- How do we substitute harvesting if we cut it off completely? Many RPGs rely on this as some sort of backbone, so how would we work without it, and if we still need some form of harvesting, how can we boil it down to the bare minimum / only what's worthwhile and interesting?
One example of minimized harvesting that comes to mind would be a survival situation where you would scavenge for bricks and try to find the appropriate brick amongst the rubble or whatever.
More importantly I'm wondering how a resource pipeline could function without this base layer, and if the resource pipeline is at all necessary.
You could centralize all resources with the unique harvestables being 'bonuses'. Like you get plastic from any number of activities but you can only get gems from mining - and have the bonus materials be entirely optional, simply put. Don't have them *required* anywhere but give a nice bonus for using them, but have everything else run off the central resource.
You could explore and find landmarks and such for plastic, or mine, or cut trees, or fight AI enemies and other players, or trade resources or otherwise exploit the economy, so you have a lot of different activities but you won't need to do all of them to succeed ultimately.
Abstracting crafting or otherwise creating objects to not need specific materials is also obviously a must. Just give things a plastic cost and be done with it rather than saying such-and-such an item takes three of this and one of that and five of the other. Sure it makes things seem overly simplistic but really that only feels bad because I'm a massive RPG lover and I like things in-depth. I recognize abstracting things this way as a good option though.
