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Town Machines
From Hellgatewiki.com
Newly added just before the alpha testing began in June 2007, the town machines served several vital purposes. Each of these machines will get their own wiki page with more details once their functions are more fully defined and finalized.
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The Converterizer
Not the machine's actual name, but since no one seems to remember what it was called when it made its debut at the May 2007 Community Day, it'll do for now. This machine is basically a non-portable Horadric Cube -- raw materials go in, a finished product, usually a weapon, comes out. Various recipes are listed when you click on the machine in town, and all of them (as seen at community day 2007) required a lot of ingredients.
Testing revealed that weapons and armor could be "broken down" into raw materials by using the control on the new Interface Wheel. One rifle or pistol resulted in one unit of scrap metal, and the easiest recipes in the Converterizer required 50 units of scrap metal, and a handful of other raw materials that were obtained by breaking down other types of items.
As you can see from the recipes, these are long term projects; you don't leave town and return with enough materials to make three new rifles from scratch. The Converterizer is a gold sink and something you work at over the life of your character, consistently picking up junky items and breaking them down into raw materials for eventual reuse. Raw materials are very portable, auto-stacking up to 50 in just one inventory spot, and with the handy interface wheel items can be broken down as quickly as you can click the mouse twice.
October 2007 Update: This function seems to have been replaced by an NPC present in most stations. He/she has a list of items, usually of one type, that is randomly generated upon entering the station. As with the machine on community day, the items take a great deal of raw components to craft.
Delux De-modificator
The Delux De-modificator is now required to safely remove Mods from your weapons for a fee. The amount of Palladium charged for this removal is equivalent to the sale price of the item to a vendor, which in turn depends on the quality of the item but not the mods in the item. Access the Delux De-modificator with a click on your mouse, place the item you want to un-socket and activate the device to separate the weapon from the Mods. Items are returned to your inventory/hands when you close the dialog without removing the items from the box yourself.
The point in this machine is to prevent exploitation. Hellgate: London permits unlimited socketing and unsocketing, and as there at some point might be macros written to enable instantaneous Mod switching in mid combat, completely changing the effect of your weapons, this Delux De-modificator makes it necessary to be in a town in order to change Mods.
The Hellgate Team decided to keep socketing and unsocketing quick and easy, but they don't want to allow unrealistic scenarios like the one described above, and making players take a quick trip to town and a quick jog from the portal to the unsocketing machine is their way of accomplishing that end. With higher level weapons and mods it might quickly become quite a toll on your Palladium stock, so only un-mod when you really need to.
Augmentrex 3000
The Augmentrex 3000 is a device that can imbue items with extra enhancements for a reconfiguration fee. The amount of Palladium charged for this process depends upon the existing quality and type of the item and the rarity of the enhancement requested. Similarly, the number of augmentations possible depends on the item quality and type (and the number of pre-existing modifications). After accessing the Augmentrex 3000, simply place the item to be enhanced into it and then select one of the available options. The machine will then randomly apply a modifier of the corresponding rarity that you selected.
This are the costs:
- Common Property = ilvl x 100 Palladium
- Rare Property = 4 x ilvl x 100 Palladium
- Legendary Property = 16 x ilvl x 100 Palladium
This is machine seemed completely unbalanced to me in my brief trial. You select one of your items, stick it in the slot, and pick a property as seen in the image. Better properties cost more than common ones, and the prices vary by item type. I paid 200 for a common property on a cheap Vulcan Bolter pistol, and it was 800 for a Rare property, and around 3000 for a Legendary Property. The part that surprised me was that I could buy more than one, and that they stacked. I had around 950 palladium at that point, so I bought four common properties in a row just to see what they'd do and if they would stack.
I got four bonus damage elemental type properties, and their names all appeared after my weapon name. I don't recall the modifiers, but my weapon was something like "Vulcan Blaster burning, phasing, toxic, shocking." Examining the item (with the wheel control) showed me the actual stats, and it was basically as if I'd added four chipped gems to a bow in Diablo II. Low bonuses to four types of elemental damage, and a really long item name. I tried it later with a piece of armor, and found out that prices varied. To add a common property to the armor cost 800; 4x as expensive as it had been on the pistol, and I didn't have enough palladium to try it out.
What I didn't understand was how this could not be a totally unbalancing feature. How many properties can you add to an item? Does this work with items that are already rare or unique or legendary? Are the properties permanent or do they wear off after some preset duration? We'll have to hear more about this one from Flagship, as they give the feature further testing.
This one will obviously need more testing to figure out.
Nano Forge
A Nano Forge can usually be found in most Towns, and are used to increase the inherited stats of your equipment. You are required to use Scrap Materials for the upgrade. Warning: This will also raise the requirements of the item!
The nano forge was added during beta, and it enables players to upgrade items as an alternative to merely replacing them. Initially there was no limit to the number of times one could upgrade an item, but towards the end of beta a limit of 5 upgrades was set. Raw materials are required for the process, and the items level (and potentially level requirement) will be increased. Take this into consideration when upgrading, as it may render some mods unequipable. However, the machine will not let you upgrade an item if it will increase it's character level requirement beyond your current level. The exact effect of upgrading an item is unknown at this time, as during beta not all item details were correctly updated. Only items directly equippable by the character may be upgraded, excluding weapon mods from the upgrade process.
The Stash
Another type of town machine was the stash. It works just like you'd expect a stash to, giving you a bunch of space to store away goodies for later. The stash is basically a storage locker now, located on one wall in each station, and rather hard to see for new players running around in a new game.
You see it in the picture below, behind the character and also open. The character's inventory is seen on the right, the empty stash on the left. It works as you'd expect, just drag and drop, and the stash is larger than the visible screen; note the two arrows on the bottom of the window; those scroll it down what looked like about six more rows. With this design the designers could easily add more space whenever they wanted to.
As of May 2007 there was no sign of the shared stash, a feature Flagship says will enable players to transfer items between different characters on the same account. It's not been implemented into the game yet, and the players on community day were not creating accounts anyway; just logging onto the server for multiplayer action.
The "Wanted" Pillar
In many stations there is also a Wanted Pillar, which is a good source of quests outside the main story line.
