Mod Request - Companion Robots from Base, Inventory, Summon or Multiplayer

[everywomans]

As a first step for providing a robot companion to No Man's Sky, a friendly sentinel (or quadrapod, or either, or both) as currently exists in basic No Man's as a 3D model, object, stats and behavior functions, could be repurposed by adding the robot as a base item. Further steps beyond a base could be creating the robot as a portable device deployed from the inventory, a summoned vehicle, or else implemented as a NPC multiplayer so that a friendly robot companion or second/third party member could be used by a the Traveller player.

 

The base construction is probably easier to implement at first restricted to within a base, then as a portable device for further exploration and use. Implementing the robot as a special ship or exocraft might also be considered when making a mod for travel beyond a base. For a mobile user-owned robot beyond the base, an exocraft analog might be easiest to implement. A range like a teleport range limit or base limit range could be used to restrict the range of a companion robot. In other words, much existing models, methods, codes and objects can be used to implement a mod or mods, including creating, upgrading, summoning or deploying friendly sentinels. For balancing gameplay, perhaps the robots should be included in the ship or exocraft count so that overpowering is not enable at first until upgrading is performed.

 

The robots could be programmed (or not) by a law of Robotics forbidding the use of weapons against other Sentinels and players themselves but only used only for defense against active hostiles. A deployed robot could be implemented as one of the inventory icons for portable devices, possible only in the tech slots in the exosuit or starship. It could even have the same three slots as a portable refiner or automatic miner, so the robot could be used as limited inventory storage and would have to be repowered from ion batteries or uranium in the fuel slot. Or the robot could be recalled as one of the player's ships or exocraft and be supplied with its own upgradable tech slots. Alternately, a muliplayer robot would be a persistent NPC rather than crafted or deployed from the inventory or summoned. Perhaps multiplayer would be the most difficult to implement, but perhaps it would be the most feasible as an automonous or slaved companion. I do not know.

 

For gameplay, the player would have to

1) craft the robot from rare or expensive parts (base building or portable deployable device implementations)

 

possibly do one or more of the following:

2) receive sentinel upgrades from a manufacturing center control center or from a costly repair tech machine (upgrade tech module implementation)

3) obtain a robot whole (surrender) or as crafting components from defeated bots at a depot or manufactory

4) receive the location of a whole or salvagable robot from an observatory or from a distress call

 

probably Hello Games would have to program the following:

5) buy a bot, components, and upgrades at one of the tech shops

6) deploy the bot from an inventory or summon one from the exocraft/ship summon menu

 

perhaps modded or from Hello Games, or a combination

7) join multiplayer as both a Traveller and a robot.

 

What do you think? Are you game for the challenge? Any insights about feasibilities within the Modders without Hello Games?