Ideas For Future Updates

[crbd115]

So I realize that QOL 2 just started and there probably will be more changes that can happen during the next couple weeks. These are just ideas that popped into my head which led to a spiral of more ideas building off of other ideas and just decided it was driving me nuts enough to make a post to get some discussion going. 
This is just meant as a fun post spit-balling some changes or ideas for the game. Maybe some of these have been talked about before, or maybe the devs already have some of these things planned for a later update. These are just things I've found myself thinking about and how they would affect the game. I know this might be a little long so I tried to make each section heading basically a tldr so you can go to whichever section you want easily.
1: Changes to light / What light does for the game
So with the changes not that long ago to being able to schedule when duplicants sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, and etc. I don't think it makes sense to have a specified part of the cycle as "night time". I personally only have 2-4 dupes actually sleeping at night time as I set up 3 or 4 shifts. It also has never really made sense to me that there is a night time in the center of an asteroid which technically has no light(even though it gets dark for some reason just to say its night). I think that everything should be darker like how it would be at the end of a cycle and lighting from lamps or other sources would be more important(and also easier to tell when an area is lit). Duplicants could get a morale boost (that lasts for a short period of time) for being in lighted areas and it would actually give a reason to set up lights besides plants. I know it provides a slight decor boost but I don't believe this should be the case personally. Light itself doesn't make a place look better (though colored lights might be a decor option who knows). Maybe being in the dark for prolonged periods of cycles would result in a negative stress modifier. This would make shine bugs more useful in some ways as well as lamps. Also maybe it would be hard for duplicants to sleep in lighted areas so you could automate them in the bedrooms with a clock or just keep the bedrooms dark. This would also provide more opportunities to make different kinds of lights in the game as well. Maybe early game lighting takes more energy and produces more heat. Then late game they could cover more areas and be more efficient heat and energy wise. Maybe they could be separated between sun lamps which grow plants and produce heat and lamps that just provide regular light.

2: Changes to Bathrooms / Duplicant usage of bathrooms

So I kind of assume that duplicants go to the bathroom once per cycle mostly to try to minimize them dropping tasks randomly. I do think that maybe it could be changed to twice a day and just lower how much time they spend in lavatories/outhouses to adjust. Maybe make it so duplicants with small bladder have to do it three times a day. I think that it could be set up so that when a duplicant has to use the bathroom they finish their task and then use it instead of having a specified time as you can't really predict when you have to go most of the time anyway. Although I do understand if this idea is unreasonable from a design standpoint or just efficiency of duplicant time. Wasn't sure if it was possible to simply add it as the next priority on their list of errands with the new errand system added in the QOL 2 update. 
3:Add hydration as a need for duplicants

So part of the reason for this  idea was to add some realism but also because it would really change the early game quite a bit. First of all I almost never currently use the water cooler other then to make a great hall (for which I immediately disable the water cooler to not waste water). I don't really understand why this is in the game as duplicants don't need it to chat (unless you want them to talk away from the portal for some reason) and they don't actually have a need to drink water. I think adding hydration as a need would make the early game more interesting and make it so the water cooler is actually necessary. It also leads into a few other ideas. You could also make it so plants or foods that duplicants eat can provide some of the hydration as most things have some water (or maybe just bristle berries and meat/barbecue). Maybe make hydration as a need for some animals as well as food. You could have an early game ranch item that uses bottles and a mid game one that can be automated or hooked up with plumbing. Obviously the amounts duplicants and animals drink would be relatively low but it introduces new challenges as now you need a source of clean water for drinking besides just plants or electrolyzers. Maybe it would also add a need to clean the water of germs as well either though boiling or chlorine.
4: Trim down on some of the animation time for some duplicant actions 

This is mostly a pet peeve of mine that playing at the highest speed I still can see a considerable amount of time that feels like it is wasted by some duplicant animations. For example when dupes get wet and spend forever shaking off. It seems like they sometimes go through the same animation 2 or even 3 times. There gets to be a lot of small things but they add up quickly and sometimes it can seem like a waste.
5: Add more foods to the game and new recipes for combining different foods

