Oceania, too easy?

[Xadhoom]

whats everyones take on Oceania? i find it rather easy, not the "slim" ingame chances would rate it.

you have access to slime, ice and jungle(?) biomes, with the easy standard starting biome (dont recall name)

you have TONS of salt water available at a nice and relatively cool 30 degrees, only needs a bit of work and extra energy to get clean water usable for most plants or other stuff.

with how the basins are formed, you usually can easy keep them to farm a lot of lettuce too by letting a skim of water sit on top as you drain the basins.

 

i think if Oceania would be a challenge, the salt water biomes (name?) should be some 50 degrees, so if you want to use it for something, you need to cool the water.

[CannedSmeef]

A lot of the biomes are not as hard as they let on.  Rime, for instance, is only hard initally, but it quickly become easy because the entire map is a free heatsink

[Gunhaver]

I'm sure they'll re-rate the difficulty levels by launch. I'm finding that difficulty has more to do with the astroids traits. But yeah Oceania is pretty low stress.

[isendel11]

I feel that different asteroids pose challenges in different parts of the game, which is hardly reflected by the generic score in the starting selection. For example, Rime can be very tough for an inexperienced player early game due to liquids freezing in the pipes and the temperatures too harsh for crops. Once you get past the early game though, pretty much everything is trivialized by the cold. Volcanea is kinda the opposite (with some caveats depending on the seed), it has an early game that is not very different from Terra, temperatures are pretty chill in the starting biome, abundance of resources and so on. As soon as you get to early game though you start facing very high temperatures and you have to deal with pockets of magma non perfectly insulated, which often requires you to cook your dupes alive to seal them before it's too late. Other mid-game difficulty is that oil biomes are mostly inaccessible, so you have to either make your way through tonnes of barely solid magma, or figure something else out.

Arboria has yet another early to mid game challenge which is the lack of swamp, not being able to use gold amalgam really forces you to rethink many builds (I'm thinking for example of all my builds that involve water near boiling point).

For an experienced player (I'm roughly 200 hours in the game, started QoL1, I still learn a lot on a daily basis especially from the really smart people around here, but I would still consider myself fairly experienced) none of the new asteroids pose a challenge in the sense that you risk losing your colony, but many of them provide interesting variations to gameplay that make it refreshing to play around. Before that, every new colony was pretty much the same grind for the first 50 cycles where you build your usual early game, now every start is different thanks to the new asteroids

[DemainaNyx]

The only issue that Oceania has caused me is that I has abyssalite separating my oxygen room from my salt water pit and when the salt water became too much it broke the 1 tile abyssalite chunk separating the two.

 

That's been it though and that issue could occur on any map seed with tons of water so it isn't Oceania specific.

 

I feel like the ratings are more a thing of "how different is this from what you are used to".  Having a hot or cold planet changes how you use the surroundings.  You cant just run to a cold biome for free cooling in Volcania because it is all melted.  Meanwhile you might need to heat your home on Rime vs cooling it like normal. 

On Oceania, I had almost no slime, cold, or caustic biomes, which is drastically different from every other map where those are plentiful and of those biomes that I did have, they were tiny so less free materials and almost no raw metals.  I'm almost drowning in salt water, granite, salt, sedimentary rock, and sand though so I can't just build everything out of igneous rock like I'm used to.

 

There isn't a "OMG I'm gonna die" moment 10 cycles in, but it isn't the same old thing though.

[wronny]

Only for Oceania I can't see, why it would have the position and survival chance it currently has.

The rest is somewhat sensible from a certain perspective:

Terra as "default" asteroid listed first. Then 3 asteroids that don't do anything special besides missing certain biomes and thus requiring some adjustments during the mid / late game: Verdante without Ice, Arboria without the Swamp and finally "The Badlands" - without Tide Pools and Swamps.

Followed by 4 asteroids that either have blistring cold or some form of heat as additional twist, with rime as the easiest of the bunch listed first. These are not the type of maps you'd want less experienced players jump in head first.

---

Makes me wonder whether Klei had (or has) something special planned for Oceania. Currently it is just a minor variation of terra (same biome types), that is havily biased towards tide pool / ocean biomes.

[Xadhoom]

well, having your base near drowning i guess is the biggest risk on this world. lucky i did spot it on time.

 

and i guess an inexperienced player might accidentally flood their base ruining it completely.

[Ellilea]

I really like this topic on the topic:

 

[Xadhoom]

7 minutes ago, Ellilea said:

I really like this topic on the topic:

 

i had missed that one, i think its fairly spot on, on the difficulty of each world.

is there any list of what exactly each type of add on does? frozen core, misplaced pod etc? and what happens if you have 2 conflicting add ons, such as mineral rich and mineral poor.

[PhailRaptor]

4 minutes ago, Xadhoom said:

is there any list of what exactly each type of add on does? frozen core, misplaced pod etc? and what happens if you have 2 conflicting add ons, such as mineral rich and mineral poor.

The positive traits are a little stronger than the negative ones that match.  So for Geoactive and Geodormant, or example, you only net an actual increase of 1 Geyser/Vent.  Geoactive adds 4, while Geodormant subtracts 3.  Same idea for Metal Rich and Metal Poor.  Metal Rich increases mass of natural metal tiles by x2, and the size of veins generated by x1.5, while Metal Poor reduces both of those values by x0.8.

All the others are very self explanatory.  Frozen Core is probably the most different, in that the Magma Core biome will be replaced by a Deep Freeze biome instead, which is pretty much just an Ice Biome but so cold that all the gases will solidify and none of the plants normally found there can grow.  Also no AETNs or other PoIs that would normally spawn in an Ice Biome.

[wronny]

What's not immediately apparent with Frozen Core: Unlike the magma biome, a frozen core is a valid area for buried geysers. I have had maps with up to 5 geysers down there (e.g. arboria w/ seed 451).