Crowd-sourcing the difficulty levels of each asteroid type

[Hyarion]

Arboria has giving me a few challenges that were harder than I expected for it's difficulty rating, I'm enjoying it myself but it'll be a big jump for a new player if they've only had 1 or 2 bases.  This is what has been relevant to me so far, up to mid-game.  I havn't built rockets yet.

Challenges:

• No Swamp = No Gold Amalgum = Cannot build anything that has to withstand more than 75C of heat.  Had to produce Steel for any high temperature buildings.
• No Swamp = No reed fiber = No atmo suits.  Have to ranch Dreckos instead, while not overly difficult it means it's a lot longer before you can equip every dupe with a suit.  Also means it's a long time before you can build paintings for decor.
• Wood Burning / Ethanol production can be dangerous for those who havn't used them before.  I flooded my base with CO2 in very few cycles in the early game and had a mad scramble to solve the problem.  

Benefits:

• No slimelung.  Only disease I've had to worry about is pockets of zombie-spore in the oil biome, but if you don't dig into it you are safe.
• Abundance of refined lead in (usually) easy to reach areas (only time I've needed to refine metal is to create steel)

[qda]

1 hour ago, Hyarion said:

No Swamp = No reed fiber = No atmo suits.  Have to ranch Dreckos instead, while not overly difficult it means it's a lot longer before you can equip every dupe with a suit.  Also means it's a long time before you can build paintings for decor.

I would have said the same a while ago, but having had to ranch dreckos a few time since launch preview, this is clearly faster than waiting for wild or even domesticated reed fiber to grow. You don't really need to ranch them, I consider them as single use for 2 reed fibers, amount needed for a single atmo suit. So it is one shear per atmo suit, plus finding the said dreckos. On arboria you will probably not go overboard with dupes because of the tougher start, so 8 atmo suits is probably plenty, that means finding (rust biomes everywhere around the start), moving (one way travel) and shearing (10-20s per drecko) 8 dreckos once. This is absolutely nothing in fact, in terms of difficulty, dupe labor and time needed to set up. In fact, in early game, I'll probably never wait again for reed plants, unless I don't have access to dreckos.

[chemie]

On 7/7/2019 at 5:34 PM, suicide commando said:

...

On top of that, no gold means no easy access to oxylite for rockets in the late game unless you go through the pain of ranching dense pufts, which is a challenge all on it's own. They will also not produce enough for more than a few flights by the time you're in need of it. So unless you get some gold from space or something like that, this will become very difficult, as the amount of data disks you need for your research to use LOX tanks will need more than 'a few' flights.
...

 

They fixed the exosuit copper issue quickly but hopefully just did not realize the same issue applies to the oxylite production...there is no reason it should only use gold.  Time will tell how they feel about reed fibers; I hope they provide alternative routes to make beyond ranching

[suicide commando]

A good way to deal with this problem is to change the metallic asteroid that always spawns at 20km IMHO.
That one has obsidian as one of the elements it contains. If they were to change that to gold amalgam, the problem would be solved for the most part.
You'd still need to have care packages on, so you can ranch pufts for a few flights, but then you can send a petrol rocket with a cargo pod to that asteroid and get a pile of gold. Then it's just a matter of keeping yourself stocked.

 

[natanstarke]

Map ranking most difficulty to easiest:

Aridia - hardest early game needing to rush ice machines to cool farm areas and live on mush bars or fried mush bars for some time and with a limited supply of water and oxygen.

Oasis - easier to start compared to aridia but mid game is a hell of heat and you have a lot of useless sand and lack of anything that matters for a long time its a good challenge map anyway! 

Arboria - mostly because of forest start and lack of gold forest starts are amazing but are indeed always harder than copper biome for me its a balanced start anyways just different.

Rime - not hard at all for me but still harder than the ones i will put now.

Volcanea/oceanea - izy pizzy didnt had any difficult at all, you can have problem in volcanea because of map gen but for me its fine as it is just need to have a forest start " same for oceania forest start is needed there"

Badlands - everything is harder than this this map is just boring for me its good for ppl who like more clean spaces to build.

Verdante - just supa izy.

Terra - easiest and the best to build mega structures and to have fun with some of the new traits.

 

 

 

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

6 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Am I just overestimating how long it takes for the area around the pod to cool down?  I tested this and it's plenty warm to grow mealwood for many cycles.  Especially if you build around a water supply, that'll stay above 10 degrees C for pretty long time.

