A question for the old timers (Feb-Mar 2017?)

[6Havok9]

I have this memory dating to about February/March 2017, IIRC.

I was making a big battery bank trying to boil polluted water to get dirt out of it. Those were the mealwood days, when dirt and sand were precious.

Temperatures were pretty high and my dupes were "happily" tweaking everything, messing with battery layouts, removing and adding floor tiles, getting "missing foundation" warnings.. I don't know if those missing foundations played a role in what happened shortly thereafter... Because..

KABLAM. BOOM. A battery exploded, indeed. 2 dupes dead, instantly. I'm pretty sure it was a battery, because well.... there were only batteries around them. And one went boom. And then they were ded. Very ded.

Now, I'm almost confident that I'm not going crazy, at least not completely insane. But since I can't be sure, I would like to ask those who were playing at that time..

Have you ever witnessed an explosion, and did you have any dupe killed by one?

Regards 

 

[chasinji]

Hello Sir, you successfully make us envy to have such a golden memory. this makes me(ep) not to feel. good.

is he already there too? 

[Junksteel]

Well, if true I'd love to play that version.

I saw somewhere a while ago that hatches used to devour entire dupes alive. I tried to get that version no matter what but couldn't find a way to play it.

Those brutal events were so Don't Starvish... I think they deviated a lot from that design perspective since. The only (very diminished) hope to see that type of stuff make their way to the game again is through themed DLC's.

[Gunhaver]

30 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

I saw somewhere a while ago that hatches used to devour entire dupes alive. I tried to get that version no matter what but couldn't find a way to play it.

Me too!

[Ellilea]

My first reaction when I saw a hatch was to instantly kill it cause I was afraid it was a monster. But I started to play after their, apparent, dupe-eating days so all it did in the end was make me feel bad for hurting such a docile little creature.

I'd LOVE to see a hazardous version of ONI. Dangerous gasses, homicidal hatches, deadly diseases, zombifying plants, radiation.

Maybe one day...

[Gus Smedstad]

I've never seen exploding anything.

Things can melt, if the temperature's high enough. High temperatures can result in scalded dupes, and a bad scalding can kill a Dupe fairly rapidly, but never instantly.

I don't want to see exploding stuff. I've played enough industrial Minecraft mods to really hate everything about that. It doesn't lead to tricky decisions, it just forces extra steps to minimize the damage from the inevitable butterfingers moment. The net result isn't additional fun, it's at best tedium and at worst incredible frustration.

Oxygen Not Included has plenty of failure modes as it is. Including ones that lead to Dupe death, like digging in the wrong order, stranding themselves and suffocation. Not to mention systematic ones like starvation or oxygen shortages.

[Lifegrow]

2 hours ago, 6Havok9 said:

 

Now, I'm almost confident that I'm not going crazy, at least not completely insane.

 

I told you, it was a lucid dream for sure

[Harlequin80]

I would love a threat model in the game.

Handling survival has become relatively trivial and now it's about making life more comfortable for the dupes rather than any kind of fear.

Creatures going truly hostile, a stress option where destructive becomes postal or crier become suicidal after a long enough period.  Invasions from other dupes on other asteroids where they do things like poison your air supply with zombie spores.

[avc15]

maybe you were playing rimworld

[Gus Smedstad]

I don't think stress death spirals will solve your problem of feeling the game is too easy. I think most experienced players never see any Dupe stress at all.

I think it's easy to forget how hard the game was when you first started playing and were inexperienced. While it's true that I, personally, managed to "win" (get to hydrogen rockets, make a stable colony) on my first try, it's far more common to have a colony collapse and start over several times. Even though I avoided that, I almost had mass starvation because I ran out of dirt while still eating mealwood. Only emergency exploration to find wild sleet wheat kept the colony alive long enough for my first berry crop to come in.

I do miss the old disease model. Not because of how lethal slimelung was, I'm fine with toning that down. No, I miss the fact that med bays had actual value for disease. It meant another thing you needed to build, another skill tree that mattered, and concerns about med bay capacity if disease became a real problem. Mostly what I want to see is Dupes spending time in the med bay, not just either taking a pill or ignoring the sickness.

I think the old model made the game not just harder, but harder in an interesting way. A way that prompted decisions.

