The Wealth of Stations: Ideas for Improving the Credit Economy

[Douk]

When credits were introduced as a feature to our server years ago, I must admit I was all manner of excited for the possibilities it might hold. Several other code branches of SS13 had similar systems in place (perhaps most notably Goon) and I felt they had benefited substantially from having said systems. If nothing else, money felt appropriate for the setting: a colossal mega-corporation that has sent an expendable crew out to likely be slaughtered in the pursuit of greater profits in the dark expanses of space. Why wouldn’t we see a taste of that in the daily lives of the crew? While I think there have been impressive strives in making the monetary system as integrated as possible, I still feel that most crew really never engage meaningfully with the credit economy round-to-round unless playing cargo (or you REALLY are into buying cosmetics from the dorm vending machines). With systems like bounties or cargo’s ability to sell items to Centcomm, there are plenty of ways to make credits should you want to, but to what end? There are simply not enough things on the station that demand you use credits, so they just end up pooling in your bank account for the round. It’s money that neither serves as a medium of interaction with a market nor serves as a means of rationing scarce resources. I could go on to say how we need a broader range of things orderable from Cargo, but that's vague and unhelpful from a design perspective; greater variety is almost always better, that's a no-brainer. Here are some suggestions for things that I think could be implemented with comparable ease that would make credits more useful to a broader base of the crew.



Faster Credit Access, Faster Fines

This one is perhaps a strange place to start, but let me explain. Currently, most things that you would need credits for that aren’t vending machines or cargo consoles (security citations, direct payments to other players, etc) requires you take the ID out of the PDA (where most people have it stored), alt-click to get the credits window, then withdraw the exact amount without going over or under. This method is cumbersome and could do with some fine-tuning.

Firstly, I think you should be able to withdraw funds directly from the PDA without having to take the ID out first. Secondly, paying citations should work like a vending machine where it auto-withdraws the correct amount to pay the selected fine. It would also be nice if security had a device (or maybe a feature built into their PDA) that directly extracts money to pay off any and all fines a person may have if used on their person, after a brief activation time of course (with a visible warning to the person its being used on to make sure they KNOW it’s happening). Right now, if a violator fails to pay fines voluntarily, it is rather cumbersome to COMPEL them pay. It currently requires restraining the individual, confiscating their ID, removing the EXACT amount of credits to pay off each individual fine as separate chips, taking this to a security records console, finding their record, and then paying off each individual fine with the appropriate credit chip. That removes what I think is the key utility of the citation system; it allows an alternative method for punishment that prevents the need to oversee as many people sitting in the timed cells, especially for non-violent crimes. With the faster system I mentioned above, you may not need to even bring minor violators into brig unless you feel the need to do a full search and are afraid doing so in a public space is too risky.

Tl;dr why does this matter? Fines are probably the closest thing our server has to taxes: it’s a form of state-mandated levy that, above all else, creates a top-down necessity for having at least a baseline of credits on hand at all times (especially if you are a would-be ne’er-do-well). This is on top of the aforementioned benefits to security itself, which would help turn citations into the time-saving measure I think it was initially intended to be.



Department Self-Stock Vendors

Every department on the station, much like chemistry currently, should be equipped with a self-serve vending machine somewhere around said department’s public-facing window. This on its own would be of large help for jobs like the botanists who output a large amount of goods that must be effectively stored/displayed to be consumed by a general public. However, the key addition to make along with the existence of the vendors themselves would be the ability for those who stock the items to, if they choose, set their own credit prices for the items(or perhaps pre-set prices for applicable items if you want to make it compatible with the current inflation system; I neither know how this works nor do I know how comprehensive the current list is for appraised items). Generally speaking, the current model for production and distribution on the server is “for use/need” with some restrictions on items based on safety concerns. Ironically, while I think this would be a more ideal model IRL, in-game I feel the existence of money begs the availability of alternative models. Theoretically you COULD buy and sell non-cargo goods right now if you really wanted, but that would require having at least one person in each department/workspace willing to stand by and essentially play cashier since those exchanges would need to be personally overseen. For roles that don’t really produce anything that can be directly bought/sold (medbay, engineering, robotics, etc), you can just adjust their salaries to keep them competitive with roles that realistically can have sales income.

Tl;dr why does this matter? This proposal has two key benefits that I foresee: it gives added value to credits by giving a wider range of things you can actually spend said credits on (let’s face it, vending machines and cargo orders only go so far) and gives departments/jobs that are production-centric incentive to keep producing into the mid-to-late round in order to keep vendors stocked and a steady stream of income flowing, even if they don’t have personal use for the produced items at that time.



Public Pay-to-Use Autolathe

There’s been a lot of debate as to whether there should or shouldn’t be a public autolathe over the years. The primary argument is that having one means cargo is obligated to shovel metal/glass into it despite having no control over how much people are subsequently taking out of it, on top of it taking away another task cargo would normally have when it comes to interacting with other crewmembers. I would suggest a compromise instead. Provide a public autolathe, but with toggleable options for how it operates. Namely, have it have three possible states changeable by unlocking the autolathe with the appropriate access ID: OFF (unusable), ON (Free use; like the current autolathe), and ON (Charge-per-use; anyone without cargo access pays credits for the items they fabricate, likely pinned to the price of materials used). This way, cargo is still potentially compensated for the materials they are investing, and people can stop breaking into cargo to use the autolathe whenever the cargo staff are away from the front window for more than two minutes.



I can think of several other suggestions that might also give credits an added sense of importance, but I’ll leave it at these few for now so as to not be too pie in the sky about my suggestions; these ones seem (at least to someone with sub-zero coding ability) mostly easy to implement.

[Super Aggro Crag]

Make air alarms have pay slots, u gotta pay for air and the more people in your area the faster the airs gonna run out so u better pony up jimbo

If u pay extra u can get premium air dispensed with Special Fun Gasses added into the mix

[cocothegogo]

pay your way out of brig

[cacogen]

I agree that departments should be set up to monetise their output among the crew. These are the items people want and what they'll save money for.