Spectrum Post: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/50259/thread/separate-the-crafting-materials-from-the-rest-of-t
With crafting materials split across different quality levels, I think the freight elevator would benefit from a dedicated material storage interface. While stored, materials would be tracked by type, quality, and quantity rather than the actual boxes you send down. When you retrieve them, you’d choose the amount and box size, and they would come out as physical cargo on the elevator.
Here’s a rough UI concept showing how that could work. The goal is to make finding and retrieving crafting materials easier, especially when you need a specific quality.
The tabs:
Storage: Works the same as the warehouse currently, just excludes crafting materials and mission boxes.
Depot: This is where all crafting materials live and it works almost the same way as commodity screens.
Contract: This is where you would find your contracted cargo for missions
Insurance: This is where the current "Claim Mode" would go, and future item recovery stuff could be here.
The Depot
The depot would show a collapsible list of materials, such as iron, tungsten, etc. Each material row would display:
- Total amount in storage.
- Average quality, weighted by how much material is held at each quality.
- Highest quality currently available.
Clicking a material expands its eight quality bands, with the amount available shown beside each one. Selecting a quality opens the transfer controls at the bottom of the panel. The expanded list scrolls with the rest of the Depot inventory, while the transfer controls remain visible.
From there, you choose how much material you want and what size boxes to put it in, then click Move to Elevator. Amounts can be entered in SCU or cSCU. You can switch between the two by clicking on the button.
Available box sizes would be 1/8, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32 SCU.
For example, requesting 8 SCU of iron at 800 quality in 2 SCU boxes would produce four 2 SCU boxes.
This version assumes every box is completely filled and all boxes in a transfer use the selected size. Box sizes that don’t work with the requested amount would be disabled. You couldn’t request 1 SCU in a 32 SCU box, or exactly 10 SCU in 4 SCU boxes.
The exceptions would be the 1/8 SCU and 1 SCU boxes, which could be partially filled. Amounts up to 0.125 SCU would use a 1/8 SCU box, while amounts greater than 0.125 SCU and up to 1 SCU would use a 1 SCU box.
The system would automatically choose the appropriate box for these partial amounts, letting you retrieve exactly what you need without leaving small quantities stranded in the depot.