I was thinking about how to make use of excess blueprints, and then i came up with this: factories.
Factories would work the following way.
1. You buy the factory location similar to how you would buy a private mine. It should be rather costly (100K+ CAPS)
2. You insert a blueprint into the factories computer
3. The factory automatically starts producing the item from the blueprint
4. The more caps you pay to the "employees" in the factory (per day), the more productive they are
5. After a certain amount of time (1-2 weeks or something like that), the factory runs out of resources (for your imagination, just imagine that the factory is located on a mine and the employees are taking the resources from the mine to create the items), thus the factory closes and the location vanishes from your worldmap
What does this do in ingame terms?
You pay a certain amount of caps for the factory location, and then you can decide to pay more caps per day to increase the productivity of the factory. You use up a blueprint.
This basically adds a huge caps sink into the game, and also gives excess blueprints a purpose.
It also reduces the amount of time factions (or everyone in general) needs to grind in order to craft their gear, because once they accumulate enough wealth they can decide to automate the process of gear crafting for a few days.
There would basically be something like a locker in the factory that would spawn the item from the blueprint (that was inserted into the computer).
The employees in the factory are just to add some flavor (they dont actually need to run around and craft the stuff manually).
If you pay a lot of caps per day, you can increase the productivity a lot.
What do you guys think about the concept of factories?
I think this could help a lot with establishing a really good economy for the game.
People that dont have a lot of caps could sell their blueprints to big factions (so that they can run their factories), who in return would pay caps for the blueprints.
Now these people can pay the factory owners caps in order to buy gear from them etc etc
With this we implement a nice caps flow into the game and at the same time a viable caps sink.