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Are O2 masks working as intended?


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I'd be happy with an the oxygen mask working as

1) Filled once

2) When returned if there is still oxygen then it can be used again.  This would help with the short trip uses.

3) Once oxygen is depleted from the mask it is deleted from the game.

It might get a little cluttered but at the most it should be one per Duplicant.  This would be similar to Exosuits but still keeping some of the ore resource costs.  We could have the station store the partially used masks.

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To tag along this. I feel the mask should also protect against irritation from chlorine and such. Otherwise it is just easier to set up some breathing rooms along the way and let dupes go from one O2 pool to the next, as currently even when using the O2 mask they get eye irritation anyway.

Also I agree that these mask should be the first step in atmosuits. Even possible using also docking functionality and being able to store up to 8 or so in the same station. O2 mask should be reusable, needing an initial investment in metals and only need to be recharged with O2 by the station.

O2 masks should provide oxygen and limited protection from gasses like Chlorine and other eye irritation gasses, but not liquids (skin irritation?).

Atmosuits are the next step and allow you to work in pretty cold and heated environments: say -100°C to 700°C.

Jetsuits are once again an upgrade, allowing you to work in 0°K to 5000°K and offering full protection from the elements.

Lastly come the Radiation Suits: they are equal in protection as the jetsuits, but loose the mobility boost and offer protection from radiation instead.

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57 minutes ago, Guinaro said:

I feel the mask should also protect against irritation from chlorine and such.

The masks don`t cover the eyes so i think it`s ok if they don`t offer that kind of protection. I`d rather see other low tier equipment like protective goggles for eye irritation and rubber boots for soggy feet but that`s just me.

I think the oxygen station is mostly fine except the lost resources. Used masks should just turn back to ore.

I think there could be an oxygen port building that would hold extra oxygen (delivered manually in bottled form) and allow all types of suits to refill their reserves (should probably have an oxygen threshold setting). This would make masks a worthwhile solution in multiple applications.

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42 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

I`d rather see other low tier equipment like protective goggles for eye irritation and rubber boots for soggy feet but that`s just me.

Making protective goggles using glass (so you would be split whether to use POI glass for solar or goggles) and "rubber" boots made from minerals (rock boots?) -2 athletics xD

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On 11/23/2020 at 11:14 AM, chemie said:

Deliver metal; mask is auto made

Dupe task mask

Dupes comes back and drops mask on the floor (I have a pile of them on the floor now)

Repeat with new metal and new mask.  Are they meant to be one use?  Or is it just bugged?

It gets a little bit worse than this, because while I was using one my O2 production went nuts.  I had a balanced O2 production that was able to supply about 100g/s more than my dupes were using.  About 4 cycles after building a mask station, I was finding that I could no longer provide enough O2 to keep my base pressurized.  In fact, what alerted me to the problem was that my dupes were sleeping right next to the source of my O2, and were waking up in the middle of their sleep cycle trying to catch their breath.

Basically, the O2 that isn't used is lost.  Thus in addition to burning metal ore, you're also burning O2 resources.  If you have a lot of little tasks where dupes will be switching back and forth, you'll burn through metal and O2 like mad.  The only time this station makes sense is if you can fit a mask to a dupe and they can spend most of their shift wearing it. 

Examples of problem tasks: Building tiles/pipes/wires/etc that require deliveries from one side of the mask station to the other.  Sweeping debris from one side of the mask station to the other.

Examples of "good" tasks: Researching a geyser; operating a telescope.

Also.. the mask does not protect the fragile eyes of the dupes -- so venturing into hydrogen/chlorine/etc while wearing a mask will still be a problem.

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3 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Examples of problem tasks: Building tiles/pipes/wires/etc that require deliveries from one side of the mask station to the other.  Sweeping debris from one side of the mask station to the other.

Examples of "good" tasks: Researching a geyser; operating a telescope.

I think you might want to restrict access to just a few dupes when using the mask station so that dupes won`t just randomly walk past it. Placing a compactor right after the station allows to get resources ready without using a mask then sending a dupe with high building priority can make constructing stuff efficient.

I also had some success locking the mask station in a sealed room and pumping oxygen inside to tame it`s consumption. It will just take more time to get ready this way but won`t suck your base out of oxygen.

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Yeah, but it seems like a lot of work for a slightly useful item.  I ended up building my mask station behind a door that only allowed a particularly skilled pair of dupes past, and I also built staging containers to hold materials for various tasks that I wanted to do.  In the end, it was too much micromanagement and I haven't used it at all in my current base.

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As a checkpoint it's just far too costly. Dupe runs up to perform a single delivery of 15kg stone, then walks away from the build errand, lets the next guy build it. But the uptime on the errands being reachable is really bad because they take so long to charge up.

