This is just my opinion, and authchips are cool and all, but they don't make much sense to me for a couple of reasons:
- Single use.
Why are they single use items? I've read the post in devblog explaining this limitation, but it doesn't make any sense from the lore point. Even relay couplers have a number of uses. And now we have a single use chip? It can only give one print command to a fabricator and then it fries itself? Or it stores only one authentification code? This seems strange, having an entire chip dedicated for only one single use. To print two items you have to use two of them. The Unaware must be wasting a lot of resources just to make those, since they are single use. - Their existence.
We can even don't care about the previous statement about wasting resources to produce single use chips if we look at the fact that the Unaware don't even need them at all. As far as I know, when the Complex need something, it sends the commands to the fabricators via some invisible to us network without use of authchips. None of the Unaware ever come to the fabricator with authchip attached to print some parts. It all happens by itself. So, why would Unaware produce authchips in the first place if they don't use them and don't need them, if not to allow some Derelicts to steal them and use for fabricator hacking, preventing which was the sole purpose of the authchips, as stated in the lore? This makes no sense and looks like they are just giving the Derelicts tools to hack their own systems.
Quote from: S0ZDATEL on April 12, 2022, 03:40:45 PMTo print two items you have to use two of them.
Note that most items are produced in multiples, not individually, unless you mean two
different items, in which case yes.
And we could maybe add even more lore/background for them later once they're going to remain unchanged/as is, but they were only just released a few weeks ago. So going to give it more time. But that's also optional. There are quite a lot of areas of the lore that are not fully explained and you can fill in blanks as you prefer. This is intentional, and some players are quite good at coming up with creative explanations for why things are the way they are. In fact, some of these explanations eventually become actual lore ;)
Those are really pretty minor points in the bigger picture, though, where you have a large world in which very few of the finer elements and connections are made explicit, and you're playing only a sliver of that world, for a sliver of its lifetime.
And another one: why only fabricators? So, the Unaware are cool with Derelicts hacking their terminals, repair stations and garrisons? Those are fine, but don't you dare to touch fabricators. If they introduced those authchips, why don't apply them to all the machines to protect them from being hacked?
Yeah I can come up with a number of different logical explanations for these things, but don't want to force so many minute details on the player. Come up with one that makes sense based on your understanding of the world :) (which I'm sure will expand with time)