea too much, making the idea more viable.

First off, the spawning of resources would probably still need to be in set locations on the tiles to prevent any horrendous clipping issues and to prevent out-of-bounds spawns of the resource/item nodes. The location, when approached and interacted with, would send down your excavator to the set spot and mine out the thing there, like it does now. That would kill off any major clipping, misplacement, and alignment problems that could arise. The last thing you would want is a troll preventing you from getting the resource spot you want because they keep deploying their extractor somewhere completely useless just for lulz. As for how many spawn at one time, Not so sure. If you have a set number spawn in the mission, you have killed the endless state of the mission and it is now limited. It may be good to have the same endless system happen, but have multiple drilling spots available at one time, with a cooldown between deployment of any drills in the mission. It could give a vague description as to what type of thing you would be digging up, letting you have a bit of choice there, while preventing players from drilling 4 spots right at the start and from then on and vastly multiplying reward-for-time-invested for the excavation mission type. If you make excavation too good for resource collection, you've created a new problem. Cryotic should probably still be a bit common of a resource to get, perhaps as its own resource node with greater amounts of resource mined (since you aren't getting it every time) or as an additional reward with all drills as it is now.

Next: the cores. It would probably be best to just make the item stay as is due to your idea requiring new enemy models to be made to have that armor piece you take the core off of. Really what DE could do to help keep the cores from piling up is make them decay over time and eventually just explode (not causing damage, mind you) and fade away. That would prevent them from piling up, and visually get rid of them. Right now though they already despawn once a limit hits, so it wouldn't be changing too much. What I want to see more of is a reason for the enemy to be using those cores. Honestly I think it would be better off (with the current excavation system, mind you) if we were hijacking enemy drills and stealing the cores the enemy would have used to power the drill, so with your idea maybe DE should look into giving the enemies a reason for having the batteries on them to begin with rather than significantly changing the cores themselves. The reason would also need to be relative to the faction, like why would infested have a core? Better that the core was infested itself as some kind of bio energy pod or something that you can rig up to work with the drill.

Next, I would say that the scanner should make a spot appear on the surface, rather than in the ground. Being in the ground causes problems due to the culling planes DE uses to prevent other tiles from being visible through the scanner or windows/holes when you physically cant see them. Steve recently started using them even more and made mention that he was going to be rolling them out to more things to boost performance. Those planes are typically a bit close to the mesh of the object to prevent unusable space or glitches if they intersect another tile. Having the marker for the resource or item be projected on the surface would solve that problem while still offering a visual representation other than light beam from space. As for seeing the depth of the drill, it could just utilize the current progress bar system we have. Seeing it actually drill down to the resource has the same problem with the culling planes.

Next: I couldn't see DE letting people put offensive capability on their extractors, thats your job, not the job of the drill. The drill should probably be restricted to utility boosts. We already have deployable turrets and the link, and it is our job to protect the drill rather than the drill itself. Keeps the drill from being self-sustaining for the defense-part and makes us have to do our jobs properly to get rewarded. As for having what is essentially craftable boosters with the resource amount or rarity "mods" for the extractors, not too sure on how DE would respond to that due to them wanting to make a market for themselves for those boosts. Perhaps the boosts we get from mission and rare crates would instead be items we'd have to consume to activate, and thus we could use those to build a utility mod for the drill, or perhaps they are a rare item you can get from excavations missions themselves as a rare item you can get from a relic spot. Not too sure if DE would want the booster drill "mod" to decay/run out or not. Its a problematic subject though that DE would have to figure out what they are comfortable with, profit-wise. Speed of drilling, durability of drill, those kinds should be fine without causing any possible profit problems for DE I'd imagine though.

As for Steve, yea he created a new prototype game mode to show that it is possible in the game using incredibly basic code functions that would need to be heavily fleshed out to be viable. Theres still a ridiculously large amount of coding needed to get close to a new game mode with that. This however is an already working thing that is already fleshed out that would need modification, which can break things that are already functional. Its more approachable to add something new to the game that doesn't break much due to the modularity of the addition, compared to changing something that already works that players depend on can be harder to go and modify heavily due to possibly getting it wrong. They can do it, but they'd need to see a need to go in and do the work or that the work would improve the system without requiring an extensive redo.

 

Great points!  The biggest issue is whether or not they should update excavation, granted, my version is on the extreme scale of things, but I am sure they could find a middle ground.

My concept for the tiles essentially goes like this:  the developers will look at each tile and create a mesh for areas that can support an excavator.   In the figure below, they determine what is in the tile and what is out of the tile.  Then they determine what is viable space to land an extractor.  No resource or treasure will spawn unless it is in the viable zone.  

When the resources spawn they appear as glowing orange spots on the ground (surface level).  In these spots you will get the most out of your extractions.  Rendered below ground you will see glowing blue treasures, like relics, chests, ayatans, etc.

The items in the ground are not actually physically in that location, they are just rendered in a virtual space.  The game takes note of where the item's coordinates are, then renders it to appear at that depth and location.  When leaving the tile, you can't see another tile's virtual space.  In the example below, a relic has been placed at X-4, Y-2, Z-2.  The gray area is not actually there, the game just makes it look as if it were.  Also note that nothing can spawn outside of the confines of the applicable area.  

This is just my vision of the ideas under the hood.  I really wanted to keep the randomness to give you the feel of excavating a new area every time.

The trolls will happen, but considering they will just plop down their excavator and everyone else will move on to another spot, I don't think this will take long to fade away.  That spot will become available again at a later time anyway.

