A whole new suggestion with all the details about how Tobspr could implement the energy back into the game!

A whole new layer of energy!

Quite literally! This mayor-update suggestion intruduces a whole new layer (I'll call it energy layer), which is under the base layer instead of being above like the wires layer. Energy is a new type of "stuff", that can be extracted, transported, and used. Kinda like a mixture of the base stuff, and the wires stuff! So let's begin!

DISCLAIMER:

All of the stuff I say are just my opinion, and none of them are straight facts! Please keep this in mind all the time while you read my suggestion
My english sometimes leaves me, meaning it can be quite bad. Please let me know if you find any mistakes in my english, because it helps me really much in learning more english. Thank you.

Energy basics

Energy is a new type of "thing". This is not an item, like the shapes and colors, but It's also not an instant signal, that simply has a "state", like the wires. (tough this is more like an item... I'll call it this way to make it easier to explain what this is)

Energy has speed, and strenght. It can be transported trough tubes (just to make it different from the others).

The speed is different from the belts, because in this case, the tubes do not have any form of speed, but the energy itself does. Every tile the energy travels, the speed decrases by one (max speed is around 25). To keep up the speed, you have to put down Electric-boosters on the normal layer, which will put the energy back to max speed. Be careful not to overcharge the energy or it will destroy itself. The same thing happens when the energy meets the speed of 0.

Energy has a statement called strengh. Strenght can be any number between 0 and 101. Every time it needs to split up, it will calculate the upcoming route and splits up perfectly evenly, so every "charger" (more on that, later (the charger is the building that uses energy)) gets the same amount of energy! In case it can't split up perfectly evenly then it prefers to go to the left, and then to the right (the splitter, has one input at the back, and two outputs on the two sides).

The strenght of the energy is displayed on the tube. The more red the tube is, the more energy, with bigger strenght is going trough it. Also has extra electrical particles, depending on the strenght of the energy that is passing by. Don't be confused... the energy generators create a constant amount of energy, and not items/s like on the base layer.

Chargers

The charger is one of the few buildings on the energy layers. The charger is the only building that can accept energy. Don't panic yet! The charger will be able to charge up multiple type of buildings on the base layer, so it's not really restricted to only one building.

Chargers use their energy to charge up the building directly above them (on the base layer). We'll cover the usage of the energy just a bit later.

Extracting energy (reactors)

This is the most confusing part, so don't be suprised if you don't fully understand it. It's not your fault.... I'm just bad at explaning confusing things lol

The main way to get energy, is to use shape-reactors. Yes! You heard me! Shape-reactors! yey! Shape-reactors come in four types, and each of them has around 3-4 variants.

Shape-reactors work a lot like freeplay. They make energy with a number of strenght, which depends on what type of reactor you use, and how many shapes you deliver into it. After you extracted a specified number of shapes, the reactor will require a new type of shape with the same rules of the reactor. To make sure the reactor will not make any energy hiccups, it will maintain the current flow of energy for about 15-20 seconds, to have your MEM (Make Everything Machines) time to recover.

The four type of reactors, differ in the number of layers they require (first type of reactor require 1 layered shapes, second type of reactor require 2 layered shapes, etc...), and their variants decide how hard should be the required shape.

Ofc the reactors give off the signal of the current shape on the wires layer, or all of this would be impossible (more on this later (like always)).

Extracting energy (other ways)

You also have two other ways to generate energy.

The first one is level-upping in freeplay. Every time you level up in freeplay, you get an extra burst of energy for 5 seconds. This will help your MEM to recover quicklier

The second method is to fill up storage buffers. When you fill up a storage, you get a very weak energy, for minutes. With this, you don't need to know almost anything about wires, to still be able to generate a good amount of energy! The only thing you need to do is to extract a bunch of items (and when I say "a bunch"... then I mean "a bunch" (because everyone likes to have lots of energy even if they don't really need it))

Energy usage

So I talked already about chargers, and how they can charge up buildings. You can use energy for two things: speed up buildings, and power up new buildings! We'll look into both of them with fine details:

Speed up buildings: You can speed up your buildings with energy. Depending on the strenght of the incoming energy, your machine will speed up correctly. An energy with 100 strenght can almost double up the speed of your building! Sounds OP? Just think about how much energy you need to make to speed up every of your machines with 100 strenght.... If you speed up a belt, then it will also speed up the belts connected to it with a 10 tile limit into each direction (tunnels, balancers, mergers, and splitters, work the same as belts in this case)!
There are ofc going to be new buildings, connected to the base layer, so energy has bit more use. This is ofc the perfect opportunity to bring back da good old inverter! I hope at least this gets into the game from this suggestion!

Suggestion cons

This is a really important one! We always need to know what are the cons of a specific suggestion, and I got quite a few!

It makes the wires a required thing. This is not very good, because lots of people don't really want to even touch wires and so thats why tobspr made it fully optional, and not needed. Now this update would break this system because there is absolutely no way to make a constant flow of energy without using at least a little bit of wires. If this thing is a game breaker, then we need to change fully, on how the shape-reactors work.
It's also a lategame stuff. As I just said, wires are needed to be able to use energy. This means you need to unlock energy after wires. And because wires are a lategame feature, energy also needs to be one! I think that this game needs more early, and midgame features, to keep the time-balance, so this might not be the perfect update (yet!).
This is going to make computers suffer! Not the new layer itself... but the amount of MEMs you are going to make to speed up your main MEM. As i said: We propably need to change the shape-reactors.

Suggestion pros

I think everything else in this suggestion is good (otherwise i wouldn't make this suggestion), but there is one thing i want to point out:

It makes the wires a required thing. Now this is pretty funny actually, but the more you think about it, the more it will become a good feature and a bad feature at the same time! Because the community is cutted into two parts when it comes to this question (should the wires be a required thing?), we can't really decide if this is a con, or a pro. I agree with both sides, so I think we should just leave this question for tobspr to decide.

Outro type of thingie that is totally unnecessary

Thank you for reading, and lets hope (if you agree with me), that this suggestion will make it into the game! :D

tobspr-games / shapez.io