Design issues with new asteroids

[DarkMaster13]

I posted this in another topic but I feel like it got buried so I wanted to put it in its own topic.

tldr; New starting biome is good.  Rest of the new planet isn't.  Oily planet isn't interesting nor can you really use it without exosuits.  Current rocketry options are not good for this planet.

The starting swamp's good.  I really like the design of mud.  Effectively infinite polluted dirt is an interesting twist on oxygen generation and echos the feel of the forest start's infinite dirt that needs to be processed.  Plug slugs are good, but putting them into the normal electric grid is more complicated than most players have to deal with in their usual grids.  Plus feeding them has its issues and you need massive battery racks to absorb how much power a full groomed ranch produces in one night.  There's a lot more free food than usual between the chuds and pacus, but very few farming seeds.  We get a massive amount of water to work with, but it's mostly just in the way.  That plus mud gives us a much stronger incentive than usual to just demolish the entire starting biome and dump all the water down the middle.

Now for the rest of the biomes.  Desert is kinda eh.  I like the idea of the new plant that needs critter tending to get the most out of it, so you have mixed farm ranches.  Though once they're in place there isn't anything to them.  Both the critter and the plant need sulphur, which the only practical source of is mining.  So just keep extracting that and there's nothing else to think about there.  Grubgrubs are flat out overpowered, if they're wild.  Just put a couple on each of your farm plots and let them roam around giving huge boosts to growth rates for free.  The rest of the desert is nothing really to speak of.  You get sandstone, copper, and sand from it.  That's about it.

The other two main biomes on the map are ones we've seen before.  Ice and toxic.  The first is a good source of water and cooling, plus wild sleet wheat for free food (though labor intensive when making frost buns).  Toxic is where you get vital resources in algae, coal, iron, phosphorite, and pincha peppers.  Nothing new here, we've seen it before.  Though those peppers aren't terribly useful without natural gas to run your gas range.  It's only noteworthy in that the toxic is harder than usual to get to, so coal power is less practical than solar and plug slugs.  While easy access to ice means that cooling industry is much easier, if you have industry to cool.  Geysers are too easy and aren't that important for a long time given how much water we start with in the swamp.

Lastly there's the new space biome full of dirt and copper, and the badlands's wasteland with refined iron and coal.  These aren't noteworthy other than being sources of more metal (which we are otherwise short of).  Solar is too powerful, or at least too boring since it's an extremely easy set and forget.

This really isn't much to work with.  After you get passed the early game, you quickly find that the asteroid doesn't offer anything that useful for you to move on.  Oddly the oily asteroid you can teleport to doesn't really add much either.  First there's nothing new content wise there.  It's sandstone, tide pool, rust, and oil biomes.  You can pick up mealwood, bristle blossoms, waterweed, and nosh sprouts from there, but you already have plenty of sleet wheat on the starting planet.  Importing the small ethanol pockets sitting around seems like the only good raw resource you can import the main asteroid without exosuits, but the main use of that is for making CO2.

Hatches end up being a big deal and probably the most valuable thing you can get on this asteroid without exosuits.  You have infinite polluted dirt on the swamp, so feeding sages for sustainable coal is trivial.  Unfortunately this is still a critter which takes a long time to build up full ranches and then the industries it supports afterwards.  You'd want them long term, but if you've run out of other things to do a hatch ranch won't give your dupes much to work with in a short time.

Which brings me to rocketry and my main issue with the new asteroid.  Our two fuel options are sugar and CO2.  Yet our only real source of CO2 on the asteroid is likely to be dupes.  Coal is quite limited and solar is easier anyway.  The only good option for making lots of CO2 is to import the ethanol to burn.  Sugar on the other hand comes only from sweetles.  That means a bunch of mandatory ranches for access to regular fuel, since we have no alternative industries to make it that you can quickly scale up into.  Your farm + ranch combinations are also a bad idea for this, since that makes all their eggs into grubgrub eggs which don't make sugar.  We also need the sugar to cook the food from those farms.

CO2 would be a fantastic rocketry option, if we had access to natural gas, wood, oil, or some other new industry/crop that produced lots of it.  Sugar has no building that can be used to make it.  So rocketry is not a natural progression on these starting worlds.  It's something really awkward to go into.  But the world doesn't really have anything to do on it after you get past the start.  It's just a good source of water for later worlds.  So the world feels like one we should be trying to leave, but our tools aren't suitable for doing so.  They involve a lot of waiting for CO2 to build up or for sweetles to gradually convert sulfur to sugar.