While I do think there are an ok amount of foods and choices in the early game I feel like the late game is kind of lacking. There are also some food recipes I feel are missing. I think that omelette should be changed to being a more late game food with a recipe of something like egg + mushroom or egg + mushroom + meat or etc. and then an early game replacement for omelettes could be hard boiled egg or scrambled egg etc. Maybe there could be other late game foods that give duplicants certain buffs or debuffs. Maybe having the level of cooking profession dictate the level of food that cook can make. Like maybe a sous chef can make early to mid game foods but a chef can make late game foods. Alternatively you could make food similar to decor items where there is a crude, abstract and masterpiece level (obviously not same terms would be used) which determines how good a food is. I do think there could be more crops added to the game or other food items/recipes to make it more interesting. 
6: Make med beds more necessary / add a doctor profession 
I know I have seen this talked about a few times so this is my take on the idea. I feel like adding another type of germs/disease would make the game more interesting as I feel like once you get the basics of the game down its fairly easy to avoid germs in your colony. I would also add a doctor profession; either as an branch off of research assistant or as a separate part of the job tree similar to groundskeeper/plumber (probably medical student - doctor). I would then reduce the amount of health regained from sleeping, because that really makes no sense to heal so quickly from any wounds they receive. I would also make it easier for dupes to get sick and make it take longer for them to get rid of the disease without a med bed, but less likely to kill them. I've only had dupes get sick very rarely and usually they overcome it quick enough that I haven't needed med beds even if they get sick. Also I feel like having things fall on dupes like sand (or if they fall from a certain distance) they should take damage, and possibly be injured depending on the distance the object (or duplicant) traveled. Right now med beds are pretty much a joke in ONI and so is getting the health regen ability from a neuro-vascillator.

7: Change How ranching/making critters happy works

 First, make it so that you don't have to groom every critters as often. It doesn't make any sense to have to groom them as often as you do right now and wastes a ton of time. Also critters should have more ways to make them happy then just getting groomed. Maybe make it so they can get exercise or have toys. You could make it so they have a manual generator that a hatch or a dreko could run on for exercise and would also generate a little power. You could have like a balloon filled with hydrogen tied to the ground or a wall that pufts or shine bugs could play with. Maybe having underwater decor items or plants for pacu like a fish tank. You could have a setting on the grooming station like to groom critters after a certain number of cycles. Critter happiness could be a meter that goes down over time and using toys, getting groomed, and eating would increase it and things like being overcrowded, not getting to eat and going long periods of time without grooming would add debuffs decreasing happiness even more. You could have the grooming station be set to groom when their happiness level goes down below a certain point similar to the massage table for duplicants. This would make it so people who want small automated farms would have to groom critters more often to keep them happy as opposed to larger ranches with more for critters to interact with. 