[bzgzd]

6 hours ago, 6Havok9 said:

Have you ever witnessed an explosion, and did you have any dupe killed by one?

I played before cold biomes and thermal update and don't remember any battery explosions.

6 hours ago, Junksteel said:

Well, if true I'd love to play that version.

I saw somewhere a while ago that hatches used to devour entire dupes alive. I tried to get that version no matter what but couldn't find a way to play it.

That was unintended bug when hatches eat everything and so Dupe was just random 30kg food.

 

[Nebbie]

2 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I don't think stress death spirals will solve your problem of feeling the game is too easy. I think most experienced players never see any Dupe stress at all.

I think it's easy to forget how hard the game was when you first started playing and were inexperienced. While it's true that I, personally, managed to "win" (get to hydrogen rockets, make a stable colony) on my first try, it's far more common to have a colony collapse and start over several times. Even though I avoided that, I almost had mass starvation because I ran out of dirt while still eating mealwood. Only emergency exploration to find wild sleet wheat kept the colony alive long enough for my first berry crop to come in.

I do miss the old disease model. Not because of how lethal slimelung was, I'm fine with toning that down. No, I miss the fact that med bays had actual value for disease. It meant another thing you needed to build, another skill tree that mattered, and concerns about med bay capacity if disease became a real problem. Mostly what I want to see is Dupes spending time in the med bay, not just either taking a pill or ignoring the sickness.

I think the old model made the game not just harder, but harder in an interesting way. A way that prompted decisions.

I think the reason it's still kept toned down is that the way dupes catch sickness is still utterly uncontrollable. For slimelung in particular, the ore scrubber is a complete joke.

1 hour ago, bzgzd said:

I played before cold biomes and thermal update and don't remember any battery explosions.

That was unintended bug when hatches eat everything and so Dupe was just random 30kg food.

 

Should have occasional "mama hatch" variant, simply views all non-hatch objects as food, including these lovely toasty warm 30kg treats walking around. Would certainly be less dumb than puft princes.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I think that was around the time that thermal calculations were first added to the game.  They had some problems.. such as buildings producing heat faster than they could off-load it into the environment.  This resulted in some strange behaviors -- such as a battery or a coal generator melting down. The building would start to break and a dupe would run new materials to it and start to repair.. and the temperature would continue to climb.  Eventually the temperature would be high enough that the dupe would start taking damage while trying to make the repairs.  Eventually the dupe would take enough damage to die.. at which point the repairs would stop.  

Further, even when the building took enough damage to stop operating, it would continue to gain heat as if it were still operational.  At some point the building would simply fall apart into debris that were way too hot for any dupes to work with.  I never had anything actually melt, but I'm sure there are some archived posts on this board talking about the problems with the thermal expansion when it first went live.

 

Sorry, no explosions.

[lunazone]

I believe this was a thing, there is an unused duplicant explosion death type

 

[DonDegow]

Check out the versions before the first food update, we all used to boil Pwater with batteries at that time, I might even have posted a screenshot on this forum with a µg of CO2 going into the millions of °C if I recall correctly.

There were words of battery explosions but I never experienced one myself.

Edit : I found the posts, we didn't mention explosions in this one but I'm pretty sure it's during that time.

For the million of °C, I didn't post the screenshot but it was this setup (juste imagine these 20µg being only one µg, 20*69k = 1.38m)

 

[bzgzd]

1 hour ago, DonDegow said:

Check out the versions before the first food update, we all used to boil Pwater with batteries at that time, I might even have posted a screenshot on this forum with a µg of CO2 going into the millions of °C if I recall correctly.

There where some serious issues in ONI those days

I made this video on first Thermal upgrade version:

 

[Saturnus]

14 hours ago, 6Havok9 said:

Have you ever witnessed an explosion, and did you have any dupe killed by one?

It wasn't in the first alpha version that batteries could explode. It was a month or two after that. I had several explode as I was trying in debug mode to narrow down what caused it but gave up. Thankfully Klei fixed. No dupe death was caused by exploding batteries. I did plenty of that myself as it was the time when the best strategy was to kill dupe on purpose and letting their corpses rot so they'd spawn morbs for free oxygen. Since back then there wasn't any germ mechanics at all then polluted oxygen was all for intent and purposes precisely the same as regular oxygen.

