Spaced out Feedback

[chrisbehk]

Okay, so now that i have played enough spaced out that i've pretty much run out of content (i have to keep my dupe size fairly low because im only supplied by 1 cool salty geyser) here are my thoughts on the current state of things

The starting biome:

I really enjoy it! I enjoy the mud mechanic with the squish press and the sublimnator giving me polluted oxygen, my first colony died becuase i spent too much time trying to use the deoderiser to make everything clean and nice when i should have been focused on getting my power to be more consistent. The difficulty i would say is pretty high compared to the other starting biomes you need to have at least a decent idea of various workarounds to problems like not immediately having alot of water, being right next to an ice biome and having the only geyser near you spit out either brine or (if it worked) polluted water at -10c. I suspect this is a more "advanced" biome start so in my opinion these things are fine by me. The new critters are fun it was a good idea to make the plug slugs eat ore rather than refined metal or both so that you are encouraged to get off of them as soon as you can, with either solar panels or oil (i personally just hamster wheeled it until i got solar panels) 

 

New Buildings:

I have already mentioned the squish press and the sublimnator and have no problems with them, given that they are important for the start. I do have a gripe with the oxygen mask station though it takes a long time to get it charged up, and if your dupe decides to go past the mask station point to pick up some granite and go back, the masks are simply dropped onto the floor and the oxygen is not returned. I could not tell if the oxygen was being put back into the air or not but i HIGHLY suggest a system where the dupes put the masks back and it returns the oxygen, perhaps only dropping it onto the floor if its become full in the time they were out?

The sucrose engine is weirdly weak when sucrose is much harder to get than carbon dioxide, one requiring ranching and sulfur collection and the other requiring....living duplicants, something i'd hope everyone has. The rocket platform is a genius way of building rockets i sincerely hope this is how rockets are going to be built from now on it is significantly less finicky and makes alot more sense. I will be very much looking forward to seeing how i can use these new buildings/rocket in the biome i prefer (the sandstone starting biome) and see if i can make any new builds or technology out of it!

 

The UI Upgrades:

These are great! i love being able to pin the various resources im interested in on the side, the trapped warning is fantastic and being able to set up what you do or dont want to be notified about is great espically when i am focusing on another asteroid (thanks for getting stuck mining while i was on another asteroid meep!) my only criticism is that some of them are very arbitrary, no colony needs a number of toilets equal to their dupes (1 plumbed toielt for every 4 dupes has never failed me) but as i said, you can turn them off so this doesn't end up being annoying.

 

The art:

The artists and animations are awesome as usual i love the sucrose engine candy design the critters look nice and the new animation are fun!

Balancing:

I do think that solar panels are VERY, VERY powerful now, you can get these going incredibly fast by just taking apart the prebuilt with glass and S digging up and plonking one or two down to get you started, i can have this done by cycle 10 and now i have a nearly permenant 700 Watt powersource. with a full surface coverage being about 10k watts a day using the pyramid formation i think this needs some kind of nerf. Maybe the starting asteroid is further away from the sun and gets less light? With the later asteroids getting more light but of course, getting space debris hitting it to make it harder to harness. Currently they are more powerful than petrol boiler/sour gas coolers and given that this is the ultimate way of generating power it should not be outshined (heh) by solar panels, or i guess petrol boilers could get nerfed but seeing as for the most part its a space age material project i dont see the need.

I can see one of the future ways of transfering power is to superheat steam (maybe up to 900c if you have space age materials) shipping it to another asteroid and feeding it into steam turbines with a bit of engineering to make sure you dont waste 700c of power, and then you have a very powerful generator that is supplied by other colonies, this is exciting and i am looking forward to seeing if this works. 

I am looking forward to nuclear power i hope we will have equally as cool things to SPEND that power on because we have tons of options right now, some are harder than others but the current non expansion endgame is more...engineering based than it is sustainable power based and having to balance both across multiple asteroids would be very fun!

 

Final Thoughts:

 

The early game and mid-game is good stuff, of course y'all have said there is no endgame yet so its expected for there to just be nothing after the mid-game. New levels of food (the burger + salt + maybe the new pie for a SUPER meal) would be nice for the endgame. I had a blast testing this out and encountered very few bugs, with the ones i did encounter already having been reported and i assume on their way to being fixed.

 

Thanks for the alpha access Klei! i'll be checking back in with the new updates