Diagonal Access (is it a bug?)

[Ecu]

I've recently seen designs pop up on discord and the forums revolving around duplicants and/or sweepers accessing resources diagonally through walls.  Most commonly, this has been for kitchen/great hall builds.  However, I just recently saw a build which utilizes steam turbines to cool the output of a metal volcano, with a sweeper being able to diagonally access the cooled metal.  This allowed the entire setup to be sealed in insulated tiles.

Seeing these builds had me wonder if diagonal access itself should be considered a bug/exploit and fixed?  I think builds like these are very interesting from a design and use of mechanics standpoint.  However, I do slightly wonder if they may make things too trivial?  Figured I'd reach out to the community here and see what others think.

Edit:  Attaching some pictures as examples.  I snagged these off discord and/or other posts, so credit goes to their individual creators.

[SamLogan]

It's not a bug, it works like since a long time. In early stage, it was partially fixed but come back after.

Diagonal have so much uses :

- 1 tile room to store food in CO2 or chlorine.

- Block the thermal conductivity from the bottom of a wall to the top by placing a diagonal tile on it, no heat exchange on diagonal side.

- Make a vaccum by destroying a second layer of a wall diagonaly.

Etc.

[Cairath]

Just now, SamLogan said:

it works like since a long time.

That doesn't mean it's not a bug. People were so certain that sieve temperatures will never get fixed "because it's always worked like that"  and see what happened.

To me it's definitely unintended and silly. Expecting a fix for that one day.

[SamLogan]

1 minute ago, Cairath said:

That doesn't mean it's not a bug. People were so certain that sieve temperatures will never get fixed "because it's always worked like that"  and see what happened.

To me it's definitely unintended and silly. Expecting a fix for that one day.

Yes, you're right.

[blash365]

I think the main use of diagonal access is construction/digging/destruction.

It would make alot of designs (e.g. building vaccuum chambers, keeping environments temporarily sealed) unnecessarily hard if we could only access tiles vertically/horizontally.

And for sake of consistency this is extended on all uses of access.

 

 

[woodenstars]

Perhaps diagonal digging is fine but you shouldn't be able to sweep items from this sealed space. IMHO.

[Ecu]

3 minutes ago, SamLogan said:

It's not a bug, it works like since a long time. In early stage, it was partially fixed but come back after.

Diagonal have so much uses :

- 1 tile room to store food in CO2 or chlorine.

- Block the thermal conductivity from the bottom of a wall to the top by placing a diagonal tile on it, no heat exchange on diagonal side.

- Make a vaccum with destroy a second layer of a wall diagonaly.

Etc.

You've perfectly described what makes me question whether or not it is a bug/exploit.  It makes these things trivial to accomplish.

To argue in favor of diagonal access, many of these things can still be done with minimal additional additional work.  As such, I'm uncertain at this time as to how much of a benefit there is to diagonal access.

You could utilize a one tile liquid lock as shown here (image not my own):

While using water to create this liquid lock could be considered an exploit as well.  Viscogel is actually in the game explicitly to create liquid locks like this.  As such, mechanically speaking, it is an intentional mechanic of the game.  This means the diagonal design isn't all that superior, mechanically speaking.

As for making a vacuum, you can do that with a normal liquid lock.  Diagonal access certainly makes it easier, but only to a point.

For managing temperatures, diagonal access is definitely a bonus.  While sweepers could be in the room, it would require a larger room to do so, and potentially more advanced materials (depending on the temperatures we are talking about).  This is definitely a situation where diagonal access does feel like it might be exploiting things a bit over the alternatives.

[Sasza22]

Diagonal tile building was a small exploit-ish trick to build walls while keeping rooms sealed but i didn`t know sweepers can go 3 tiles deep with diagonal sweeping. That should be probably reported as a bug but i kinda feel fixing it might have unforseen consequences (like the recent ladder qol fix).

[Ecu]

9 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

Diagonal tile building was a small exploit-ish trick to build walls while keeping rooms sealed but i didn`t know sweepers can go 3 tiles deep with diagonal sweeping. That should be probably reported as a bug but i kinda feel fixing it might have unforseen consequences (like the recent ladder qol fix).

I wouldn't really say that sweepers being able to go diagonally is any more/less a bug/exploit when compared to duplicants being able to.  The only difference here is that sweepers have a longer sweep range, when compared to duplicants and as such the situation is noticed more.  I would argue that the mechanic should be changed altogether or not at all.

[nakomaru]

Diagonal access seems to me to be an intentional design of using a tiled world and not wanting to make the gameplay unreasonably frustrating.

[Ecu]

2 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Diagonal access seems to me to be an intentional design of using a tiled world and not wanting to make the gameplay unreasonably frustrating.

I definitely can see this as an argument in favor of it.  Personally, I am a bit torn.  What you can do with it does feel slightly like a bug/exploit.  However, I do personally find some of the builds utilizing the mechanic to be interesting and that many can be done via other mechanisms with minimal changes.

Definitely an issue where I personally feel on the fence.

[Nightinggale]

Don't touch this!!!

Fixing this will be so annoying when constructing rooms because there is a high risk of leaving a tile in a corner and then you can't build the corner. This will be really annoying and then there has to be a fix to fix that case. Then somebody else finds another case, which becomes annoying and then that has to be fixed too.