 

All tasks grey out for 60 more seconds, then a dupe runs up to build one tile, and leaves right away. Again wasting the 1 trip we get per 60 seconds.

 

Need conveyors to deliver to the worksite, need automation to only let them back down once all the mask's o2 is depleted. It's a project in itself just to setup a job site past the mask station.

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1 hour ago, MiniDeathStar said:

You have untold zillions of tonnes of metal ore spread across the cluster. The 1-2t lost to the mask station is totally irrelevant and it's only there so that you don't rely on them long-term.

What benefit does not allowing players to rely on them long term add to the game when Atmo Suits can be relied on long term and don't have said cost? Atmo suits already have many other advantages that give people reasons to upgrade, such as environmental protection, hot and cold protection, more oxygen, pipe input for pure oxygen, better checkpoint mechanics, avoidance of sopping wet and soggy feet debuffs, etc.

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19 minutes ago, psusi said:

Outch.  That's a huge problem.  I thought that it leaked back out.

The masks definitely appear to loose oxygen at a set rate when a dupe isn't wearing them.  That oxygen, however, does not appear to return to the environment.  I don't know if this is an oversight, a bug, or intentional.  However, I built a sublimation station/deoderizer room that produced 600g/s of oxygen. I had 5 dupes that all breathed normally, requiring 100g/s of oxygen each.  This means that there should have been 100g/s of surplus oxygen.  When I limited the travel such that if a dupe took a mask, they wore it for nearly the whole cycle, then my base kept a consistent pressure.  When I let the dupes perform tasks where they grabbed a mask for a short time, then abandoned the mask, my base lost pressure very quickly and within a couple cycles my dupes were routinely getting out of breath.  Since the masks are always dropped at the base of the station -- the sealed pressurized part of my base -- I should not have run out of oxygen.

I have not set up a specific test to verify that the oxygen is lost, but it shouldn't be difficult to design such a test.  I don't have sandbox unlocked with the DLC worlds.  Yet.

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On 12/29/2020 at 11:35 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

I stand corrected.  Something is still terribly wrong, though because my base should not have become starved for oxygen because of dupes using a lot of masks.

For a moment there, I thought I could use masks as O2 storage  for rockets. Then they nerfed them.

I've never used them again since then. Before the nerf I had dups wear a mask right outside the barracks. And drop it before going to bed, with 5-10kg of oxygen inside. Huge toll on metal ore, not sure if worth it.

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On 12/29/2020 at 5:35 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

Something is still terribly wrong, though because my base should not have become starved for oxygen because of dupes using a lot of masks.

I have seen the same thing in one run. I had two stations, and the second one was going nuts draining oxygen. You could see vacuum all around it. Oddly it was the least used. The other one had the pile of masks at its base.

I wonder if it isn't a bug when it does that?

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Even for something early access the mask stations make me rather sad because they are so incredibly wasteful. It pushes in the opposite direction to this game's philosophy on recycling.

Why not just make them similar to atmo suit in terms of checkpoints and permanence? Have up to x masks be able to stored per station or have mask docks that store like a stack of 3 or 4. Masks come on and off at checkpoints like atmo suits would and are rechargeable. Also by allowing the masks to be sharable equipment can make disease that much more impactful. In theory both food poisoning and slimelung can spread through mask sharing without involving surface germs.

Now if the philosophy is that masks absolutely shouldn't be shared... even then the current system would still be too wasteful lmao.

Furthermore if the idea is that the tradeoff is wasting metal ore for early game convenience, I'd like to know how many people consider this kind of resource management to be an interesting challenge because I sure as hell don't think it is. At least, not in a game like this.

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The station stores quite a lot of oxygen in it for early bases, so that's maybe partially why people see it bringing the surroundings to near vacuum.

However, there is some vindication for @KittenIsAGeek et al. Here's a picture to contradict my previous one. I don't know how we could make this happen in a real game, but you can make the mask not output anything.
TIVeChRiGn.thumb.gif.123dff158daabac5473552a0c6e91ee0.gif

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On 12/27/2020 at 11:46 AM, ZanthraSW said:

What benefit does not allowing players to rely on them long term add to the game when Atmo Suits can be relied on long term and don't have said cost? Atmo suits already have many other advantages that give people reasons to upgrade, such as environmental protection, hot and cold protection, more oxygen, pipe input for pure oxygen, better checkpoint mechanics, avoidance of sopping wet and soggy feet debuffs, etc.

Because masks require very little infrastructure, no refined metal, no special exosuit skill, and no advanced technologies. 

Also keep in mind that niobium is now (very) renewable and can act as ore as far as building stuff is concerned, so you don't even need to conserve the ore so much.

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