u/Doop--

Heya Facepunch :)

Remove fragments from being found anywhere else other than in the following with appropriately adjusted drop rates:

Basic Blueprints:
- Toolboxes
- Sunken Treasure Crates
- Military Crates ( probably good idea to exclude deep sea )

Advanced Blueprints:
- Locked Crates

Finally, reduce the number of basic fragments needed to make advanced to 10 or even 5.

---------

The number of issues this can fix is absolutely bonkers.

1. CRITICAL: Advanced fragments being tied to locked crates means the most common route to tier 3 will be collecting basic fragments. This. is. GOOD....... There's no option for building right next to locked crates, they are on cargo, oil, chinook, or deep sea. That's it. Everyone can see it on the map so you will be fighting like hell for it. So the only people who are tier 3 day 1 are gonna be the lucky ones who roamed like crazy and didn't die or managed to get multiple cargo/oil runs without losing to grubs. This effectively implements a time gate to "instant" progression. If you want tier 3 instantly, you have to wait for events, otherwise you have to play the whole game and die out in the wild like everyone else.
2. CRITICAL: Large groups are no longer being funneled countless amounts of sulfur early game which is a big reason why everyone on the entire server gets raided in the first 48 hours of wipe.
3. CRITICAL: Everyone can progress equally and groups can't use bully zerg tactics to gatekeep anymore. You will progress faster if you take more risk but on average it will take everyone hours to get tier 2. Someone might get lucky with RNG but that will be random and impossible to game by anyone, let alone large groups.
4. Every bit of monuments and powerlines are worth it. Hell, most of the map becomes viable again rather than everything being focused on 5 individual grids. This also means decent performance improvements due to everyone being more equally distributed. Also means the map will feel more alive.
5. Loot in keycard rooms can be more meaningful and powerful now that its not the mechanism for progression. Go ham on it, the possibilities are endless. I'm looking at you new power plant power grid branch.
6. Targeting toolboxes is essential here as it prevents this from just ending up being the same thing as a scrap grind because there's no real safe and easy to game this system. Toolboxes are semi rare on roads/powerlines and have no static spawn locations so you have to roam. Otherwise you are diving or hitting monuments. That's it, there's no exploitable loops to generate endless progression materials. Sure, you could sit in the safe zone and try and get the few toolboxes that spawn within it but that's gonna take forever and its still random. You can't just fish, hit barrels, recycle, do quests, etc, you have to play the game to progress, full stop.
7. ESPers can get f*****...... as everything lives inside crates. Every wonder how it seems like people have perfect timing for when keycard rooms reset? Welp, that wont work anymore here and those losers have to actually play the game again.
8. Cars will be decent strats both for collecting fragments as well as mad maxxing people on the roads.
9. Underwater Labs is intentionally excluded because we all know how easy it is for 4 people to fully control it with endless respawn rates during early wipe. Now its exclusively for components and t2 guns like it should be.
10. This is an easy fix that requires no new code to implement other than admin level of tuning drop rates and maybe an exclusion filter on deep sea.
11. You will actually see clans take down a chinook early wipe, like seriously.... That's pretty nuts and cool.

There's probably even more to this than I realize and you get it all for a change that will take a SINGLE dev maybe a day or 2 to do properly? You don't even need to adjust the keycard rooms at first. No crazy new mechanics, just boilerplate tried and true simple tuning. Fixes a metric ton of issues in the process. Doesn't get better than that.

p.s. - Yes I submitted this as feedback already but I want a good public discussion on it as well.

TLDR; there's too much "free" boom in the game now, largely from the deep sea but not entirely, and it's really really ruining the game.

This is fundamentally the thing causing server pops to tank dramatically on monthly and bi-weekly servers after just 2-3 days.

I'm a steadfast solo player who likes to try to survive full wipes in big compounded bases without getting fully raided and I've noticed a trend.

First it was the workbench fragment update which created a diabolical method to funnel sulfur to big groups for what is essentially "free". You should see the stats on some of the vending machines that I've seen in clan bases.....60k+ is COMMON just for basic fragments. This dramatically cuts down the need to farm in addition to making it 100% risk free way of generating boom as it's all vendy sales.

