Natural reserve morale bonus duration

[thiagoh]

Does anyone know the duration of the nature reserve bonus?

In my game, the bonus is approximately 0.5 cycle. Is this a bug or is it correct?

I didn't find any information about it. Can anyone help me?

[axxionx12]

Yes, it's estimated 1/3 to 1/2 cycle duration 

[Gus Smedstad]

I've noticed it last less than a fully cycle, but haven't had the patience to track exactly when it expires.

I'm finding it a bit problematic, since I've got one nature preserve, and it's in front of my mess hall. I'm not really sure how to regularly route Dupes through a preserve during their work day. In front of the bathrooms or bedrooms doesn't help much, since that's within a few time slots of using the Great Hall.

[SamuraiJones]

Most of us have ladders going up and down from our main base to the places the dupes work. Make the ladder's conduit a park. It can stretch all the way down through your base, so even cooks and farmers can hit it as they're running around.

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm not sure how you make that work. The nature preserve has to be a room of no more than 120 tiles. My central ladder / firepole is 200+ tiles long. I guess you could put airlocks in to break that up, though it'd sure slow down the firepole movement a lot.

As time goes by, I also end up building secondary ladders. I've got one secondary ladder / firepole that's about 80 tiles, and I'm building another one on the other side of my base pretty soon.

[MorsDux]

Not sure it is worth it but you can set a bathing break 12 hours after downtime and have a reserve before the showers. 

[OxCD]

25 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I'm not sure how you make that work. The nature preserve has to be a room of no more than 120 tiles. My central ladder / firepole is 200+ tiles long. I guess you could put airlocks in to break that up, though it'd sure slow down the firepole movement a lot.

As time goes by, I also end up building secondary ladders. I've got one secondary ladder / firepole that's about 80 tiles, and I'm building another one on the other side of my base pretty soon.

Yup I agree. Main ladders and firepoles are free for me, but access to atmosuit docking station are nature reserve. It's a bit annoying to build as it's highly better to plan natural tiles before to dig (harder to make natural tiles when it's vertical hallway), but seeing dups slowing down because of horizontal doors is the worst, especially when, like me, you attach big importance to travel time.

[Gus Smedstad]

"At the spacesuit dock" isn't something that works well with my playstyle either. I don't force Dupes into spacesuits unless there's good reason. At the surface, at the oil biome, in front of a hazardous area, but no general "everyone get into suits before you do anything" area.

So far, my only idea is to try and identify some horizontal stretch of corridor that Dupes tend to travel through and make one there. My current base has a lot of corridors that dead end because of water tanks, steam chambers, geysers, CO2 filled mushroom farms, and the like. So I think I may have unintentionally created some bottlenecks for horizontal movement.

[WanderingKid]

So far this has been the best setup I've had, though I'm still tweaking slightly for 32 dupes.  I get a large amount of uptime between dining in the great hall and morning showers.

Not having to care about serious morale, I've not really invested much beyond this.

[Gus Smedstad]

That's some food for thought. I wouldn't go with that precise layout for a variety of reasons, but a shared park in front of the entrances to the great hall and the showers might help my current duration some. My current great hall is a big honking horizontal room, going more vertical might help with travel times a bit.

[WanderingKid]

18 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

That's some food for thought. I wouldn't go with that precise layout for a variety of reasons, but a shared park in front of the entrances to the great hall and the showers might help my current duration some. My current great hall is a big honking horizontal room, going more vertical might help with travel times a bit.

The best part is you can leave, say, a handful of wild pincha for cooking in an awkward place, slap a sign down on it, and then feeder branch it into a common walkway with a few open doors.

It's not hard to keep up a +6 uptime if you have a little time and are willing to adjust your walkways for it.  Even easier with a couple of wild pips.  I don't because I do a lot of verticality and fire poles though, and that breaks up the flow.

[Gus Smedstad]

4 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

It's not hard to keep up a +6 uptime if you have a little time and are willing to adjust your walkways for it. 

I cut a hole in the floor of my shower room and it became part of the nature reserve. Guaranteeing that Dupes get the boost both at dinner time and in the shower seems to keep the bonus up continuously.

But, for the sake of argument, let's say I wanted to take a different approach. "Adjust the walkways" is a phrase that hides some important details. What are you thinking of, specifically? Because it seem like the majority of the movement my Dupes do is up and down the primary ladder / firepole shaft / transit tube shaft. There's no guarantee they're going to move horizontally at all if they're off to the oil biome, farming, cooking, or just off to some construction project that's off the central shaft.

[WanderingKid]

Stagger your drops.  Drop down from the main base, hook a brief horizontal with a 'tail' from a preserve in it, and then drop the rest of the way.

[Gurgel]

I have put a park at the entry to the toilets and one at the exo-suit checkpoint (and single exit) of my base. That seems to keep the buff up almost permanently.

[chemie]

I went for a reserve at exosuit (which is usually enough since they come and go each cycle.  But I throw in a reserve on the showers and a park for the food pickup just for good measure.

 

but it is overkill.  My dupes are running around with over 60 morale and demand in the 30's.  

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm still struggling with morale, which is why I care about the topic. I'm assuming that improving my food quality's going to help that, since I'm just now transitioning from fried mushrooms to mushroom wraps. Once I got a salt water geyser I set up a lettuce farm, and the first crop just came in.

However, it's not really critical. The Dupes that are suffering from poor morale when they don't visit the park have multiple skill trees filled out. If they have to save skill points for a while it's not going to affect much.

[WanderingKid]

@Gus Smedstad Have you done a décor bomb yet?  That's a relatively cheap way to seriously boost morale as well.

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm pretty ambivalent about the value of decor, given that the only places where Dupes stay for a substantial amount of time are the upkeep rooms (food, hygiene, sleep, recreation). The showers and toilets are already as well decorated as they're going to get - I just haven't made a concerted effort to upgrade the Great Hall or the bedrooms.

In any case, once my Dupes started eating Mushroom Wraps, the 11 point increase in morale solved my morale problems. Stuffed berries will do the same thing of course, and I could have gone that route, it was just simpler to upgrade my existing mushroom food chain.

It seems morale balance is pretty similar to where it was pre-QOL III. Once you have high quality food, most of your morale concerns go away.

For +12 morale foods, lettuce is actually a bit easier than berries, if you have a salt water geyser. It's much more tolerant of heat than bristle berries, which means you don't have to cool the water quite so much, and you don't need as many plants. The restriction of course is that you need a salt water geyser rather than any old renewable source of water, since you can't make salt water from salt and water.

Lettuce is also a component of Frost Burgers, of course. I'm just not sure I'm going to go through the effort of farming sleet wheat again. Maybe if I start hitting morale limits again.

[Ingi]

I do my main base with 22 tiles between ladders that way I can have a 16 room 1 dore 1 dirt tile and 1 empty tile next to the ladder.

You only 4 natural tiles so you don't need natural tiles to fit perfectly.
Then you can have a horisontal dore and an airtile to close the room.
Just leave the horizontal door open and you won't lose much time.
Pip needed of course
I always do this from the start as creating natural tiles lategame is a hassle.