I left a lot of the starting mass un-dug, but it still cooled down quickly. By cycle 5 I had started a farm of mealwood.  By cycle 8, they were too cold to grow, even though they were very close to the printing pod.  Putting some batteries there let me grow Bristles, but it took another 10 cycles before I warmed up enough area to grow enough plants to feed my dupes.  There's a pool down and to the right of the one in my screenshot. It was liquid when I started, and froze over before I dug down to it.  Also, there's a pool above and to the left of the starting pod.  It was liquid as well, barely in frame, when I started.  It too froze over.

I'm guessing that your map generated warmer areas near your portal.  Mine did not.  Here's a debug screenshot:

Spoiler

I don't even have a lava zone.  There are a couple of hot spots on the map.  In particular, I _just_ located a steam geyser below my base that I'm working towards.  I also just found a salt-water biome (the yellow/green area to the left of the pod) while digging out my closest geyser.  Turned out to be a -50c CO2 geyser, so I walled it off.

Basically, my map is a frozen rock. Everything is cold.  Very cold. I've got -30 and -50c areas just on the other side of insulated tiles.  When my dupes go exploring, they come back with hypothermia.  I've found two frozen caustic biomes, a frozen slime biome, and a couple of frozen rust biomes.  There are no critters -- they all froze.  One of the caustic biomes is cold enough that the chlorine is condensing into liquid form.

So.. I'm glad your test went well.  But on my map, I had to rush insulated tiles and space heaters just to get plants to grow.

[natanstarke]

44 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I left a lot of the starting mass un-dug, but it still cooled down quickly. By cycle 5 I had started a farm of mealwood.  By cycle 8, they were too cold to grow, even though they were very close to the printing pod.  Putting some batteries there let me grow Bristles, but it took another 10 cycles before I warmed up enough area to grow enough plants to feed my dupes.  There's a pool down and to the right of the one in my screenshot. It was liquid when I started, and froze over before I dug down to it.  Also, there's a pool above and to the left of the starting pod.  It was liquid as well, barely in frame, when I started.  It too froze over.

I'm guessing that your map generated warmer areas near your portal.  Mine did not.  Here's a debug screenshot:

  Reveal hidden contents

I don't even have a lava zone.  There are a couple of hot spots on the map.  In particular, I _just_ located a steam geyser below my base that I'm working towards.  I also just found a salt-water biome (the yellow/green area to the left of the pod) while digging out my closest geyser.  Turned out to be a -50c CO2 geyser, so I walled it off.

Basically, my map is a frozen rock. Everything is cold.  Very cold. I've got -30 and -50c areas just on the other side of insulated tiles.  When my dupes go exploring, they come back with hypothermia.  I've found two frozen caustic biomes, a frozen slime biome, and a couple of frozen rust biomes.  There are no critters -- they all froze.  One of the caustic biomes is cold enough that the chlorine is condensing into liquid form.

So.. I'm glad your test went well.  But on my map, I had to rush insulated tiles and space heaters just to get plants to grow.

Thats the idea needing to use different tech or it would just be equal to the other asteroids. Try to use the mini batteries they are a heat monster and use little space. Also water tepdizer some liquid and send it to heat crops time to time if necessary. Hope i helped you :). " dont have fear to waste power on this mini batteries you could even use some manual gens just to make them full and nothing else in the base using this energy just letting it become heat naturally for you something like 1 mini baterry per 4 plants should be enough if its not spam some more in the bottom of the farm"

Just now, natanstarke said:

Thats the idea needing to use different tech or it would just be equal to the other asteroids. Try to use the mini batteries they are a heat monster and use little space. Also water tepdizer some liquid and send it to heat crops time to time if necessary. Hope i helped you :). " dont have fear to waste power on this mini batteries you could even use some manual gens just to make them full and nothing else in the base using this energy just letting it become heat naturally for you something like 1 mini baterry per 4 plants should be enough if its not spam some more in the bottom of the farm"

Also i will restart my rime map to try to get the colder one a friend said up there with -200 or -100.

[Loscil2]

I only had experience with two biomes: Oceania and Rime

Oceania: pretty easy starting out, difficult to find metal ore in mid-late game since most of the map is oceans and oceans. Water is absolutely no problem though.

