The Reed Fiber Bottleneck

[Sasza22]

2 hours ago, Dracian said:

So to say, 20 Insulated Tiles or Pipes.

It`s about how much you need. I haven`t needed more for most of my designs but i can agree that getting around 100-200 without spending time farming it from the start and rushing a drecko farm or two might take too long. If it was 2 fibers per 400kg (1 tile) it would be more reasonable.

[WanderingKid]

2 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

I completely agree with you, and I'm just confused by why anyone feels the need to argue with this point.

While I was offering solutions to the problem, and which is what I usually do, I agree with fiber production should not start 100s of cycles before you're hoping to have enough to use it in mass. 

This is partially because I don't *want* to play a base longer than 200-300 cycles. There really needs to come a point where 'I'm done' is a win condition.  This, to me, should never be longer than 24 hours of user time.  That is, at 3x speed, 24 * 12 cycles = ~300 cycles, not including pause times.  At normal speed if you include a few larger pause times, that's roughly 100-120 cycles.

It is also partially because reeds are a really odd limiter.  Super Coolant can be used for power positive cool steam and doesn't require much as long as your piping is contained, and is only limited by the rocket components.  Thermite can practically ignore most heat concerns, and requires only Tungsten to mass produce once you have an initial starter amount.  Insulation requires a massive resource dump to use because of the amount of kg of it you need for small to medium sized projects.

Reeds have always been a bottleneck for early/midgame though.  They're fine for that.  Exosuit or painting?  Ranch early for clothing or skip it entirely?  Somewhere around here is a thread that says 'How long have you played'.  I personally feel that anyone with over 1000 hours should not simply offer "Build Better" to the majority of the playerbase as a solution to this problem. The problem exists.  "I've got rockets!  I can make Insulation!  I … now need to have built my base 200 cycles ago and have been mass collecting this stuff?!" is a complete and utter buzzkill for what should have been a "Fun and Exciting" moment.

Reeds do exactly what they should, I feel.  They are an early/midgame bottleneck that you can learn to conquer if you care.  Rocket materials production however I do not feel even has a place in the conversation.  I do hope that the reed requirements are something that's going to replaced in the future with the new biomes on 1.0 release.  They've never made sense to me for Insulation and I agree that it requires far more base material resource gathering than it should.

[mathmanican]

10 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

Reeds do exactly what they should, I feel.  They are an early/midgame bottleneck that you can learn to conquer if you care.  Rocket materials production however I do not feel even has a place in the conversation.  I do hope that the reed requirements are something that's going to replaced in the future with the new biomes on 1.0 release. 

I like it. 

So one suggestion could be "drop completely the reed requirement from insulation".  Why make the early/mid game bottle neck be the thing that completely kills endgame material creation. I agree completely that it seems out of place. Why not just make the recipe be "Stuff from rockets + Abysallite". Then mass produce rockets to make insulation faster. If someone wants to continue playing past this point in the game, limiting their ability to use insulation seems pointless from a game perspective.

Adding reed fibers to paintings stopped the mass painting spam for morale (though it really just changed it from spamming paintings to spamming marble statues or metal statues out of gold). "Don't build paintings because you'll need the fiber later for insulation" seems like the wrong move.  

@Dracian, I completely agree something is out of whack.  What the right fix is, I don't know. Thanks for putting up this post and starting a discussion.

[Nitroturtle]

11 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

I like it. 

So one suggestion could be "drop completely the reed requirement from insulation".  Why make the early/mid game bottle neck be the thing that completely kills endgame material creation. I agree completely that it seems out of place. Why not just make the recipe be "Stuff from rockets + Abysallite". Then mass produce rockets to make insulation faster. If someone wants to continue playing past this point in the game, limiting their ability to use insulation seems pointless from a game perspective.

Adding reed fibers to paintings stopped the mass painting spam for morale (though it really just changed it from spamming paintings to spamming marble statues or metal statues out of gold). "Don't build paintings because you'll need the fiber later for insulation" seems like the wrong move.  

@Dracian, I completely agree something is out of whack.  What the right fix is, I don't know. Thanks for putting up this post and starting a discussion.

I agree completely.  I love the idea of dropping it, let the space resource be the bottleneck at that point.

I feel like @WanderingKid we are talking about different games.  If you only want to put in that much time, that's fine.  But I'm talking about a base with hundreds of hours, thousands of cycles.  At this point, I should be able to build anthing I please out of insulation.  Not be sitting with excess space materials waiting to produce enough of an early game material.

Another issue is that abyssalite is basically a trash material at this point.  I love that they removed the option to build with regular abyssalite.  That change made a lot of the other minerals relevant again and made you have to at least somewhat consider building materials instead of just building everything out of abyssalite.  But at this point it's basically useless because the real bottleneck is reed fibers?  Give us other uses for abyssalite at this point.  Or is there some arguement why we should have 100x more abyssalite than we could ever use, let alone the fact that it's available FAR before there's any use for it.  

 

[Lali-Lop]

I would feel a lot less annoyed at having to collect abyssalite while not being able to use it for anything if they simply lowered the mass of each tile (or thinned the walls), so it doesn't pile up so much.  Then (if they wanted to), they could make it a building material again without being so OP because it is no longer so abundant.  I understand why they removed that ability, but they should've also changed map gen to accommodate this.

[WanderingKid]

1 hour ago, Nitroturtle said:

I feel like @WanderingKid we are talking about different games.  If you only want to put in that much time, that's fine.  But I'm talking about a base with hundreds of hours, thousands of cycles.  At this point, I should be able to build anthing I please out of insulation.  Not be sitting with excess space materials waiting to produce enough of an early game material.

