Pipes & Plumbing is Confusing

[SpydrXIII]

I picked up a lot of the game by trial and error pretty fast, read the tutorial pop-ups when they came up.  I'm getting this game overall.

But pipes and plumbing make me pause and sit and stare at my screen for a long time, and every time I think I got it and un-pause, I got it wrong and urine goes everywhere.
I play a lot of management games, I've done my fair share of virtual plumbing.  But this one is always hard to figure out.

The main issue I have is input and output.  I think adding arrows or something would help.  Like when I play Cities: Skylines, I can make subway routes, and bus routes very easily.  We need something that 100% fool proof shows what and where fluid will go.  As it stands now I waste so much time through trial and error with pipes and always end up flooded with urine.

Another thing, we need more information on certain things like the Carbon Skimmer (and the Fertilizer Synthesizer).  I had to have a pipe go off onto the floor before I hooked it up to test what comes out of the machine as a byproduct.  It says it uses water to remove carbon dioxide, doesn't tell me what comes out the end though.  At 1st I though I should add a gas vent to let out the purified air.  Of course that didn't work, so then I used a normal liquid output vent.  But I thought maybe it will expel freshwater, so I tested it, and found out it expels polluted water.  So I had to go through all that, then the urine clean up, then the re-piping.  After lots of pipe trials I think I got the pipes right, but I ended up having to just turn it off cause currently I can't get it to work.

This isn't a post for someone to tell me how it all works, that's not the point.  The point is we shouldn't need to leave the game to figure anything out.

Love the game, keep up the good work.

[Gwido]

4 hours ago, SpydrXIII said:

we need more information on certain things like the Carbon Skimmer (and the Fertilizer Synthesizer).

You can have all these infos before building the carbon skimmer :

It clearly says that the building have a liquid input and output, but no gas input/output.

It also says that the carbon skimmer produce polluted water

And also says that it does not produce any breathable air.

 

For your pipe issue, maybe you should just make shorter pipes, with liquid bridge to force/remember the flow of liquids.

But you're right on one thing : when we have long pipes, it's sometimes hard to remember what flows inside, and where it goes.

[Nebbie]

I'd really just like some indication of where liquid wants to go. I recently am having problems in my new base with the old bathroom loop trick no longer working (bridge to lavatory etc. inputs, but input on bridge is piped past so that only once the bridge is an invalid destination from backup does the excess water go elsewhere to prevent the water sieve being backed up) as it seems that the liquid won't go past the bridge input when it's no longer valid, and it wouldn't really give me any indication as to why. Of course, I'd also like, you know, an actual way to set priorities on things so that I don't need to use the bathroom loop trick to begin with.

In general, piping is missing the last 10% to becoming a wonderful thing, and I always find myself wanting to tear my hair out as I build a big gas-processing pipeline that gets the chlorine out of my base and gets the combustibles to their generators, and then the whole mess just gets backed up with something.

[ONIfreak]

This would be really easy to solve. Just force system to add light grey arrow on every pipe when system calculate direction - this would also resolve issues with liquid/gas moving back and forth.

[cpy]

Yeah mistakes like that happens. I don't mix liquids or anything like that, i'm pretty experienced to not mess up that much often. But I still get few wrong orientation bridges because I forget which direction my cooling loop is going, especially when I build contact heat exchangers.

[vanHoof]

IMO the icons regarding plumbing are not great in conveying what is an input and what is an output. It's also pretty counterintuitive that the inputs for lavatories and sinks are at the bottom and the outputs at the top.

I find it also a bit cumbersome to insert bridges manually. I'd much prefer if the pipe tool would insert bridges automatically.

So, as a suggestion: when we laydown pipes and cross another pipe in one move, the default should be that the tool automatically inserts a bridge over that crossed pipe. If we want to connect to the crossing pipe we can simply end the move on that tile. The flow direction for the bridge could then be determined by the direction we crossed the pipe, and the UI could additionally have a button to reverse the flow direction for the bridge.

I think that would make it much more convenient and less fiddly to handle pipes.

 

[ONIfreak]

20 minutes ago, vanHoof said:

IMO the icons regarding plumbing are not great in conveying what is an input and what is an output. It's also pretty counterintuitive that the inputs for lavatories and sinks are at the bottom and the outputs at the top.

I find it also a bit cumbersome to insert bridges manually. I'd much prefer if the pipe tool would insert bridges automatically.

So, as a suggestion: when we laydown pipes and cross another pipe in one move, the default should be that the tool automatically inserts a bridge over that crossed pipe. If we want to connect to the crossing pipe we can simply end the move on that tile. The flow direction for the bridge could then be determined by the direction we crossed the pipe, and the UI could additionally have a button to reverse the flow direction for the bridge.

I think that would make it much more convenient and less fiddly to handle pipes.

 

Although idea with automatic bridges sounds good it will remove freedom in constructing primary and secondary flow and may have impact on advance setups and cleaning pipes ( pushing liquid using bridge at the end for example or making "infinite" circut where you have one bridge and one empty pipe)

[vanHoof]

8 hours ago, ONIfreak said:

Although idea with automatic bridges sounds good it will remove freedom in constructing primary and secondary flow and may have impact on advance setups and cleaning pipes ( pushing liquid using bridge at the end for example or making "infinite" circut where you have one bridge and one empty pipe)

Hm, maybe I miss something, but I think the current options wouldn't have to change. I mean, the build options could still list bridges, and the user could still place them manually if he needs to.

The automatic inserting of bridges would be just a change for the logic when we lay down longer pipes. Unless I miss something I don't see how that could be a problem with existing setups.

That said, I'm sure there are edge cases where it's not possible to insert a bridge automatically, so that the logic would just have to fallback to what it does now. But in all cases where we cross another pipe and have the space to build a bridge, it could just do so, and I think it would be really beneficial, because it saves the user ten clicks and manual rotating and would be much simpler.