User blog comment:Watson 777/Do you want Raw Material Lists?/@comment-454133-20121120054341

I find myself having to plan constructions carefully in early game with scarce resources and big plans. It's also important in late game where running around from chest to chest is annoying. It's frustrating to get part-way through making something before realizing "crap, I needed 2 diamonds. And I'm also short one copper -- better go hunting again".

As stated above, the raw materials table gives a good at-a-glance indication of just how much material goes into an object (to estimate its cost). Pages like Klein Star already have to list this information to give an adequate scope of the resources necessary to build one. This table would simply offer a uniform way to represent the information, one that matched other pages.

Planning is much easier as well. A table like this helps to break down the recursive search of "Recipe A requires B C and D; B requires E and F...". The player can get all the necessary materials together and then start down the path of building each sub-item.

An aside:

It's tempting to consider a recursive template that showed each required item and how it broke down into each item it needs and each item those need etc, but that would quickly balloon into a massive table for items like HV Solar Arrays and the various super-armors. :) You typically find such tables in game guides (usually as a large image) made by some user and uploaded to GameFaqs by one user or another.  However, I don't think the admins here would be thrilled at the prospect of building and maintaining such a table (even if someone else built it, they probably wouldn't be excited about maintaining the thing).  Templates that contain templates, which themselves contain templates which contain templates, could make heads spin.  And I don't know how much wiki sites like recursive templates.

We can stick to a flat "these are the raw materials you need to gather before you start building" table and do just fine.