Rime: not as difficult starting out, sometimes you'll find yourself unable to grow mealwood because temps, but that's okay, hatches are enough to keep you going. Slimelung is non existent even if you have swamps. It's resourceful enough and you will never have the issue to cool your base.

[KittenIsAGeek]

15 minutes ago, natanstarke said:

Thats the idea needing to use different tech or it would just be equal to the other asteroids. Try to use the mini batteries they are a heat monster and use little space. Also water tepdizer some liquid and send it to heat crops time to time if necessary. Hope i helped you :). " dont have fear to waste power on this mini batteries you could even use some manual gens just to make them full and nothing else in the base using this energy just letting it become heat naturally for you something like 1 mini baterry per 4 plants should be enough if its not spam some more in the bottom of the farm"

Also i will restart my rime map to try to get the colder one a friend said up there with -200 or -100.

If you read my post, I did state that I used small batteries near my pod to warm my bristleblooms up.  I'm not currently using a tepedizer, though I could, because I think it adds too much heat for the power it uses.  So I'm using a different methods.  Besides, a new player on Rime wouldn't necessarily think to research up the tree to the tepedizer in order to solve the food shortage problem.  I wasn't writing this post to ask for help on my world -- I was writing it in answer to the OP's original post, wherein they asked for help determining the actual difficulty ratings for the various worlds.

However, thank you very much for the advice.  I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful, and your advice would definitely help a new player.

 

[DarkMaster13]

4 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I was writing it in answer to the OP's original post, wherein they asked for help determining the actual difficulty ratings for the various worlds.

And I thank you for the information.  The more people testing, the better idea we get of the difficulty.  It sounds like Rime is a bit like Volcanea in that the there's a large RNG factor for how difficult it is.  In the case of Rime, it's based on how close to your portal the starting water is.  If it's right on top of the portal, you've got a large reserve of heat that will let you farm for an extended period of time.  If not, you'll need to find alternative sources of food like ranching hatches or rush heating.

It's definitely a more difficult start than standard sandstone.  Aridio is certainly a more difficult start than rime since you can't grow anything at all until you get cooling and the forest offers far less food than sandstone.  The main question then, is standard forest or rime sandstone more difficult?  Both are significant challenges for new players, while experienced ones will likely find Rime easier in general due to having plenty of time to do everything and having more resources to work with.

Additionally, how much more difficult is the mid-game?  Given that you don't get critters, wild plants, and have to plan your base around using your industry to heat your farms.  I'm actually thinking that Rime is a good challenge map for those who want to try something where you have no wild plants to rely on, at least for the mid-game.

Obviously for Rime, once you get to the late game this no longer matters and the game becomes far easier with everyone in exosuits or warm sweaters.  The cold is mostly just beneficial since the largest problem in the late game is usually cooling.  You've already setup all your farms from the buried seeds you've gathered.  Your pipes are insulated so water doesn't freeze in them anymore.

[DarkMaster13]

I've done some recalculating.

• Ice biomes: I think I was overestimating how much of a problem missing the ice biome is, as it's mostly a convenience in the mid-game for cooling and getting cold irrigation water.  With the changes to fixed output temperatures, you just don't have your water supplies heating up quite so much anymore.  Getting cold oxygen systems with electrolizers without weazeworts or thermal nullifiers is more power intensive, but certainly not impossible.  Wolframite is ultimately the only resource you lose out on without the ice biome and it is possible to go without tungsten before you have rockets.
• Rime: I've also upped the difficult for the Rime start in the mid-game to account for the lack of wild plants and non-hatch critters.  The early game is still ranked 2, the same as the forest start as I'm still unsure which is more difficult.
• Oasisse: Increased the difficulty a bit in the mid-game, should be more in line with the other mid-game difficulty modifiers.
• Volcanea: Added a bit more to the mid and late game difficulties to account for how random this start's difficulty can be.
• Badlands: A lot of people have called this start a very boring and easy asteroid, and thus have discounted it and never finished a game on it.  I'm pretty sure no one has gone to the end game yet, because it's also missing the swamp biome like Arboria, which means it has all the same problems with Arboria in the mid to late game.  The only thing that makes it somewhat easier is that it gives extra sandstone biomes and that makes up for the loss of water.  The difficulty of Arboria's start is largely shifted to the end game.

