A ship or station that has the capacity to allow other players to interact with it does so through Public Services. These interfaces are enabled through the construction of various Public Facilities such as Marketplaces and Docking Bays.
When navigating to any ship or station, there may be public services available to you depending on what facilities exist at the interactable base. When a facility is configured to be public, the public service screen will be available for interactions with that type of public service. These interactions are an aggregate view of all of the public facilities of that type. For example, the Public Marketplace will allow players to browse through all player owned marketplaces on the interactable base and interact with them specifically.
Public Services at this time have only binary access rights. They are either fully public or fully private, there are no mechanisms to control access to a specific set of players at this time.
A Public Market is available when there exists at least one player owned marketplace on an interactable base. The public market shows all of the marketplaces and orders them by the sum of the volume of marketplace hosted goods that are within the marketplace itself (see Marketplace for more information about marketplace hosted goods are).
The name of the Marketplace and the owner will be shown to all players browsing the marketplace. Because the public market is browsed individually, it is up to the players to build a reputation or brand to draw in traffic.
Larger marketplaces will appear at the top of the list, as they are more naturally obvious.
Future Plans: For popular stations, it will make sense for marketplaces to have to pay station owners for access to the Marketplace. The goal is to implement baseline costs as well as advertising costs that will force public marketplace vendors to pay premiums to the station owner to bump their position on the list of marketplace vendors.
The Public Docking Bay screen is available when there exists at least one player owned docking bay that has public access enabled. A public docking bay can be used by any ship that is attemping to dock within a port ship or station.
Since public docking bays are, by name, public, all of the interactions and ships within that docking bay are transparent to everyone. Players can browse public docking bays to see what ships are currrently docked, what ships are currently docking or undocking, and the list of ships in the queue waiting for docking bay access.
For more information about public docking bay fees, see Docking Bay Fees.
FOr more information about docking in general, see Docking Bays.
Public services are meant to be the primary mechanism by which player to player interaction occurs. The current system only supports two public services, but additional ideas should follow as the game becomes more refined. Here is a short list of some ideas for public services that are in the road map.