Phosphorite problems on verdante

[Greybear]

So I'm playing a Verdante map, and I feel like there is almost no phosphorite on the map. Verdante has a forest start biome, and I would love to domesticate some trees for ethanol production - but the starting biome only have extremely small patches of phosphorite, and it seems the only other direct source is in the Caustic, which is not near the start and have quiet limited sources. I guess I could start a few drecko farms. This part feels a bit unbalanced though - and feels like the game forces my hand a bit...

[Gracefulmuse]

3 minutes ago, Greybear said:

So I'm playing a Verdante map, and I feel like there is almost no phosphorite on the map. Verdante has a forest start biome, and I would love to domesticate some trees for ethanol production - but the starting biome only have extremely small patches of phosphorite, and it seems the only other direct source is in the Caustic, which is not near the start and have quiet limited sources. I guess I could start a few drecko farms. This part feels a bit unbalanced though - and feels like the game forces my hand a bit...

What do you mean the game forces your hand? There is nothing forcing you to use domesticated trees. If you are choosing to use them in this specific asteroid, then you may need to either find a caustic or ranch drecko. 

If you don't want to do either, you could just not use domesticated trees.

[Caochu]

The lack of phosphorite at start really depends of the seed. I had the same occurence with a previous map, but now on a new Verdante map I have 20 tons ahead. I had a caustic biome that I dug just a bit, but quite a lot of phospohorite came from the starter biome, if I remember correctly. 

EDIT : After verification, while the starter biome indeed has quite a lot of phosphorite tiles, they all seem to be only 10 kg each. So I guess I got my phosphorite from the caustic biome 

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, Greybear said:

- and feels like the game forces my hand a bit...

That's because it is. Verdante has caustic biomes, so you have to get out and explore. I would say it's best to just use wild trees until you have a source of phosphorite, or just setup a permanent wild tree farm. 

[Greybear]

7 minutes ago, Gracefulmuse said:

What do you mean the game forces your hand? There is nothing forcing you to use domesticated trees. If you are choosing to use them in this specific asteroid, then you may need to either find a caustic or ranch drecko. 

If you don't want to do either, you could just not use domesticated trees.

I mean that if I want to use domestic trees, I feel like I have to ranch dreckos. There isn't a lot of phosphorite in the few caustic biomes that I have found so far. I would love for there to be another alternative on this map type. It's fine if you don't feel that way - but I feel like the tree farming should be a bit easier to get into on what the game communicates as the second-easiest map type. That's all, no drama.

7 minutes ago, Caochu said:

The lack of phosphorite at start really depends of the seed. I had the same occurence with a previous map, but now on a new Verdante map I have 20 tons ahead. I had a caustic biome that I dug just a bit, but quite a lot of phospohorite came from the starter biome, if I remember correctly. 

Great, my seed might be especially bad then - just wish there was one more source and that the starting phosphorite pathces didn't only contain 10 kg each.

[Gracefulmuse]

1 minute ago, Greybear said:

I mean that if I want to use domestic trees, I feel like I have to ranch dreckos. There isn't a lot of phosphorite in the few caustic biomes that I have found so far. I would love for there to be another alternative on this map type. It's fine if you don't feel that way - but I feel like the tree farming should be a bit easier to get into on what the game communicates as the second-easiest map type. That's all, no drama.

I was not meaning drama either. My English isn't the best so sorry if It sounded strange. I was genuinely asking what you meant. 

[Greybear]

Just now, Gracefulmuse said:

I was not meaning drama either. My English isn't the best so sorry if It sounded strange. I was genuinely asking what you meant. 

Cool - No problem. I don't think that the system is broken or anything like that in the current build - just that it felt a little too hard to get my domestic tree production going. And since there aren't any coal near me either, I still rely heavily on manual generators for my power.

[BaloneyOs]

4 minutes ago, Greybear said:

I mean that if I want to use domestic trees, I feel like I have to ranch dreckos. There isn't a lot of phosphorite in the few caustic biomes that I have found so far. I would love for there to be another alternative on this map type. It's fine if you don't feel that way - but I feel like the tree farming should be a bit easier to get into on what the game communicates as the second-easiest map type. That's all, no drama.

Sounds like an issue with map choice.

That said, sooner or later we'll probably have means of choosing world generation options like in Don't Starve so players could play however they want instead of being restricted to 9 presets.

[Greybear]

2 minutes ago, BaloneyOs said:

Sounds like an issue with map choice.

That said, sooner or later we'll probably have means of choosing world generation options like in Don't Starve so players could play however they want instead of being restricted to 9 presets.

Sure - it's a problem with map type - but I am planning to try and build a colony on all nine, and this part felt a little "unbalanced" to me. I wouldn't expect the more esoteric maps like Rime or Volcanea to be a smooth and well-managed experience, but I think the first 3 should be relatively easy to get into.

