QoL Mark II suggestion: changing the pufts and pacu's

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

I'm doing a suggestion towards the developers, so this is a message to @Ipsquiggle @Cheerio @k_nicole.

Currently, the sweet cute pufts and pacu's you put so much hard work into for animations, coding, scripting,... are really under used. And that has its reasons. You see, most other critters have a very good cost to benefit ratio. Hatches can eat any practically unneeded resource you want, for useful coal and you can breed them to the smooth hatch, which converts unrefined metal to metal at a very decent 75% ratio, making it an excellent and fair alternative to the rock granulator and the metal refinery. The slicksters  are excellent critters to get rid off cumbersome CO2 and get useful oil or even petroleum in return. Shine bugs are low cost decor critters and power free lamps, while drecko's give a good supply of reed fiber and plastic. Since the changes in QoL Mark I we'll definitely need the reed fiber a lot more from them, while plastic drecko's give a very feasible alternative to polymer presses. The costs in terms of resources again are worth the gains. Shove voles also ae worth their cost, basically getting rid of unneeded regolith which is an infinite resource anyway. They are good food resource in that regard. IMO, there's little need to change these critters. They provide fair and decent benefit without making alternatives to their resources redundant.

We finally arrive to the 2 troublesome critters. There will be people who will disagree with me, and that's fine. They should post their own opinion as well here. It's always good to get multiple perspectives on such topics.

PUFTS

I will start with the puft. Pufts are... incredibly resource intensive. They need 50g/s of polluted oxygen for each critter. Ask yourself: how will I get a source of polluted oxygen that can sustain that. Let's look at some sources of polluted oxygen: 

-If you are lucky you can get an infectuous polluted oxygen vent. And if you are lucky, it produces 100g/s on average. So if you are extremely lucky, you can sustain 2 pufts in the most straightforward way.
-If you are bit less lucky, but still quite lucky you will get a hot polluted oxygen vent, emitting polluted oxygen at 500°C. If you are lucky, it emits 100g/s on average and you can start on designing something that can cool down the gas down to survivable temperatures for the pufts.
-An other source is a morb. You will need roughly 5 morbs for each puft to sustain it. So a ranch of 8 pufts requires 40 morbs. I'm sure the developers know the game is not designed to handle this and it will nosedive your FPS.
-Slime emits polluted oxygen. However, it doesn't do so at a high enough rate, plus slime is a very costly resource.
-One last source I can possibly think of, is polluted water. Now, one tile of polluted water emits on average 4g/s in the most optimal state (1000kg tile, no pressure above 1.8kg above it). So to go down this way, a full ranch would require you to have 100 tiles of polluted water emitting polluted oxygen. Really not worth the trouble.

Are they completely useless? No. They are a source of precious slime. And the squeaky and dense pufts are much better concerning their cost to benefit ratio. Dense pufts especially. However, to keep up their populations you need a puft prince. Puft princes can't live in oxygen or chlorine. You can have polluted oxygen stack on top of chlorine and that way make a sqeaky puft ranch viable, but I'd say it's not worth the trouble (and for new players this would be practically be difficult hurdles to overcome). On the other hand, oxygen and polluted oxygen don't stack on top of another. It's not viable to put a puft prince in a dense puft ranch therefore. The realistic solution to all of this is keeping a separate normal puft ranch with a puft prince. But then we arrive again at unrealistic cost in polluted oxygen.

What do I suggest? I suggest 2 possible solutions:

-Either design a separate dense puft prince and a squeaky puft prince. That way we can atleast take the initial big cost for the normal pufts, selectively breed them and later on discard the normal pufts entirely.
-Or heavily reduce polluted oxygen requirement. And I mean heavily. I think 10%, so 5g/s, would balance out with the resource cost. The dense puft is ok since oxygen can be produced in high enough quantities and you do get the 95% return in oxylite. Sqeaky pufts should also get a reduction in chlorine requirement, about 50% what it is now.

