The core idea is essentially adding a snap feature. Imagine that one feature that most if not all survival games have when building foundations or something. You place a cargo/sealed chest, and from there will be one of two options for this suggestion:
Automatic - Self explanatory, it’ll automatically pick the snap point closest to the player/cargo placement.
Manual - You select where you want to snap the cargo to, this is probably easier to implement since you can just click a side of the cargo you specifically want to place your cargo and it’ll automatically place there.
Obviously there will be a few restrictions to this. The primary one is you cannot snap/choose/even see a snapping point if that point is obstructed. The second restriction is that only cargo can work as a snap point for cargo, and sealed chest can only work as a snap point for other sealed chests. Similar/same shape or type of cargo, assuming variants get added can be placed under a category so sealed chests can snap onto other sealed chests of different types, and cargos of different types can snap onto cargo of different types.
An optional restriction could be limiting this to strictly the ship.
Mostly thought up of this suggestion due to the horrendous attempts of symmetry I have seen when it comes to laying out cargo. I also don’t want to suggest anything extreme and this is relatively tame for what it is. Although, it would be interesting if we could in the case of gunpowder barrels when snapped in a square shape tie them together and just carry 4 gunpowder barrels at once for explosive reasons or just selling.
Probably not
I should probably also clarify, the snap points do not “fuse” the cargo together, it just places it perfectly at the snap point. Meaning each piece of cargo will work as normal and unloading should work just fine.
So let me understand this right.
Every ship now has an invisible grid on it where every point is perfectly spaced from every other point to allow perfect cargo placement 100% of the time.
As long as I have the option to make it stay invisible even when I’m carrying something or otherwise utilizing it, that sounds great!
I don’t see why not, I made the suggestion thinking of an outline to only appear if you’re holding cargo and being near it. But I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a way for you to make it invisible.
We really need this feature cuz the only way to solve loading problem is either grid snapping or a feature for a quartermaster to buy a certain amount of cargo, but would be hard to implement
If you want that then you could always suggest for Merchant focused ships with storage compartments inside. Alternatively it could be an addon, for example, in Elite Dangerous you can buy Cargo Modules and that’s how you’d get your storage.
In this case, it’d be an add-on that varies from ship to ship (how many you can add) but the cargo can be automatically stored in there by your crew (or the player) for rapid unloading and loading. A consequence of these could be reducing speed and/or ship integrity (durability) but perhaps they could save while crossing seas in order to facilitate cross sea trading which could prove to be immensely more lucrative than standard in-sea trading (although there could be a mechanic where pirates catch rumors of your spoils and come after you like the Grand Navy does with Notoriety).
Sorry if I’m stupid but what do snap points mean exactly?
Like is it an outline of the object ur holding and where you’ll place it, so for example I’m holding some cargo then on my ship I see like a transparent piece of cargo right infront of me which is where the cargo will go if I place it.
