A game designer's honest love letter

1. Turn 5 Circuit Boards into 1 Component Kit - If you're building a lot of vehicles and mechanisms you will run out of component kits all the time. Circuit boards on the other hand will get more and more. This recipe allows for a balanced conversion rate from circuit boards to component kits. You will have much more fun tinkering on new creations once this recipe is part of your craftbot.
   
2. Turn 1 Totebot Head into 1 Circuit Board - Totebot heads don't have much use except for making sounds and maybe be used as an unsightly defense material. Turn them into something very useful with this recipe and never again be annoyed by your ever growing mountain of Totebot heads.
   
3. Turn 1 Circuit Board into 5 Scrap Metal - this one you probably won't need regularly, so think of it more as a backup: If you're working on a new creation and accidently used up all your scrap metal but you're in dire need of a otherwise very cheap part like a hinge - with this recipe you can stay in the crafting flow instead of being forced to head out to look for a haybot.

• navigate to the file craftbot.json which is located at: ...\steamapps\common\Scrap Mechanic\Survival\CraftingRecipes
  
• open it with a text editor and replace the first two lines with this code:

• ...\steamapps\common\Scrap Mechanic\ChallengeData\Gui\Language\
  
• ...\steamapps\common\Scrap Mechanic\Data\Gui\Language\
  
• ...\steamapps\common\Scrap Mechanic\Survival\Gui\Language\

So you will need to search through up to 3 files to find the item you are looking for, because e.g. the Totebot Head is listed in the inventoryDescriptions.json file of the Data directory, while many construction materials are listed in the inventoryDescriptions.json file of the Survival directory.

I encourage you to create backups of both the original craftbot.json file and your edits. This can be helpful in case there are any mistakes in the code or if the game gets an update that might override your changes.

• Lock Creation - Set a creation (vehicle or building) to "locked" by using a new tool or a shortcut, which prevents you from accidentally removing some of its parts. This would prevent players from accidently deliting vital parts of their creations, especially when collecting nearby item drops by using the right mouse button. The lift already recognizes detached creations as one connected thing, so it shouldn't be to hard to implement this feature.
  
• Blueprints - Create a blueprint of a creation and then replicate it in the mechanic station or in a new building by paying the combined sum of its parts (or more). This would be extremely time saving if you e.g. want to create foldable stairs for your house which you want to put in there 10 times. Or if your car gets destroyed while exploring, you can just reprint it - if you have enough resources.
  
• Means to remove scrubs - It's weird and annoying that you can't remove small bushes. If you want to turn a forest area into a factory, you can't get rid of the scrubs.
  
• Tree seeds - Let us have our own hydroponic forest, y'all!
  
• Layered Visibility System for Connector - When you have the Connect Tool selected, hit Shift+Scroll to open a new Visibility Menu. In this Menu every type of connection is listed and you can toggle their visibility. The type of connections are already color coded in the game right now, meaning that the separation per layer isn't something that players need to be taught anew.

• display dimensions while building and deleting blocks
  
• make the inventory smaller - this would put more emphasis on building cars with chests
  
• automatically access nearby containers when you open your backpack
  
• remove message "stop playing the game wrong" - come on guys, please don't show players this message every time they glitch through the ground because of your physics being weird
  
• improve bot balancing: e.g. Tapebots are way too strong as they can kill you with two hits
  
• note: it never bothered me that food doesn't spoil, because tinkering on mechanical constructions can take ages. So if you plan to add a spoil system, pls make sure that players aren't obligated to focus on that too much (e.g. if food can spoil, also add a fridge which greatly improves the durability)

That all being said, I want to stress that the survival mode of the game could use much more content in the likes of other survival games (e.g. Don't Starve). With the mechanics and systems that are already in place, this would mostly mean to build many more variations of what's already there, not coming up with new features (so it would mostly be art tasks for asset creation and design tasks for balancing and probably a comparatively small amount of engineering support).

I hope this contained some bits of useful information. Let me know if you have any questions or want to know more!

Thank you for reading! ✌️