 

With this recalculation, the overall estimated difficulties stand at this (keep in mind this is estimated difficulty for all stages of the game, not just the start or mid-game):

• Very easy / Ideal: Terra, Oceania
• Easy / Probable: Rime, Volcanea
• Moderate / Likely: Verdante
• Hard / Marginal: Arboria, The Badlands
• Very hard / Slim: Aridio, Oasisse

Assuming that the devs do not change anything about the start designs, the above list should provide a more reasonable ordering for the starts.

Some thoughts:

• Nearly all of the easy asteroids have the sandstone start, nearly all of the difficult ones have the forest start.  As the forest biome start was added very recently, I would not be surprised if it gets more adjustments or buffs before the official launch.  This will almost certainly bring it closer to the difficulty of the sandstone start.
• Both Arboria and The badlands are currently just shy of the difficulty of Aridio and Oasisse due to the fact that they cannot do rocketry without getting pufts from care packages.  Once this oversight is addressed (either with gold being added to another biome they both have, a new refinery/recipe is added for oxilite, or a new renewable source of oxilite is added that they can both access), their difficulty rating will drop significantly, though the relative difficulty ratings should stay the same.
• If there aren't any other glaring issues with the current calculations, I'll next be doing some speculative difficulty estimations for starts that might be missing different biomes and what potential issues like the inability to make oxilite without the swamp biome might be.  Should be useful for the devs or modders making more asteroid starts.

[avc15]

Most people will probably lose their colony the first couple times they play a forest biome start.

But really a few very easy measures get you set up and running. As another person mentioned before, sticking with three dupes until you get a food source and a water source sorted out is pretty important. Also, getting that food source up and running quickly before you run out of water might mean looking for a different source of oxygen than cultivated ferns.

 

But I would call neither arboria nor aridio difficult, the only thing that is required is a little familiarity with game mechanics.

[DarkMaster13]

7 minutes ago, avc15 said:

Most people will probably lose their colony the first couple times they play a forest biome start.

But really a few very easy measures get you set up and running. As another person mentioned before, sticking with three dupes until you get a food source and a water source sorted out is pretty important. Also, getting that food source up and running quickly before you run out of water might mean looking for a different source of oxygen than cultivated ferns.

 

But I would call neither arboria nor aridio difficult, the only thing that is required is a little familiarity with game mechanics.

It's all relative difficulties, so maybe easy vs hard were the wrong terms.  The idea is that Terra and Oceania are easier than Rime and Volcanea.  While Aridio and Oassia are harder than any of the other starts.  Being very good at the game means you can succeed regardless of the start.

[wronny]

57 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Both Arboria and The badlands are currently just shy of the difficulty of Aridio and Oasisse due to the fact that they cannot do rocketry without getting pufts from care packages. 

The lack of Gold for the Oxylite Refinery is only part of the issue, Supercoolant is another recipe that currently calls for Gold. With that in mind I'd favor adding a gold source to the rust biome rather than adjusting the recipes that currently call for gold.

Adding an uncovered Gold Volcano to the rust biome would be interesting, considering that the maps without the slime biome are lacking two uncovered geysers.

---

On another note: Arboria should have a decent chance to spawn with the usual abyssalite enlcosed 4.8t (2.4t, dug) Oxylite in one of the caustic biomes, as it has "normal-sized" caustic biomes - unlike The Badlands.

[TheEvilMango]

Rime with the frozen core + glaciers has been fun and volcana with magma channels and volcanos has proven to be challenging. 

[Vuelhering]

8 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Easy / Probable: Rime, Volcanea

I found that the starting world options makes a huge difference on difficulty of the playthrough, on most worlds.

 

Magma channels tend to leak into and destroy other biomes, so you can get a steam pocket of 500kg easily, or a channel roasting your misjudged starting location. This can be incredibly difficult -- definitely not easy. A new player would be incinerated and not know why. That is who these ratings should be tailored to. In fact, maybe the rating should change based on the starting stats to guess how difficult it will be.

Rime can be an easy start, or a fairly difficult start. Subterranean oceans are warm, so that can make it really easy to get 25C liquid heat. But some starts are really cold everywhere, and simply plumbing your bathroom at cycle 40 is difficult, and you can forget using water locks on the entire map until you find oil. But I think we can agree once you get temps (and thus food) handled, the mid-game is pretty smooth.