8: Rework some of the geysers/make worse geysers more useful 

So there are many geysers I just see as useless honestly or so underwhelming I don't see a point in using at all. I get that cool steam geysers provide water while being something that the player has to meet some criteria to work with. The player needs gold amalgam to keep the hot water from overheating the pump, probably needs exosuits to keep dupes safe, needs insulation to contain heat and etc. My issue is that sometimes they don't even provide enough water to continuously provide water for an electrolyzer. I think bare minimum they should produce an average of at least 1kg/s. Regular hot steam geysers are worse because they can be hotter for a steam turbine but have insanely lower steam/water production. While it is hot enough to run a steam turbine a little its pretty inconsistent when compared to a volcano but most people don't use the heat from volcano's for steam power anyway. Polluted oxygen vents are kinda lame as one is insanely hot with no germs and one is kinda hot with a ton of germs, so  you have to cool them and the one you have to cool less you also have to clean to let dupes breath or you just use both to fuel puft farms. If you have a polluted water geyser or polluted slush geyser, you get the same thing as it off gasses from the water at a lower temperature and you have polluted water that you can use. Carbon dioxide vents/geysers are also just kinda lame as you pretty much only feed it to slicksters which a leaky oil fissure would produce more. I like the idea of chlorine vents but they aren't that useful since ranching squeaky pufts is awkward because of how their reproduction works and bleach stone isn't used for that much. 
I guess long story short is make them somewhat more consistent/useful. I get that renewable resources are useful but when some are insanely useful and many are underwhelming or even a chore they need to be looked at. If they ever made customization options available similar to don't starve I don't think anyone would let their colonies have some of these geysers/vents at all. Honestly I would just completely remove both polluted oxygen vent variants from the pool of possible geysers/vents. I would probably make a either a polluted water vent or a polluted slush geyser a guaranteed geyser similar to how you currently are guaranteed 2 cool steam vents. Maybe the polluted water could be in the slime biome or the polluted slush geyser would be in the cold biome. 
9: Change Magma Biome

Pretty simple idea, I would either make it a usable part of the map for late game or just get rid of it /Trim the amount of map it is using. There is a mod that I have used a few times and looked at that makes it into an actual biome with volcanoes which is a cool idea. I don't really get why the whole thing (in the current design of the game) is just a giant area blocked off by neutronium. You could make it so there are guaranteed volcanoes there and then make it so they don't spawn in the upper part of the colony. This would make it so the 10 geysers that spawn above ground are the ones easier to deal with in early to mid game and the late game volcanoes can be at the bottom where you wouldn't really go until late game anyway. I know sometimes people can get volcano set ups in the mid game but they are generally more useful in later parts of the game when you have access to some of the space materials.
10: Rework Puft reproduction

I sort of mentioned how I think puft reproduction is kinda awkward in the geyser section. I think that each type of puft should have a corresponding puft prince. For example Squeaky puft prince, Dense puft prince something like that. Puft princes could still be similar to how they are now just instead would produce pufts of the corresponding type only similar to how regular puft princes only create regular puft eggs. Maybe the chances of eggs could correspond to what gas environment they are in instead of the current weird system. Right now it's just to inconsistent and awkward to work with. Maybe puft princes could require more grooming then normal pufts as they are princes and need to be pampered to be happy (though still less then normal if using the changes to critter happiness I mentioned above).

11: Change how POI work
Right now most POI are kinda useless besides neural vascillators and AETN. Vending machines and lockers don't really do much to help the player as clothes aren't hard to make and a tiny bit of food doesn't really seem like much reward for finding them. I think there should be other rewards for finding these honestly. Maybe there could be some sort of map or system that reveals a part of map if your exploring, so that you can find other poi or geysers you are looking for. You could give some small amount of rare materials that would help the player advance a little earlier maybe. Maybe a tool upgrade that improves digging / building. Maybe a second Portal now that portals can provide things besides duplicants. Maybe a computer that completes a random research task you haven't finished.  Also you should be able to deconstruct most of these POI so they stop getting in the way. Also I find it strange that a lot of POI look like they are supposed to have some sort of puzzle attached but most of the time they don't work as they don't really have power to supply them. Maybe you should have to supply power to the door to open the POI and in doing so you power up the puzzle attached to it.
12: Change mechanized airlocks / add insulated door

So right most people I've seen and myself included don't actually bother to power mechanized airlocks as they aren't really worth it. The speed change is minimal and the amount of power is a little much to power every higher tier door besides bunker doors. I would lower the power cost to 40-60 and increase the amount of time it takes to open both the mechanized and manual airlock by 1-2 seconds. Also I would add and insulated door which would be similar to the mechanized airlock. I would probably have it build out of both metal (for the inner workings) and whatever insulated material you want to use. Maybe it would have to be a 2x2 door instead of a 1x2. It could also require slightly more power to open and close quickly.