In some ways we are. I like to speed run and I simply don't have the free time I used to have as I've gotten older so speedrunning is how I can still enjoy a game without having to invest months of time for a single session.  DF/Rimworld/etc are all things I've learned to play quickly, partially for that reason.  The other part is I enjoy the challenge.

However, I agree with the sentiment that reeds, a base material that is used for other projects, shouldn't suddenly be a massive bottleneck that you have to choose for construction.  That I can build it in 50 cycles and someone else takes 200 shouldn't necessarily be a concern.  My concern that I *was* trying to bring up, poorly apparently, is that the game play time should NOT be a constraint to anyone who continues on building what they choose.  I'd like to see alternate approaches to some of these challenges, and reeds are an obvious indicator of what I'm talking about.

Allow me to try to make why I feel using time as a constraint is something I don't feel adds to the game:

I want more water?  I hunt down and infrastructure up whatever geysers I can find.  There's a hard limit here somewhere on every map seed of what's available.  That's an interesting and fun limitation.

I want PWater?  I want more of it?  I start trading water for oil wells and process it through petrogens or NGGs and get my PWater from the output and the CO2 + skimmers.  Another interesting design challenge, and plays with the idea of limitations and conversions.  Add in a Petro Boiler or a Sour Gas converter and you're even water positive.

However, these limits are actually to base size limitations in the end.  It's all about how can you support X # of dupes.  Food isn't a concern, Wooly/Lily or Vole/Regolith ranching is water free and endless, and there's enough wild pincha that they are basically nearly ignorable as a constraint.  Early/mid is most easily handled with rock hatches + igneous.  Power?  Solar + Petrogens are so strong in end game that there's basically nothing else you need. So the only survival need is the water in the long haul.  You build it and it's done.

If you have conquered all of these base needs for the end game, adding a time constraint to reed production should not be the limiter.  You're reducing your base survival components you've already successfully completed (water consumption) and adding a 2 cycle delay on it.  You're adding more dupes to your system than you previously needed (ranchers who may or may not even be trained) for shearing, and adding (at best) an 8 cycle delay on it.    This is a time lock out.  Similar to "Want to go to space today?  Wait until you've got enough xp, because you can't change THAT" time lockouts of doing what you know HOW to do I don't feel adds to gameplay.

Time should add constraints and interesting challenges.  Time should not add playtime simply because I'm bored while I'm waiting for things to grow/level up.

EDIT:

Of course after I walk away I remember a great example.  ROG in Don't Starve has summer.  Summer has one or two possible ways of approaching it.  The forced time is enough that you basically have to choose one the first year.  Either you handle fires, heat, and cooling, or you handle moving into the caves and sanity problems far earlier than most players would like.  I had gotten to the points where I was typically raiding the ruins the second year in the caves, but that's how I like to play.

A player who prefers a slower tempo and pacing can use a number of options for low risk eventual reward.  A player who likes a high tempo can go High Risk/High Reward.  There were options in the game that the timers didn't punish you for being faster.  Even before ROG since it was basically always night anyway in the base game and you didn't want the deerclops obliterating your stuff, you'd collect cold gear and head underground to explore/wait it out.

[beowulf2010]

4 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

Reeds have always been a bottleneck for early/midgame though.  They're fine for that.  Exosuit or painting?  Ranch early for clothing or skip it entirely?  Somewhere around here is a thread that says 'How long have you played'.  I personally feel that anyone with over 1000 hours should not simply offer "Build Better" to the majority of the playerbase as a solution to this problem. The problem exists. 

True. *BUT* those of us with 1,000+ hours of play time learned about the need for early reed fibre the hard way and are trying to help out with hard learned experience. 

Yes, there's something funky with the recipe and it needs to be looked at. 

No, insulation (the material) is not *needed* for most builds. 

Yes, it's nice to have, but even ceramic overkill most of the time. 

No, it's not obvious that you need mass reed fibers until you start rockets. 

Yes, you need to start farming it early and Dreckos are the way to go. 

And finally, yes, this is something that people *will* fail on a couple times as they learn and get into the 1,000 hour range. 

[suicide commando]

Adding to @beowulf2010 as I mentioned before, reed fibre the plant has a growth period of 2 cycles, so if you build a large farm, you can produce large amounts of reed fibre easily. As you need to wait at least 3 cycles of a rocket to return with goodies anyway. You can produce a metric ton of reed fibres and have them ready and waiting for when your rocket returns with isoresin.

 

[Tonyroid]

I built a giant power generator that produces natural gas from oil. It can fuel 73 natural gas generators and they produce a 5kg of polluted water per second. (Also, 50,000 watts (net) and a bunch of CO2).

With the consistent source of polluted water you can farm reed fiber like crazy. EVEN THEN it took me a while to get enough for what I needed, but now I have more than I could want.

I made a video explaining how to set up the power generator.

 

[JohnFrancis]

2 hours ago, Tonyroid said:

Giant power generator that produces natural gas from oil.

1. That is a beautiful counter flow heat exchange, I'm stealing it for testing when I have time.
2. Ingenious design and actually possible in survival.
3. Don't bury this in a sub post, make a post dedicated to this topic. Also makes it easier to find when people want to look it up again.
4. Now I need to figure out a way to replicate something like this without space materials.

[Tonyroid]

9 hours ago, JohnFrancis said:

1. That is a beautiful counter flow heat exchange, I'm stealing it for testing when I have time.
2. Ingenious design and actually possible in survival.
3. Don't bury this in a sub post, make a post dedicated to this topic. Also makes it easier to find when people want to look it up again.
4. Now I need to figure out a way to replicate something like this without space materials.

My game is survival mode, so it is indeed survival mode compatible. I don't see how it could be done without thermium but some very clever hydrogen use might be able to replace the super coolant.