[DarkMaster13]

On 06/07/2019 at 8:51 PM, DarkMaster13 said:

For now, we are ignoring traits entirely.  This thread and the documents are related to the basic starts alone.

14 minutes ago, Vuelhering said:

I found that the starting world options makes a huge difference on difficulty of the playthrough, on most worlds.

 

Magma channels tend to leak into and destroy other biomes, so you can get a steam pocket of 500kg easily, or a channel roasting your misjudged starting location. This can be incredibly difficult -- definitely not easy. A new player would be incinerated and not know why. That is who these ratings should be tailored to. In fact, maybe the rating should change based on the starting stats to guess how difficult it will be.

Rime can be an easy start, or a fairly difficult start. Subterranean oceans are warm, so that can make it really easy to get 25C liquid heat. But some starts are really cold everywhere, and simply plumbing your bathroom at cycle 40 is difficult, and you can forget using water locks on the entire map until you find oil. But I think we can agree once you get temps (and thus food) handled, the mid-game is pretty smooth.

This is in the OP.  It's exactly for that reason that we're not discussing world traits at all.  Just the baseline asteroids.

[Nitroturtle]

I've noticed with Rime, if you generate a world with the irregular oil trait, not only do you get the random oil biomes spawning around the map, but also the normal oil biome spawns at normal temps, versus very cold.

[Vuelhering]

7 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

This is in the OP.  It's exactly for that reason that we're not discussing world traits at all.  Just the baseline asteroids.

How do you separate that out? Is it a guess, or is there a way to turn off all traits to get the baseline asteroid?

 

[Saturnus]

On 08/07/2019 at 6:36 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

If you read my post, I did state that I used small batteries near my pod to warm my bristleblooms up.  I'm not currently using a tepedizer, though I could, because I think it adds too much heat for the power it uses.  So I'm using a different methods. 

You can use the kiln. No power required. Produces a decent amount of heat.

[miauly]

16 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Assuming that the devs do not change anything about the start designs, the above list should provide a more reasonable ordering for the starts.

The current rating as you compiled it looks about right. I would hope that difficulty gets adjusted rather than maps reshuffled - it just seems to me that having the two most "extreme maps" as the most difficult is nicer.

I'd especially hope that gold thing is fixed, because playing without it does not feel like a fun restriction. I like ranching, so I like that it seem to get an edge on maps with unusual temperature, but there's a difference between choosing something and being forced to something I guess.

Also played on Oasisse a bit and it seemed to me more difficult than Aridio. Is it even possible to get exos without injuring your digger in the sand repeatedly? I mean I got drecko eggs from the pod when I almost made it to the caustic biome, but that's really meh. On Aridio it seems that the food is giving you a pace whichever way you take to get it, but obligatory injuries are more extreme kind of push, unless I'm missing something obvious of course.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

1 hour ago, Saturnus said:

You can use the kiln. No power required. Produces a decent amount of heat.

Yeah, that's one of my options.  Once I get my hatches producing coal.  Or I find a seam of it somewhere.  There wasn't any in my immediate vicinity.

[DarkMaster13]

8 hours ago, Nitroturtle said:

I've noticed with Rime, if you generate a world with the irregular oil trait, not only do you get the random oil biomes spawning around the map, but also the normal oil biome spawns at normal temps, versus very cold.

Sounds like a bug.  Similar to the large glaciers spawning in at the same temperature as the original environment.  They'll likely have to remove certain traits from Aridio and Rime entirely to avoid breaking the core theme of the asteroids.

3 hours ago, Vuelhering said:

How do you separate that out? Is it a guess, or is there a way to turn off all traits to get the baseline asteroid?

Some of the traits have a larger effect than others.  It isn't that hard to reroll until you only have things like boulders, geoactive/geodormant and metal rich/metal poor if you're looking to help test the asteroids themselves.  Other things you can tell from playing for awhile or looking at the variables at play.  Obviously if an asteroid has far less water than usual, you can trivialize this part of the difficulty if it has the subsurface ocean or glacier trait.  An argument can be made for restricting certain traits from spawning on those worlds to maintain the core of their difficulty, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.

2 hours ago, miauly said:

The current rating as you compiled it looks about right. I would hope that difficulty gets adjusted rather than maps reshuffled - it just seems to me that having the two most "extreme maps" as the most difficult is nicer.