Sorry I know this post is long I've just accumulated a lot of ideas and I hope the Klei keeps doing the great job they've been doing on this game for a while. I know I may not be the first person to think of some of these ideas but I would like to get people's thoughts on them. Maybe if they devs  like some of them they will add a few of them into the game or if enough people ask about them. This would probably be easier for people to sit through if it were a video or a podcast but I figured more people would see it here.
 

[MorsDux]

For one i would love it if i could make an efficient airlock with pump. But with the strange input points of the pump it takes too long to vacuum a 2x2 room. I have an unnatural dislike for fluid locks for some reason they feel cheap and cheaty. 

[natanstarke]

I like hydration but only of its super cheap and we have more ways to water cause on my map now water is just a suffering to have enough.

Toys for pets ftw.

Insulated door but 1x2 would be cool, lower power cost for lockers is a must but extra time never ever to much balls of iron on the feet already. ( things that makes you lose time ) things are always kinda distant also so no need to make pathing worse.

Geysers balance also a must i always play random seeds and only played on a slush geyser map once, was the funnier map i ever had, while leaky oil too hot and volcanos to irritating to use but well... theyre volcanos so its ok, polkuted oxygen super useful just dont know wht everything needs to be hot i hate heat so much i cant describe i live in brasil heres a living hell.

Also Buff hydrofan Harddddd off topic

New foods and the cooker is also a must

Poi ideas really cool and all make sense, revealing geysers locations would make total sense too, i disagree with you about lockers clothes are super usefull i love sneazy and cool ones ( new clothes ftw)

So now... lets talk about doctors, its easy to more diseases and wounds just make again a ball of iron on the feet especially that you already have a lot of then in the form of slime in the air interactions mv speed terrain and the list goes on. But yeah minor wounds and minor diseases would be cool, just make them be treated super fast or make dupes use the downtime to theatment, also remember dupes are engineered to be super superior than every human so yeah there always have some imune resist on them.

 

[Sasza22]

Actually light gives a small decor bonus for dupes. It`s like +15 decor. Making it affect morale more doesn`t really change much. IMO to make it useful it would have to increase dupe move and work speed. It would also make sense for it to work that way.

The small bladder trait needs some attention as it does nothing atm. It needs to be changed to require 2 pee breaks for the particular dupe or risk him having to stop his work at a random moment to pee.

There were a lot of ideas for more food types. Especially a 3rd tier cooking station using water so that food poisoning and cleaning the water starts to matter.

Diseases could use more balance to make them more "deadly" but we would need more countermeasures as well. The doctor would be nice but i`d say introduce an air sanitizer using bleach stone and a bit of power to remove germs from nearby air (it would warrant making slimelung more dangerous in clean oxygen). The thing would allow for using germ sensors to automate it even.

I made a topic with some ideas for  critter happiness check that one out.

Geysers need a balance sweep. Most of them produce way too little to be useful, while others like slush make the game easymode. Hoping for a pass on those next upgrade.

I also had a suggestion about the magma biome but it seems it got archived already. You could take a look anyway.

Also insulated doors. Something suggested since forever and yet no word on if we will ever get those. Still keeping my hopes high.

Sorry for the chaotic post, just tried to respond to as many points as i could.

[Yunru]

The reason for day/night is... because there's day/night.

Which is kinda important for solar panels.

[crbd115]

4 hours ago, Yunru said:

The reason for day/night is... because there's day/night.

Which is kinda important for solar panels.

I'm referring to inside the asteroid itself. I understand that the outside does rotate and there is a sun so there is day/night in terms of whether or not the surface has light but inside makes no sense to have the whole thing get darker for "night" when there is no light inside to begin with.

5 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Actually light gives a small decor bonus for dupes. It`s like +15 decor. Making it affect morale more doesn`t really change much. IMO to make it useful it would have to increase dupe move and work speed. It would also make sense for it to work that way.