Four excavators right off the bat may sound like a bad idea, but in reality many players do that already to skip past the early tedious weak enemies part and get some high level stuff anyway, I've had four going at once the way it is now.  As the enemy level increases the threat causes players to converge on one excavator anyway.

As for the endless mission status, there are two concerns that come immediately to mind.  1. now that excavators can be left on essentially forever, what is the metric that the enemies scale with?  2. what happens if players mine every node.  My immediate thoughts to solve these would be: use the resources themselves as the metric, giving them each a value and having the game use the amount of value that has been harvested as the amount of scaling that needs to occur.  (e.g. is ferrite is worth 1 and rubedo worth 10  then 1000 is one step of scaling, similar to 100 cryotic).  As for the tiles, perhaps every ten minutes, a tile that has been mined will roll a new set of nodes, not replacing existing ones.

I would like to move all cryotic to ice planets as a resource that is gathered from areas not in a rich resource area (not in the orange zones).  This will allow people to farm cryotic reliably.  Eventually the same could be applied to Earth, maybe the sea floor on Uranus, Mars, some asteroids down the road, etc.  

My intent with cores was to actually remove extra enemies, they only drop from elite enemies, just the average run of the mill heavy gunners.  This will have to be adjusted a bit to accommodate low level missions.  But essentially they are left unchanged, instead leaving some kind of gear or body part behind that you reach into and tear out a core to speed up the excavation process.  Sorry if I gave you the impression that I wanted a bunch of new enemies, thats not where I was going with it.

I actually thought of only having the indicators on the surface as well, but I think it would easy enough to tell the game to make it look like it is at these coordinates while you are in a tile with or without cull zones.

The drills were a bit over zealous of an idea, but it came to me as I was playing a mission.  I was thinking about how ugly the excavator was in its yellow colored armor, I thought a Titan Extractor would be way more awesome to see in the mission.  So my my thoughts were, why stop there?  Why not have all sorts of options for extractors.  Another cool idea is if your extractor was tied both visually and with additional features to the lander that you have equipped giving another good use of some thing that essentially a loading screen item.  For example, the Mantis' excavator has four legs that grip the ground and has a faster dig time and regenerates its health, but it has weak shields and armor.  The Liset is averaged across the board.  The scimitar has a mortar on top of it and fires high explosive rounds at enemies outside of a minimum distance, it also has large metal plates that it deploys that function similar to Grineer blunts (airbag cover) blocking enemy fire until destroyed.  The Xiphos is slower than other excavators but has a built in turret and high shields and armor.

Once again, thank you for the great topics to debate, I look forward to the next round!

Edited February 18, 2017 by Danjal777

[NeithanDiniem]

The heat map idea for where stuff can spawn could work if very carefully made to prevent deployment on a bad location. I don't think it should even let you use an excavator on an invalid location (the green spots) just to bite that problem in the bud. Whether or not the AI can properly target the deployed extractor though becomes the main limiter to whether or not it can work. It all depends what foundational system DE uses for their existing extractors.

To combat trolls and tie in with your resources being worth points that change enemy scaling, you would probably want mission completion to also rely on that point system. To extract, you would probably need a basic point value amount first. That would prevent people from just dropping an excavator where ever and booking it to the end. Its also important specifically for sortie and alert types, which have a required point (cryotic) amount to get.

Cryotic to ice planets is iffy, and would largely depend on how DE wants that resource to be available. Since Cryotic has always been a universally available resource, it isn't tied to a planet specifically and thus doesn't need to be mentioned on the resource UI for each planet. This change would disrupt that. It does however open the possibility of more extraction-specific resource for planet types, so it has that going for it (cue people complaining over new resources here). If it is to be moved, a UI change to display that would be needed to not only show its on the ice planets only, but also only gotten through excavators exclusively (making it drop would be an issue, I feel).

Enemies would then be dropping a generic "armor piece" that isn't physically represented on their model, which may look weird. Like "Where was that guy hiding this big chest piece? They were just a little dude and this thing is bigger than their torso." This is what lead to me assuming new enemy models were expected to go with the idea since I was assuming the armor would be an actual thing they were wearing. Personally this is the biggest negative to me, I'd rather there be a reason why the core carriers are there to begin with, like maybe the factions are trying to use their own extractors and the cores are for those. You go in and take the resources before they can by stealing their cores to use on your own excavators, or maybe you even destroy their excavators while you are at it. This would work for the Grineer and Corpus, while the Infested could maybe use the cores to grow hives over the resource-rich areas or something and we are taking the cores to prevent it. I dunno, but it provides a reason for the cores to exist in the first place. Both options are on the table at least.

Not too sure how I'd feel about having to change my ship just to get the extractor type I wanted. Maybe you can get different skins you can equip after you build the different landing crafts, but be free to use any of them with any craft? Dunno. Color appearance of the extractor would more easily be accepted if it matched the landing craft. Color options for your loadouts and equipment are actually very bloat-causing for the info DE has to store for each profile, hence why we can't already recolor each cosmetic armor piece differently. Tying the colors of your extractor to the ship prevents needing to add a new one to the pile. Skin or type of modifications would be a lot easier and smaller data-wise and a lot more viable. Weapons on the extractors still seem as a bad idea to me. I assume these would be called down via a gear-wheel consumable?

On a side note. I've now been thinking how this kind of extractor could be used on asteroids in archwing. That may be an interesting thing to see honestly, especially considering DE's recent comment to step back from the sim-like feel of flying and return a bit closer to the older, more controlled movement system we had.