First thoughts on the starting asteroid

[Idles]

First thought: this feels more like a total overhaul than an expansion. So many tiles and critters I haven't seen before, and the early game plays very differently!

I really liked the huge amount of collapsing and off-gassing tiles in the swamp biome. If the game design goal is to teach players about gas/fluid mechanics, careful planning and tile placement, it's a big success. Initially I felt like there was too much polluted water, but Bog Buckets can go through it pretty quickly, and with the limited raw materials on the starting asteroid, it's very helpful to have a healthy amount of cushion. Bog Buckets seem like the path of least resistance for early game food production after the Chard runs low; they have a reasonable recipe available in the Grill, and you don't need to ranch critters to get their productivity levels to a respectable level. So somewhat approachable for new players.

The primary food source being Bog Buckets feels like it transitions naturally into tackling the Cool Slush Geyser. You'll want access to the polluted water for long term food sustainability. But the geyser presents its own challenge; from what I can tell it always spawns in a frozen biome, and heating its output so it's usable for farming will be a necessity. Plug Slug electricity and the Liquid Tepidizer seem like a very strong synergy here, and not immediately obvious.

The Plug Slugs made me unreasonably happy, by the way. They're an excellent twist on the typical critter formula of transforming one resource to another. Starting with roughly 4 of them, once you figure out how to hook them up to electricity, gives you a nice small boost to early game productivity. It doesn't really scale into mid and late game, so you'll need other power sources. While you could try ranching and feeding the Plug Slugs to boost their power output, I was very quickly running out of my Cobalt and Copper supplies, so that doesn't feel particularly sustainable. I guess the other electricity source on the starting Asteroid is coal, but those biomes are somewhat far away from the starting location and supplies are limited.

Then you start looking at sustainability of O2 supply. Polluted dirt, mud, polluted mud and the new buildings to split mud and offgas polluted dirt are a good balance. They require continuous electricity input, but you also have large reserves of those resources to last a couple hundred cycles. By that point you could probably set up a sieve and an electrolyzer to produce O2 from the Cool Slush Geyser.

I was somewhat confused after spending a while trying to figure out the use-case for Sweetles and Grub Grubs. Seems like Sulfur is a limiting factor here, and while you can mine enough to feed them for quite a while, you'll also need sulfur to fertilize the plants they synergize. Also somewhat finnicky to haul the critters into a farming room so that they tend the plants; and then you need an active rancher to wrangle any Sweetles away or move the Sweetle eggs out, since the Grub Grub buff for plant productivity is much larger. It overall didn't feel like an enormous benefit to do all of this rather than just farming Bog Buckets and paying the polluted water price, especially since there's an early and obvious path to sustainability for that.

So overall it feels like you can put maybe a hundred cycles maximum into the first asteroid before you really start feeling growing pains and you start to want to see other asteroids... seems like a solid design! My only problem was I tried to set up a rocket first thing, before using the teleporters. That was a real boondoggle; difficult to get enough CO2 just from duplicant exhalation to power the CO2 rocket; difficult to get enough oxylite or fertilizer for a sugar rocket (which seems really underpowered, in terms of # of tiles it can travel when full of fuel). I should have just used the teleporter.