More water problems..

[tangorn]

6 hours and 2 collapsing asteroids in, I have to say that water availability and management feels like the biggest roadblock in the current build. While I understand the desire to keep people pushing out into new biomes and research, I think a significant rebalance is in order to avoid too many frustrated restarts for new players. A few specific headaches:

1. A water consumption/production/cycles remaining section in the report would be a huge help, as would some sort of alert along the lines of the low oxygen/food warnings. Similarly, a mouseover item which shows the size of an entire reservoir in meaningful terms (again, cycles would be the obvious one).

2. At the moment, the ability to purify water is barricaded behind a large amount of water expenditure in the supercomputer. While I like the aesthetic of the liquid-cooled supercomputer, this mechanic led my last colony to dry up completely at 9/10 percolation research, with vast supplies of contaminated water an airlock away, and no recourse but to start over. The effect is to railroad the tech tree and all development toward water purification, lest one dead-end. I'd suggest either changing the requirement or allowing the supercomputer to use contaminated water, perhaps with the downside of having to muck it out after every production run.

3. Algae terraria absolutely suck water and dupe time. I thought I'd be clever on my last run and build a cistern pumping to vents above each of my algae platforms, but this resulted in confused dupes endlessly hosing up the trickle of water from each tile. Making the terraria porous would encourage interesting engineering solutions like this -- immerse your algae colonies in water and save the dupe time spent watering them.

... and, as a few before me have said, please, please, please give us more ways to recycle water.

All that said, you guys have done a fantastic job of creating an addictive, engaging game. Keep up the good work!

[Omnifarious]

To add to this I would *really* like to see water behavior changed to be a bit more realistic.

I just spent an unnatural amount of time trying to get a pump to work that was in a 2 block high hallway 5 blocks below a massive contaminated water supply and the water would flow to it and then just stop flowing and start sticking to the ceiling like its made out of spiderwebs while the pump sits there complaining about not being in water.