[BaloneyOs]

The map difficulties seem to be based off minimums for survival which translates to how much of the necessities you have and how compromised they are. On the first 4 maps you can always grow food asap and don't have to deal with ambient heat for a very long time so the variety kinda comes from how easily you can access other resources and therefore affecting your build orders. Lack of immediate phosphorite on Verdante is just as much of a feature as lack of early salt biome on Arboria.

Obviously new additions might shift difficulties as well and we still have some EA time left. For example Arboria's difficulty label is currently rather deceiving for new players BUT this would change immediately if they added a lower tier recipe for beans. Lettuce nerf, on the other hand made Arboria even more difficult while making Verdante only marginally more difficult. These shifts could happen with every significant patch so the difficulty labels will probably be more meaningful after release.

[SamLogan]

Drecko?

[KittenIsAGeek]

2 hours ago, Greybear said:

I mean that if I want to use domestic trees, I feel like I have to ranch dreckos. There isn't a lot of phosphorite in the few caustic biomes that I have found so far. 

I feel that the problem isn't domesticating trees.  I've found that there's plenty for domesticating a couple of trees, without having to look for dreckos or digging out the entire map to find more phosphorite.  The problem is scaling up to be a complete solution.  This is a trend that I see in a lot of threads.  Take, for example, food production.  I've found in my bases that having a variety of food sources works best in the long run.  If I focus on one particular food for my dupes, I run into scaling problems where either dupe labor time suffers, or food production can't keep up.  Like with mushrooms.  They're a fantastic mid-game food source, but eventually I'll run out of slime.

So, for domestic trees.. 1 or 2 will do a LOT for your base and you have plenty of available phosphorite to fertilize them for a very long time.  20 trees is going to be hard.  

[DarkMaster13]

2 hours ago, BaloneyOs said:

The map difficulties seem to be based off minimums for survival which translates to how much of the necessities you have and how compromised they are. On the first 4 maps you can always grow food asap and don't have to deal with ambient heat for a very long time so the variety kinda comes from how easily you can access other resources and therefore affecting your build orders. Lack of immediate phosphorite on Verdante is just as much of a feature as lack of early salt biome on Arboria.

Obviously new additions might shift difficulties as well and we still have some EA time left. For example Arboria's difficulty label is currently rather deceiving for new players BUT this would change immediately if they added a lower tier recipe for beans. Lettuce nerf, on the other hand made Arboria even more difficult while making Verdante only marginally more difficult. These shifts could happen with every significant patch so the difficulty labels will probably be more meaningful after release.

I'm thinking of starting a thread where we crowdsource figuring out what the actual difficulties are for the various starts are, and why.  Then the dev team can use that information to either shuffle around the starts and adjust their difficulty labels to be in line with what actually is easy or hard, or adjust the conditions of the asteroids to have their difficulties be in line with what's intended.  I just need to do some pre-work first.

[Gracefulmuse]

54 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

I'm thinking of starting a thread where we crowdsource figuring out what the actual difficulties are for the various starts are, and why.  Then the dev team can use that information to either shuffle around the starts and adjust their difficulty labels to be in line with what actually is easy or hard, or adjust the conditions of the asteroids to have their difficulties be in line with what's intended.  I just need to do some pre-work first.

The only issue with this, is different people are going to find different things harder. Not to mention the most active contributors on this forum have well over 1000 hours in the game. Take for example my husband, he has never really played the game, but has watched me play a lot in my 2000 hours. He tried starting a map on Volcona(the volcano one, forgive me for not knowing the name) and actually did really well. He was much better at dealing with that map then even I was. But one some of the maps like rime that I had a very very easy time with, he starved to death becouse he could not figure out a food situation fast enough. 

 

Im not saying your forum could not be helpful, I am merely suggesting that these differences in playstyles be kept in mind while doing so. 

[EnderCN]

It is useful feedback.  There is no way the new biomes are 100% perfect on release so if this is an issue for people in it important to tell the devs about it.  Maybe it is by design, maybe it is more sparse than it should be, no way to know.

[Promethien]

Phosphorite is present but the tiles are only 10kg seems to me to be one of those easy to make mistakes. These are the kinds of things that betas are meant to catch. 

[DarkMaster13]

3 hours ago, Gracefulmuse said:

The only issue with this, is different people are going to find different things harder. Not to mention the most active contributors on this forum have well over 1000 hours in the game. Take for example my husband, he has never really played the game, but has watched me play a lot in my 2000 hours. He tried starting a map on Volcona(the volcano one, forgive me for not knowing the name) and actually did really well. He was much better at dealing with that map then even I was. But one some of the maps like rime that I had a very very easy time with, he starved to death becouse he could not figure out a food situation fast enough. 

 

Im not saying your forum could not be helpful, I am merely suggesting that these differences in playstyles be kept in mind while doing so. 

As an aside, my initial difficulty estimates put volcania as one of the easier asteroids.  However we should take this to the relevant thread to continue the discussion: