Yeah, the fabbing is at way too high an abstraction level to feel reasonable. There really needed to be a separation of resources. Like, have some resources be things which were now too cheap to meter; just as we include public water fountains as part of our civic infrastructure, I can see Eclipse Phase allowing every sophont an energy budget quite sufficient for regular life support, a selection of public-domain extruded foodstuffs, drugs, and entertainment (with entertainment conforming to the values of the hab getting sponsored by civic orgs, who are delighted to sponsor a variety of A is for Actuator educational programming for newly-instanced ex-indentures)...but anything more than that, you need to earn with credits or rep. After all, if you're an up-and-coming faction member, do you want to have a large, luxurious living quarters for one moderately-repped individual, or a block of tenement-quality coffin-rooms that offer the barest minimum of privacy and living space, and which can be rented cheaply to newly-instanced ex-indentures, for whom you are doing a favor and who can be counted on to contribute what exists of their miniscule faction rep to causes you support (or else have their rent come due until they move out and you replace them with more pliable tenants)?
Eclipse Phase is absolutely not post-scarcity, any more than we in 21st-century America are because water fountains are freely available. There are always resources that are scarce, and Eclipse Phase not only fails to address actual post-scarcity, it introduces horrible new kinds of scarcity, like the whole question of which Fall-refugee infomorphs get first crack at the bodies.
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I mean, given the way that Eclipse Phase does tend to stare unblinking into the naked singularity past any reasonable game balance can exist, I am curious what the designers would do with a habitat which explicitly had, as part of its anarchier-than-thou, a completely open fabber pattern and several fabbers made from it and absolutely no restrictions sitting around with no actual software restrictions or admin locks.
And, conversely, we should have an adventure taking place on a habitat where the tension between a full-scale fabber as a necessity of habitat life and a full-scale fabber needing to be incredibly restricted and locked down happens. Like, take everything that a full fabber is expected to do for a colony, and say that the colony's fabber is gone, and one faction in particular is claiming that they are the only ones who can fix it and that anyone else breaking in or attempting to interrupt their repair with violence or digital intrusion will wipe the whole shebang. Do you trust that faction? Even if you don't, do you take action, knowing that they may well not be bluffing about violence dealing with the whole problem? What happens when you learn that this was engineered to force the makers of the fabber to have to farcast over an ego with the control codes needed for admin access, and that the ones who set this up are willing for the lights to go out on the colony entirely, because hey, worst-case scenario everyone gets backed up into cold storage and they lose a decade or two before someone can get a spare shuttle, fusion reactor, and replacement fabber all the way out here, since murder isn't a crime any more, even when you do it to an entire habitat?
Again, I feel like the ideas behind Eclipse Phase are decades out of date. In the real world, we see that reputation mechanics can be gamed, and that when something like Facebook likes or hours-listened for Spotify songs becomes valuable, then you get all sorts of black-market gamesmanship around them. We see that every method of determining identity digitally can be spoofed or forged, and we see exactly how long DRM lasts in the face of "Fuck you, I want to play that game for free.", much less what can be done with 3D printing, 80% lower receivers, and the like. And we see what happens to individuals, and even entire companies, that outsource critical functionality to the cloud. And so, Eclipse Phase should absolutely have a side bar detailing "OK, if the players don't start spamming open-sourced fabber blueprints everywhere, eventually someone will put the right pre-fall Open Source evangelist into the wrong virtual environment and they will, or hell, maybe one of the factions will do it to discredit another. But information doesn't go away when it's shared right, so here is how the factions will react to the fact that everyone with this level of technical skill and resources can jailbreak their individual locked fabber and start mass-producing Frisbee-sized reaper drones."
Which would, I think, be a really interesting question. Do the anarchist habitats stick to their guns when, well, the guns are sticking to them, and more are coming by the minute? Do the more restricted habs crack down, knowing that they'll need to lock down a whole bunch of precursors-to-personal-fabbers which are part of various bits of crucial public infrastructure, and also knowing that trying to crack down will have some percentage of their population Molon Labe it up against them? On a scale of 1-10, how smug are the Jovian told-you-so-grams sent to the rest of the system?
And then, when the normal set of things dies down, what happens when people look at Earth and see swathes of Exsurgent clearly mass-producing some of the designs that were being sent hither and yon across the system, for its own purpose?