Here's an example from early March 2017 of what a very successful base design looked back. Back then it was near impossible to survive 200 cycles but I had a magma dirt cooker to feed my mealwoods. Note that a magma dirt cooker required some patience and several sacrificed dupes to build as exosuits didn't exist. Heat death was the major concern for long running bases as there was no way to cool anything into an acceptable range for plant to continue to grow. And abyssalite wasn't a building material either yet.

Note: no bathrooms. Pee and vomit was the only sustainable water source.

[Gus Smedstad]

7 hours ago, Nebbie said:

I think the reason it's still kept toned down is that the way dupes catch sickness is still utterly uncontrollable. For slimelung in particular, the ore scrubber is a complete joke.

Disease is definitely controllable, if you’re paranoid enough. You just eliminate all possible exposure. I ran a base through a couple of hundred cycles with the new rules without anyone getting sick.

I’ve never built an ore scrubber. For slime, that meant Dupes had to be in enviro suits any time they mined slime, and the slime got stored in chlorine under enough pressure to prevent offgassing. Underwater bins prevent offgassing too, but they don’t sterilize the slime.

That said, not everyone is going to be careful, so the severity of disease has to reflect that. This is particularly true of new players who don’t even know slimelung exists. However, I don’t think “being bedridden” is too severe a penalty for that case, as long as it doesn’t lead to death.

[6Havok9]

4 hours ago, Saturnus said:

I had several explode as I was trying in debug mode to narrow down what caused it but gave up.

Oh, thanks. Faith in my sanity is restored. 

[Risu]

There was an explosion however I don't think it was ever used by batteries since it was never given a texture.

Naturally when I was playing with it I had to go overboard.

 

[Nitroturtle]

13 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I do miss the old disease model. Not because of how lethal slimelung was, I'm fine with toning that down. No, I miss the fact that med bays had actual value for disease. It meant another thing you needed to build, another skill tree that mattered, and concerns about med bay capacity if disease became a real problem. Mostly what I want to see is Dupes spending time in the med bay, not just either taking a pill or ignoring the sickness.

I've been playing for a year and a half and have only needed a med bay a handful of times.  I typically don't even bother with any of it (even before the disease changes) as for the most part it's easy to keep dupes from getting sick.

[Nebbie]

4 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Disease is definitely controllable, if you’re paranoid enough. You just eliminate all possible exposure. I ran a base through a couple of hundred cycles with the new rules without anyone getting sick.

I’ve never built an ore scrubber. For slime, that meant Dupes had to be in enviro suits any time they mined slime, and the slime got stored in chlorine under enough pressure to prevent offgassing. Underwater bins prevent offgassing too, but they don’t sterilize the slime.

That said, not everyone is going to be careful, so the severity of disease has to reflect that. This is particularly true of new players who don’t even know slimelung exists. However, I don’t think “being bedridden” is too severe a penalty for that case, as long as it doesn’t lead to death.

Completely destroying germs with a crazy setup or just tolerating them isn't a good set of control options. The entire idea of the ore scrubber is to provide an intermediary step for slimelung, but it just doesn't work in practice.

[Gus Smedstad]

You don't need a "crazy setup" to completely destroy slimelung. A 3kg+ pressure chlorine room or a pool of water is hardly "crazy." Both are fairly trivial. The main difference being that high pressure's somewhat problematic until you get plastic for high-pressure vents.

In any case, you can do any slime-related tasks outside your habitable zone until you have a sterilization chamber. There's no rule saying you have to store slime in the same areas where Dupes are sleeping.

Food poisoning is a non-issue if you provide sinks and either don't use waste water for food or you sterilize it first. I actually like that food poisoning is much easier to get now; prior to the changes, you could be ignore sterilizing waste water, a few sinks were enough.

I will agree that I'm not fond of the fact that you can now just tolerate diseases. It makes them far less interesting. Which is why I miss bed rest.

 

 

[0xFADE]

I remember when there wasn’t really any power sources past hydrogen gens and coal. Pretty much had to hamster wheel everything.  Not near as good.  

The best time was when fert makers only needed polluted water and put out a lot of natural gas. Good times.  Sage hatches were the thing since you’d have a lot of excess fertilizer to feed them. 

[Gurgel]

Exploding batteries? Seems I really missed something!