Materials.
Created by: PJB3005
We have a material datum system but it's more some counters for abstractly storing material amounts of a set list of minerals than actually having meaningful materials.
On bay and goon and such on the other hand, a lot more things have materials incorporated. You don't just have a table, you have a steel table, etc... This is really cool and it opens up a lot of flexibility and personally I think materials are a better way to handle upgrades than flat part upgrades.
On goon you can literally combine Uqill, a very blast resistant crystal, with Fibrilith, a sort of cloth-like "mineral", To make blast resistant cloth. Now make a jumpsuit out of that. You can make rainbow coloured floor tiles. And jumpsuits. And chairs. And toolboxes. You can make plasma chairs which produce plasma gas when sparked. Hide some in the bushes and run around spamming RCD sparks for !!FUN!!
The problem is our materials system isn't exactly laid out to handle this. At all.
Now the question is, how do we make a system like this here?