I'd especially hope that gold thing is fixed, because playing without it does not feel like a fun restriction. I like ranching, so I like that it seem to get an edge on maps with unusual temperature, but there's a difference between choosing something and being forced to something I guess.

Also played on Oasisse a bit and it seemed to me more difficult than Aridio. Is it even possible to get exos without injuring your digger in the sand repeatedly? I mean I got drecko eggs from the pod when I almost made it to the caustic biome, but that's really meh. On Aridio it seems that the food is giving you a pace whichever way you take to get it, but obligatory injuries are more extreme kind of push, unless I'm missing something obvious of course.

Maybe, I can't really see how Oceania could really be one of the hardest starts, given that it's defining trait is going to make the game easier than normal in most cases.  That said, both it and Volcanea would become far more difficult if they just took something else out of the asteroids rather than rust.  Another fairly easy way to swap around the difficulties would be to switch the starting biome.

If Arboria's missing biome was made rust instead of swamp, the difficulty of that start would be: 2 early, 1 mid, 0 late or a total of 3 instead of 10.  Making it a slightly easier asteroid than Rime.  It's then the same as Terra, but with the forest start instead of sandstone.  Of course, the difficulty is all right at the very beginning and once you get past the lack of water, diverse starting resources, and bristle blossom seeds, you're pretty much back at the same game as one started in Terra.  Perhaps also take away the tide pool biome instead to add more late game difficulty?  It'd be a smoother 2, 2, and 1 then for a total of 5.

If Volcanea's start was changed to forest and it was missing the swamp, ice, *and* tide pool biomes, that would catapult it instantly to the hardest start by a significant margin with difficulty ratings of 2, 5, and 9 for a total of 16.

Actually, let's go the full distance.  Hows this for the starts and their order?  From easiest to hardest, assuming that the gold issue is fixed by adding it to something like the oil biome that is in every start.  This means that missing the swamp is only around a +2 late difficulty.  The first four are intentionally fairly easy, mainly mixing up what the player expects in them.  It's only with The Badlands and Rime that things start getting seriously challenging.  Also, all the forest starts have sandstone biomes in the pool to make the mid game easier, up until you get to Aridio and Volcanea which don't.

• Terra (0/0/0): Sanstone start, no rust biome
• Oceania (0/-1/1): Sanstone start, no rust biome, ocean biome is in the biome pool at double the normal occurrence rate.
• Verdante (0/0/1): Sanstone start, no ice biome, forest biome is in the biome pool.
• Arboria (2/-1/1): Forest start, no tide pool or rust biome, sandstone biome is in the biome pool.
• Rime (2/4/0): Sandstone start, extreme cold, no tide pool biome, the forest biome is not included in the biome pool.
• The Badlands (2/3/4): Forest start, no swamp or tide pool biomes, barren biome is included in the biome pool at tripe the normal occurrence rate, sandstone biome is included in the biome pool.
• Oasisse (2/6/3): Forest start, no ice or rust biomes, a large desert biome spawns around the starting area, two sandstone biomes and two oil biomes spawn on the edge of the desert.
• Aridio (5/4/2): Forest start, no ice biome, extreme heat throughout map, forest biome is in the biome pool.
• Volcanea (2/5/9): Forest start, no swamp, ice, or tide pool biomes, magma channel biome is in the biome pool.

EDIT: Of course they release an update while I'm working on the above post.  However it looks like the only change in difficulty is a new muckroot plant to the forest and that only pips can do wild planting.  I suspect that will reduce the difficulty of the forest early game by 1, but I'd have to test it first.  Thankfully that doesn't change any of the relative difficulties and I won't have to change anything.

[Grimgaw]

55 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

However it looks like the only change in difficulty is a new muckroot plant to the forest and that only pips can do wild planting.

Doubt pips can replant it. Like the description suggests, there are no seeds.

[DarkMaster13]

Looks like the new forest muckroot gives you the same starting food supply as the sandstone stuff.  It's just all concentrated into a handful of 'planted' ones rather than having a large number of smaller buried ones, so actually a little easier to collect than on sandstone.  That seriously eases up the forest start as you now have the same 15-20 cycles of grace time before you need to start growing plants or making mush bars.  I'm rather surprised at this large of a change so late on in the test.  You still have the smaller water supply to worry about and oxygen is a little more complicated to manage, so I'd now rate the forest start as 1/1/0 difficulty rather than 2/1/0.  Rime is clearly the more difficult starting condition.