The small bladder trait needs some attention as it does nothing atm. It needs to be changed to require 2 pee breaks for the particular dupe or risk him having to stop his work at a random moment to pee.

There were a lot of ideas for more food types. Especially a 3rd tier cooking station using water so that food poisoning and cleaning the water starts to matter.

Diseases could use more balance to make them more "deadly" but we would need more countermeasures as well. The doctor would be nice but i`d say introduce an air sanitizer using bleach stone and a bit of power to remove germs from nearby air (it would warrant making slimelung more dangerous in clean oxygen). The thing would allow for using germ sensors to automate it even.

I made a topic with some ideas for  critter happiness check that one out.

Geysers need a balance sweep. Most of them produce way too little to be useful, while others like slush make the game easymode. Hoping for a pass on those next upgrade.

I also had a suggestion about the magma biome but it seems it got archived already. You could take a look anyway.

Also insulated doors. Something suggested since forever and yet no word on if we will ever get those. Still keeping my hopes high.

Sorry for the chaotic post, just tried to respond to as many points as i could.

So I said I know that it gives a small decor bonus my argument was that it shouldn't. My idea was that basically it would give dupes like +1 or +2 to morale similar to when the duplicants are showered. Like there would be some sort of short term buff that lasted maybe 2 min or so and would refresh upon being in a lit area again. I like the idea of giving a buff to increase move or work speed as it does make sense that they would perform better when they can clearly see what is going on because it is well lit. I even had another idea after posting this that you could have a negative trait like "afraid of the dark" or whatever. Maybe that dupe gets a negative morale debuff in dark areas for too long and needs to sleep with a night light lol.

[SamLogan]

18 hours ago, crbd115 said:

8: Rework some of the geysers/make worse geysers more useful

You have some good suggestions, but this one I don't agree :

- Most of the cool steam vent produce enough water for at least one electrolyser and most of the time 2-3 electrolysers. You probably don't optimize the cooling of the steam that block the geyser by overpressure it.

- Yes, geysers with 500°C gas is mostly useless, but it will be to easy to just put a steam turbine on it, the game always have an alternate way to use a system. So increase the flow is not the point.

I think if we will certain to have all the best geyser of the map it would be really boring. If you want that just use the seed map web site.

 

About the puft, just do a room with two gas as the drecko, it's not really a big deal.

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, SamLogan said:

You have some good suggestions, but this one I don't agree :

- Most of the cool steam vent produce enough water for at least one electrolyser and most of the time 2-3 electrolysers. You probably don't optimize the cooling of the steam that block the geyser by overpressure it.

- Yes, geysers with 500°C gas is mostly useless, but it will be to easy to just put a steam turbine on it, the game always have an alternate way to use a system. So increase the flow is not the point.

The problem with the geysers is that some of them produce so little that you might as well ignore them. CO2 vents can`t sustain more than 1 slickster, hydrogen vents produce less than a single electrolizer, polluted oxygen vents can barely sustain pufts. I guess you can live without those but if we have an option to get tons of cool water for free or a miniscule amount of random gas instead there`s a balance issue there.

[Foefaller]

17 hours ago, MorsDux said:

For one i would love it if i could make an efficient airlock with pump. But with the strange input points of the pump it takes too long to vacuum a 2x2 room. I have an unnatural dislike for fluid locks for some reason they feel cheap and cheaty. 

If the concern is keeping a gas *in*, and you're not too worried about keeping a gas *out,* then all you need is to make sure the pressure outside the room is greater than in; gas from the outside will always rush in when the lock opens and rarely if ever let anything escape.

If you need to keep a chamber full of one and only one gas, you can take advantage of their weight. Rooms you want full of Hydrogen should be set to enter from below, CO2 from above. Chlorine rooms can be either as long as it isn't from the side, but you also need to have the floor all airflow/mesh tiles and a chamber packed with CO2 under it, with a micro pump and a sensor to get rid of excess CO2 from dupes exhaling before it rises to the room above.