Then came the deep sea and holy mother of jeebus I wont even dwell on how bad February was other than saying it would have been 10x worse had more people known how egregiously op and easy the loot was. Now 3 force wipes later, with a few decent tweaks from FP and the meta largely being discovered by larger groups, the core issue is still there. There are something like 50+ mil crates, 5+ elite crates, at least 2 air drops, 1 locked crate, and usually about 12k+ sulfur, sometimes more.

One of the more wild runs I've done netted me 16k sulfur, 10 satchels, 5 C4, 3 rocket launchers, bunch of HVs, 4 air supply drops which gave me more satchels and at least 2 more C4......and that was only hitting half the islands and ghost ships. Took like 90 minutes and I walked away with enough boom ( won't even talk about guns + comps + etc ), to FULLY raid just about any standard compounded base or 3-4 smaller ones. FYI that's almost an entire barrel of sulfur with nearly zero risk involved ( except meta is now solved and deep sea is now 100% locked down by clans as they finally realized max speed is how you win ).

The trend I'm seeing now is I use to have neighbors, like lots of neighbors... and like throughout a large portion of wipe. It was nice, made the game feel alive and grubby but nice. Now, I no longer have neighbors for more than a day or two. I am also offlined every single night on force wipe and it just keeps getting more ridiculous. People use to hit bunkers and just give up but now, it's to the core, every single time ( complete with full turbo virgin griefing ).

I'm not here to give exact solutions as there are many many maaaaaaany ways to fix this. All I'm gonna say is that free boom and sulfur availability needs to go waaaaaay down. If it doesn't, there's no point in even trying to build bases anymore and half the game is dead and gone.

---- My latest story time on Rustopia US Large ----

I've been sick with the flu and stuck in bed so I grabbed my laptop and decided to focus on building a perfect compound this wipe on Rustopia US Monthly.

Raids:

1. 7 hours into wipe, Quad builds a fob but bails when they see I'm online, raid 2 of my neighbors with about 8 rockets
2. 11 hours into wipe, Quad returns when they think im offline. I fumbled the defense and they spend about 6 C4 and 6 rockets and get to my core on my main building. Try to grief but cant because I had the bones pretty solid on the compound. I recover, seal, and goto bed. Spent the next day pretty much finishing the compound, complete with anti fob TCs as best I could.
3. 44 hours into wipe, ?? sized clan blows anti fob, builds a 5 story fob, and throws ( this is not an exaggeration ) ~EIGHTY+ rockets into my compound and griefs every single inch they could. They even dumped 8 rockets on the flank base I had setup ( literally just a bed inside ) and griefed it. They did all of this in less than an 90 minutes which means they had almost all of this precooked and ready as they also had to go through 11 turrets I had throughout the compound, some of them pretty dirty.

The real kicker and I'm not even kidding here.... I had a single p2 ( turrets obviously had pythons ) in base with a box of comps you could farm solo in about 1-2 hours. I wasnt PVPing because I'm sick and on a laptop in bed so there's zero chance I even pissed off either this quad or this random clan. It's highly unlikely they even knew my name.

Game feels broken if FP is allowing people this brain dead to be able to throw this amount of boom to offline a SOLO for MASSIVE MASSIVE net loss and/or because they are bored with too much boom. As a solo, I dont even bother raiding other solos because its never worth it, especially early wipe. Even duos have like 3x times as much loot. This amount of boom is enough to literally crack ANY full sized clan base and net you 10-20x what I had? Insane.

And yes, I get it, building big draws the attention of everyone you dont want but at some point there has to be a breaking point of not being worth it. I've been raided exactly like this 4-5 times but it was always more than 5 days into wipe and always because I had a major flaw in my build and I actually do have loot. This time around, there really wasn't a flaw issue and I did as much as I humanly could in less than 48 hours. Even not getting raided on the first day wouldn't have changed that much.

p.s. - yup, first post on reddit and I hate engaging with the internet nowadays due to the rampant toxicity so should give you an idea of how hot and bothered I am about this. If someone like me is wasting their time to come complain about this, there's a real problem here.