Another week, another BETA 8 Dev Progress Post. We're making progress, and the Experimental builds seem to be doing what we had hoped for. The next build is coming out along with this post with the recent changes, Manufacturing.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing is seeing a few changes. First of all, time is going away. It was added back in ALPHA 5 as a way to promote base/intrastructure upgrading (want more stuff faster? have more stuff to make it). However that didn't really work out, and was off the mark. What we want is players to be able to make stuff, either to upgrade their ship(s) or to trade it, or to turn it in for a mission or objective. Manufacturing will also use your current vessel's inventory for both source and destination, so no more having to mess around with the other vessel's inventory. The Manufacturing screen will also show you all nearby labs, and their status (whether free or paid or unavailable due to a restriction), so no more shifting around.
Now with insta manufacturing, that now means using other ships/stations Labs is easier than ever. Much like Construction, you'll now able to pay for access to those labs. Faction standing will ultimately determine how much you pay, and payment will be done on a per recipe basis.

Faction Changes

We're also making some changes to the faction system. We're going to be switching to five standings (ally, friendly, neutral, disliked, hated) for simplification--after all, what really is the difference between disliked and untrusted? We will also be adding in some kind of visual indictator to the faction panel to better indicate exactly where you stand with each faction. Finally, we'll be introducing mini-faction standings, small little bumps that can help decrease/increase prices a little bit smoother. Next Progress Post we'll hopefully go into the universe changes. It's one of the more complex changes we're making, and it's taken some time to get working, but we're confident it's going to really be a great change.