[crbd115]

6 hours ago, SamLogan said:

You have some good suggestions, but this one I don't agree :

- Most of the cool steam vent produce enough water for at least one electrolyser and most of the time 2-3 electrolysers. You probably don't optimize the cooling of the steam that block the geyser by overpressure it.

- Yes, geysers with 500°C gas is mostly useless, but it will be to easy to just put a steam turbine on it, the game always have an alternate way to use a system. So increase the flow is not the point.

I think if we will certain to have all the best geyser of the map it would be really boring. If you want that just use the seed map web site.

 

About the puft, just do a room with two gas as the drecko, it's not really a big deal.

While you are free to disagree with my opinion, I don't really appreciate you assuming that I don't understand how geysers work. I specifically said that i wanted the average production per second on a cool steam vent to be at least 1kg/s. That means that after calculating the theoretical max production value of a geyser it would potentially produce 1kg/s or more. https://oxygennotincluded.gamepedia.com/Geyser
If  you look at that page it shows that cool steam vents can produce anywhere from 0.2kg/s - 2.5kg/s. Many of the gas geysers/vents are underwhelming and not useful to say the least so yes they do need a balance change.

 

[crbd115]

8: Rework some of the geysers/make worse geysers more useful 
Since I apparently need to be more clear on this idea/my reasoning behind this change I will go through all the numbers. 

Cool steam vents produce anywhere from .2kg/s - 2.5kg/s , I would change the minimum to 1kg/s
An electrolyzer running at 100% efficiency would consume 1kg/s and since you are only guaranteed 2 cool steam vents per map it makes no sense for the minimum value to be anything less then 1kg/s. Maybe sometimes it takes you awhile to find one or maybe you don't get lucky enough to have more then the two renewable water sources. With how many water consumers are in the game I don't really understand why the minimum would be .2kg/s. Lets say someone gets really unlucky and gets the bare minimum somehow on both cool steam vents, and only gets one natural gas geyser also at minimum production of 15 g/s (I know this is a apocalyptic idea but it is theoretically possible). So if a natural gas generator was running all the time it would consume 90g/s and produce 67.5g/s of polluted water but because you got a bare minimum nat gas geyser the generator is running at 17% efficiency so it would only produce around 11.25 g/s of polluted water. Lets say you have 8 duplicants going to the bathroom 1 timer per day producing 6.7kg per use which averages to 89g/s. So in total from your renewable sources of water you have around 500g/s. Only enough water to run one electrolyzer at 50% efficiency... I get that this would take a lot of bad luck to happen but this part of the game shouldn't be based around luck at all. This is just my thoughts on the guaranteed geysers/vents. Don't even get me started on hydrogen, both of the carbon dioxide, and both the polluted oxygen vents/geysers. 

 

[MorsDux]

5 hours ago, Foefaller said:

If the concern is keeping a gas *in*, and you're not too worried about keeping a gas *out,* then all you need is to make sure the pressure outside the room is greater than in; gas from the outside will always rush in when the lock opens and rarely if ever let anything escape.

If you need to keep a chamber full of one and only one gas, you can take advantage of their weight. Rooms you want full of Hydrogen should be set to enter from below, CO2 from above. Chlorine rooms can be either as long as it isn't from the side, but you also need to have the floor all airflow/mesh tiles and a chamber packed with CO2 under it, with a micro pump and a sensor to get rid of excess CO2 from dupes exhaling before it rises to the room above.

Thanks for the suggestions, they are good, I am using all these. My chlorine room has pumps on top and bottom to collect unwanted gases and a "weight" based entrance that keeps most of the gases where they need to be. My problem is that if the rooms have pressure difference this does not work that well. I ended up having to sync the outside pressure with the room pressure there. But this can be problematic for rooms with 20kg hydrogen pressure, or rooms with vacuum etc. These arent unsolvable problems, they would just feel better with a good pump airlock solution.