A final suggestion would be to make us able to wrangle or atleast trap pufts. We know the animations for it are there, so please: we actually require it because now we need to build the ranch around the puft instead of getting the puft in a remote, ideally placed ranch.

PACU'S

Pacu's are in the same boat as the pufts, being too cost-intensive of their required cost when they are tame. 140kg algae per cycle per pacu is frankly heavily unrealistic. Algae is a very valuable resource that you don't just throw away, and there is only one single way to get more algae (through the distiller). Honestly, the uterior reward you get for it, polluted dirt and water conversion from polluted to clean, isn't worth it either. The only true advantage is their egg mass production. 4kg per egg does give a lot of calories. But again, given we have quite a few alternative sources for eggs, not in the least hatches which are much viable to maintain, it's not worth just outright burning through your algae.

I'm going to pre-empt this, because now there will be a lot of people coming up with pacu farm topics. Well, everyone to his or her own opinion, but when lookinh at such topics: 

 

There is large involvement of bugs and exploitation, not in the least keeping pacu's wild and overcrowding them, and a hugely complex system of sorting the eggs (although with the egg sensor this will probably be a bit easier now). I really don't think this is what you developers had in mind. And frankly speaking, even if you did then I have to say this is unnecessary complex gameplay.

My advice? 2 solutions:

-Either replace the required algae with a produced fish food, based on perhaps meat grinded with plant food. In a feasible mass.
-Or reduce the algae requirement to something like 5-10kg/cycle. Algae is just too rare to even be able to produce enough for a normal full pacu pond.

[Sasza22]

There needs to be some rebalance for the pufts and pacu. Also there needs to be some balance for geysers and morbs.

Polluted oxygen geysers should produce way more. Since the oxygen is infected you don`t want to breath it so it producing huge amouts would be more of a problem than a benefit (unless pufts are considered).

Morbs could use some improvements. A proper lifecycle and feeding mechanic. Morbs should eat rotten food and polluted dirt and produce huge amounts of polluted oxygen out of it. Maybe even make them eat normal food and cause it to rot super fast in contact with it.

Pacu shouldn`t have a tame stat. Instead they should have their reproduction tied to amount of food consumed. When not fed they lay a single egg at the end of their lifecycle. When fed the maximum amount they reproduce like crazy.

[Craigjw]

I disagree with the comment regarding shove voles, they are still useless at getting rid of regolith.  Their consumption rate is too low and they are nigh on impossible to ranch because they too easily escape.  At best shove voles get stuck in doors, which basically resolves down to micro managing them if they are to be ranched.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

24 minutes ago, Craigjw said:

I disagree with the comment regarding shove voles, they are still useless at getting rid of regolith.  Their consumption rate is too low and they are nigh on impossible to ranch because they too easily escape.  At best shove voles get stuck in doors, which basically resolves down to micro managing them if they are to be ranched.

Let's keep that for a separate topic. Point was that shove voles bring something net positive to the table (eggs for no resources that are needed), while pacu's and pufts do not.

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

Polluted oxygen geysers should produce way more. Since the oxygen is infected you don`t want to breath it so it producing huge amouts would be more of a problem than a benefit (unless pufts are considered).

 

Yes, but then you'd be heavily dependent on a geyser that has no guarantee to spawn on your map. pufts should realistically be always viable no matter which seed you get to roll.

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

then you'd be heavily dependent on a geyser that has no guarantee to spawn on your map. pufts should realistically be always viable no matter which seed you get to roll.

True, but currently it doesn`t matter if you have a polluted oxygen geyser or not. Having one should make a difference. I think the morb should be more useful in feeding pufts so you don`t have to create massive herds of them.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

9 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

True, but currently it doesn`t matter if you have a polluted oxygen geyser or not. Having one should make a difference. I think the morb should be more useful in feeding pufts so you don`t have to create massive herds of them.

Agreed. In this case I just brought it up as an example, and how little it does to support pufts.