Concerns with sustainability

[chemie]

TL/DR: Small maps mean limited resources.  This puts a clock on achieving sustainability (at least for Oxygen power, food).  The mid-game seems stretched out as you have to get 2-4 bases up and running and rockets going but you do not have the resources existing to get there.  Original game gave to a big map with the resources needed to both bridge the gap to end game as well as geysers to enable long term sustainable base.  These small worlds make it hard to get there.

Sulphur: I stopped farming grubs and grub fruit to save sulfur for sweeties for meat/sugar fuel. Not sustainable.  Once sulfur is gone, so is early fuel and food.

Water: My map has no geysers on starting world or teleport world.  This means no longer term oxygen or food options.  Sure, unlucky RNG but it highlights that small maps mean limited geysers...If you get a bad one (or not in my case) this small map is very constrained.

Food: Most food needs water, which is limited (or none in my case).  Mealwood is dirt but no pips to sustain.  Everything else needs water or PW to sustain.  I am not sure rockets can keep up, but even if they can, you will run out of time with the mid game getting there.  Pips allows for zero resource food but that is not happening.

Power: I am out of coal on main world and will be soon on teleport world.  I have one hatch now (160 cycles) so stone hatches are a longer way off.  Geothermal would be nice but no plastic or exosuits.  No NG geysers.  Solar seems only option.  Do you get meteors on the starting world?  If so, that takes a lot of infrastructure.

Limited key resources removes tools to address above.  No steam turbine since no plastic.  No exosuits so hard to dig through 85C rock and get to 110C oil reservoir.  No gold so need steel and this ideally includes a steam turbine.  The clock is ticking on your small starting resource pool; seems the rocket race is forced on you whether you wanted it or not.

Disjointed game play: I find jumping around each world, trying to manage each set of challenges and projects somewhat disjointed. A lot of pausing..

New players: This will be brutal.  Keeping one base going is hard; keeping 2-4 running early/mid game to manage O2, food, power, heat is will very hard for unexperienced; especially when several resources have to be managed very carefully without cascading failure of the base.

[Steve8]

You can't draw too many conclusions from the current state of the game as a lot of things aren't finalized. They haven't settled down on the geyser balance.

But I've also seen maps with two water geysers.

Klei explicitly mentioned that in the announcement:

Quote

 We have plans for how we want to distribute geysers, resources, and other sustainable solutions in the late game, but are holding off on expanding on these ideas until we feel comfortable with the early and mid game content.

[chemie]

4 hours ago, Steve8 said:

You can't draw too many conclusions from the current state of the game as a lot of things aren't finalized. They haven't settled down on the geyser balance.

But I've also seen maps with two water geysers.

Klei explicitly mentioned that in the announcement:

It's not just geysers.  Sulfur as well as all the other things like dirt etc where original game had a solution but you will have a hard time putting those all together across 4 colonies.

[Idles]

I've got a saved game where my first asteroid has no geysers, and the second teleport-linked asteroid only has an oil reservoir in quite a hot biome. I definitely agree with the feeling of there being a time crunch. While I'm not immediately going to run out of an O2 source (100 tons of polluted dirt makes a lot of O2), my Bog Buckets are rapidly depleting my polluted water supplies and once that's gone I don't have an obvious, sustainable food source available. I suppose I could transition to mealwood from the second asteroid, but then the end of my food supply is tied to dirt, which will also run out in time.

[chemie]

1 hour ago, Idles said:

I've got a saved game where my first asteroid has no geysers, and the second teleport-linked asteroid only has an oil reservoir in quite a hot biome. I definitely agree with the feeling of there being a time crunch. While I'm not immediately going to run out of an O2 source (100 tons of polluted dirt makes a lot of O2), my Bog Buckets are rapidly depleting my polluted water supplies and once that's gone I don't have an obvious, sustainable food source available. I suppose I could transition to mealwood from the second asteroid, but then the end of my food supply is tied to dirt, which will also run out in time.

Yup.  I got to 200 cycles but no algae and no polluted dirt left.  I was not able to build a rocket as it was not in the menu despite being researched.  End of game.  Not having exosuits meant I could not get to the oil reservoirs but I did not have water for them anyway

[Hexicube]

Not having this issue, if anything it just discourages you from bringing in too many dupes. This was already technically the case, but the bar for that used to be way higher and you would hit performance issues first, whereas now you hit it before that point.

Running on 6 dupes, additionally having abandoned the second planetoid (I had 3 on each but temps rose too high), 400 cycles in. I'm projecting at least another 400 cycles due to the 500t dirt supply and plenty of water to match it.

Also, there are no meteorites, so solar panels are simple and safe. Not sure what the plan is for this, but it would be real nice if the starter planetoid remains meteorite-free, since it means easy power but also renewable metals have to come from elsewhere. I feel like the inclusion of glass in POIs is intentional.