Before long we have a few weeks of cascading bugs from this one fix and that's way past release day. Like it or not, at this point we are stuck with this "feature/bug" in Launch.

I'm not convinced I would call it a bug. It's more in line with layouts used by advanced players. Fixing it will require dupes and transfer arms to look at even more cells to figure out what they can do and it's not like it's lightning fast to begin with.

[Ecu]

7 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

Don't touch this!!!

Fixing this will be so annoying when constructing rooms because there is a high risk of leaving a tile in a corner and then you can't build the corner. This will be really annoying and then there has to be a fix to fix that case. Then somebody else finds another case, which becomes annoying and then that has to be fixed too.

Before long we have a few weeks of cascading bugs from this one fix and that's way past release day. Like it or not, at this point we are stuck with this "feature/bug" in Launch.

I'm not convinced I would call it a bug. It's more in line with layouts used by advanced players. Fixing it will require dupes and transfer arms to look at even more cells to figure out what they can do and it's not like it's lightning fast to begin with.

I hadn't thought of the corner walls of rooms.  That is definitely a case for not changing the mechanic.  As I already mentioned, many of the cases where this can be abused, could otherwise be done easily via alternative methods.  So maybe it should just be considered a feature (or is already, by the developers)?

[avc15]

I don't care about corner building, I just don't use it and so it doesn't affect me one bit.

This isn't a stance you could ever take with the sieve or other heat deletion machines.

[mathmanican]

1 hour ago, Nightinggale said:

Fixing this will be so annoying when constructing rooms because there is a high risk of leaving a tile in a corner

My thoughts exactly.  Well put.

1 hour ago, Nightinggale said:

This will be really annoying and then there has to be a fix to fix that case. Then somebody else finds another case, which becomes annoying and then that has to be fixed too.

Before long we have a few weeks of cascading bugs from this one fix and that's way past release day. Like it or not, at this point we are stuck with this "feature/bug" in Launch.

This is my worry with the fixes to matter conversion and liquid duplication. A couple people have noted strange behavior, but it hasn't exploded yet. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it won't.  

[Lilalaunekuh]

2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Diagonal tile building was a small exploit-ish trick to build walls while keeping rooms sealed but i didn`t know sweepers can go 3 tiles deep with diagonal sweeping.

Same fore me

But I would argue to leave auto sweepers the way they are:

It feels a bit cheese, but it allows for some really awesome engineering.

(More possibilities in a sandbox game are always welcomed, at least in my eyes^^)

[Glassyfo]

2 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Diagonal access seems to me to be an intentional design of using a tiled world and not wanting to make the gameplay unreasonably frustrating.

I'm okay with one tile diagonal access, but the two and three tiles shown by the sweeper image is a bit much.

[ONIfreak]

Conatructing diagonal is cool as it is very helpful. But sweeping should be removed.

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, bleeter6 said:

I'm okay with one tile diagonal access, but the two and three tiles shown by the sweeper image is a bit much.

Agreed. Leave diagonal access/build/dig in the game, but (if possible) limit an autosweeper's range to only the same 1 block a Dupe can get to. 

[Rebrait]

i think the real bug is leave food on the floor... disgusting

[Ellilea]

All it would take to de-cheezify it without making building a hassle is allowing gasses and liquids to pass through diagonal spaces.

[ONIfreak]

6 hours ago, Ecu said:

I hadn't thought of the corner walls of rooms.  That is definitely a case for not changing the mechanic.  As I already mentioned, many of the cases where this can be abused, could otherwise be done easily via alternative methods.  So maybe it should just be considered a feature (or is already, by the developers)?

This actually would be really easy to fix. The only thing to change here is range for builder - instead of square 4 tiles every direction change it to circle ( or octagon) so dupes will not reach corners of rooms without ladder, ergo will not be able to build those corner tiles. 

It might be wierd at the beginning to switch from square rooms to circle rooms though.  

[Gurgel]

Not a bug. It would have been fixed long ago if it where. Please stop disputing established base game mechanics.

[Nebbie]

59 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

Not a bug. It would have been fixed long ago if it where. Please stop disputing established base game mechanics.

All game mechanics are up for dispute, nothing is sacred.

This one, however, is definitely necessary to have. What actually needs fixing is being able to drop food in a little drawer to completely negate the point of the fridge. In real life, we can't just store food in rooms full of carbon dioxide, because then Clostridium botulinum will come along and start producing the most toxic known substance to humans in nature (lethal at 0.00000008g); I think chlorine actually works against it, but normally for food it's just best to either freeze, preserve in acid, boil at high pressure and seal, or allow some oxygen in while refrigerating.

[Ellilea]

10 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

All game mechanics are up for dispute, nothing is sacred.

This one, however, is definitely necessary to have. What actually needs fixing is being able to drop food in a little drawer to completely negate the point of the fridge. In real life, we can't just store food in rooms full of carbon dioxide, because then Clostridium botulinum will come along and start producing the most toxic known substance to humans in nature (lethal at 0.00000008g); I think chlorine actually works against it, but normally for food it's just best to either freeze, preserve in acid, boil at high pressure and seal, or allow some oxygen in while refrigerating.

Out of the two, I think storing food in a CO2/Chlorine pit is less ridiculous than storing it in 1 square of void between walls from where duplicants can take it out and conveyor chute can throw it in never disrupting the void lol.