Soft Fuel and Maintenance System

EARLY VERSION - NOT THOROUGHLY TESTED. UINSTALL OLD VERSION BEFORE INSTALLING NEW.

v1.2: Major changes to how maintenance and fuel are handled.

Your ship never wears out and never asks you for anything. This mod changes that, without getting in the way.

As you jump, land, take off and dock, your ship occasionally needs servicing. Every one of those events is checked, but most of the time nothing comes of it. When something is needed, it's graded Minor, Average or Major maintenance, and the game tells you which - Minor is by far the most common, Average shows up now and then, and Major is rare, the same way most real wear is small and serious wear is unusual. The size of the job decides what it draws: a Minor service only needs a unit or two of cheap raw material, an Average service needs several of those plus a couple of lower-grade parts, and a Major service works its way up to needing some of the expensive high-grade parts too. Materials are drawn from your cargo hold, a maintenance crate, or both depending on your settings. If you don't have what it wants, it makes do with whatever else is aboard. If there's nothing suitable at all, your hull takes some damage, and the message tells you what you were short of and whether your hull took the strain. Hull damage is capped so hull never drops below 15%. Everything the mod asks for scales up linearly with your ship's hull - a ship with twice the hull of the Frontier is asked for roughly twice as much.

If Fuel Consumption is on, every one of those same flight events also rolls, completely separately, for a reactor spike - its own Minor/Average/Major grade, drawing Helium-3 instead of parts. A ship's maintenance needs and its fuel needs are independent of each other, so a routine jump can turn up a Major reactor spike with no parts trouble at all, or the other way around. Reactor spikes scale with your ship's reactor power rather than its hull.

SETTINGS

Three options under gameplay options. Maintenance Requirements is the one dial for both how often something is needed and how severe it is when it is - higher settings mean more frequent AND heavier events, lower settings mean fewer and lighter ones. Supply Source chooses whether maintenance draws from your cargo hold, maintenance crates, or crates first with the hold as backup. Fuel Consumption lets you turn off the Helium-3 draw entirely, for use alongside mods that already manage ship fuel.

MAINTENANCE CRATES

Build a Large Maintenance Crate (found under Miscellaneous in ship decoration menu, 4 Aluminum to build) aboard your ship and it becomes a valid supply source, governed by the Supply Source setting above. Any number of crates is supported, and you can build or scrap them freely - the mod checks what's actually aboard each time it services your ship.

MAINTENANCE MATERIALS

CAUTION: Having these items in your cargo hold or a maintenance crate may mean they get consumed by ship maintenance, depending on your Supply Source setting.

Fuel: Helium-3 is drawn by reactor spikes, unless you've turned it off under Fuel Consumption. Reactor spikes are rolled independently of maintenance, so they don't always coincide with a parts service.

Raw materials: Iron, Aluminum, Copper, Sealant, Titanium, Adhesive, Lubricant, Polymer

Parts: Adaptive Frame, Austenitic Manifold, Comm Relay, Isocentered Magnet, Isotopic Coolant, Mag Pressure Tank, Monopropellant, Reactive Gauge, Tau Grade Rheostat, Zero Wire, Control Rod, Molecular Sieve, Semimetal Wafer, Paramagnon Superconductor, Supercooled Magnet, Zero-G Gimbal, Positron Battery, Nuclear Fuel Rod, Sterile Nanotubes, Microsecond Regulator, Indicite Wafer, Power Circuit, Rothicite Magnet, Substrate Molecular Sieve, Tasine Superconductor, Veryl Manifold, Vytinium Fuel Rod

Spread beats pile: there's a limit to how much of any one material a single service will accept, so a moderate amount of eight or ten things covers you better than two hundred iron.

KNOWN ISSUES

Ship systems: Hull damage has occasionally been accompanied by a system (engines, grav drive) taking damage too. This looks like the game's own response to hull damage.

NOTES

Changes no vanilla record, so it should sit alongside almost anything. Safe to add mid-playthrough. To remove, set Maintenance Requirements to Off, fly once, then uninstall.

You can contact me for bug reports and suggestions on https://www.nexusmods.com/profile/AgreeableOwl