[Steve8]

9 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Grubgrubs are flat out overpowered, if they're wild. 

Klei agrees:

Quote

• Grubgrubs are no longer found in the wild except for one feature somewhere in the world

 

[psusi]

Sweetles are still found wild and can be converted into grubgrubs though.  And why do you say they are only overpowered when wild?  You don't have to feed them just groom them and they will lay an egg before they die to replace themselves.

[Steve8]

There is always some spin up time required when breeding variants. You need to wait for eggs and wait for those eggs to hatch. That just takes longer and is more work than just wrangling some wild critters.

[crbd115]

So this post gave me an idea, I feel like if we need another source of sugar besides the small bit we can mine and ranching sweetles (which doesn't seem worth it) we could maybe use the bog jelly for it in the mid to late game when we no longer need it for food. I mean we get most of our sugar in the real world from plants so it would make sense and jelly is a lot of sugar normally. Maybe it produces co2 as a byproduct since it would probably be cooking the jelly to a burning point where it becomes solid?

[DarkMaster13]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

Sweetles are still found wild and can be converted into grubgrubs though.  And why do you say they are only overpowered when wild?  You don't have to feed them just groom them and they will lay an egg before they die to replace themselves.

You don't need to tame them at all either.  Just put some grubgrub eggs in your farm area.  You're going to end up with a lot of them if you setup a sweetle ranch/farm anyway.

2 hours ago, crbd115 said:

So this post gave me an idea, I feel like if we need another source of sugar besides the small bit we can mine and ranching sweetles (which doesn't seem worth it) we could maybe use the bog jelly for it in the mid to late game when we no longer need it for food. I mean we get most of our sugar in the real world from plants so it would make sense and jelly is a lot of sugar normally. Maybe it produces co2 as a byproduct since it would probably be cooking the jelly to a burning point where it becomes solid?

If sugar is going to be the main rocket fuel we're suppose to use, there needs to be some way you can rapidly start production for it.  So for plants to be a good option they need a very large amount of seeds available from map generation or you only need a small number of plants to produce a large amount of product.  Bog buckets don't work for this.  There simply aren't that many seeds in the starting biome and each plant produces a small amount of product.  If a player hadn't been farming them for whatever reason, they cannot rapidly increase their sugar production once they reach the stage in the game they need sugar for rocketry.

Contrast this with glossy drecos and the polymer press.  The former is a great option to gradually build up a large amount of plastic with minimal resource expenditure.  However if you want a lot of plastic right now, you can slap down five polymer presses and fuel them off a single oil refinery.  The later option is very energy and resource intensive, but can be built from scratch much faster.  If five polymer presses isn't enough, you can simply build more.  If the project is taking a long time to finish, you can throw more dupes at the problem without any of them needing any special skills.

[crbd115]

40 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

If sugar is going to be the main rocket fuel we're suppose to use, there needs to be some way you can rapidly start production for it.  So for plants to be a good option they need a very large amount of seeds available from map generation or you only need a small number of plants to produce a large amount of product.  Bog buckets don't work for this.  There simply aren't that many seeds in the starting biome and each plant produces a small amount of product.  If a player hadn't been farming them for whatever reason, they cannot rapidly increase their sugar production once they reach the stage in the game they need sugar for rocketry.

Yes there aren't that many seeds to begin with but for the most part that is an early game problem because it is usually your only renewable food source until you get far enough into other biomes. Therefore it seems unlikely the player wouldn't have farmed them at all.  My idea was mainly to supplement the sugar that is already available from sweetles and the bit that naturally generates. Also to give the starting world another source of co2 generation if need be as well. I'm sure the starting world will be changed quite a bit though in future updates after it goes public. So we will see what our needs are then.
Edit: its also more then likely they give us a completely different plant specifically for this purpose, my idea was more just working with what we have but its more likely they just add something for this specific purpose.

[TheMule]

17 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

 Solar is too powerful, or at least too boring since it's an extremely easy set and forget.

You're assuming there won't be meteors. I don't think they're gone for good.

[psusi]

15 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

If sugar is going to be the main rocket fuel we're suppose to use, there needs to be some way you can rapidly start production for it.  So for plants to be a good option they need a very large amount of seeds available from map generation or you only need a small number of plants to produce a large amount of product.  Bog buckets don't work for this.  There simply aren't that many seeds in the starting biome and each plant produces a small amount of product.  If a player hadn't been farming them for whatever reason, they cannot rapidly increase their sugar production once they reach the stage in the game they need sugar for rocketry.

What do plants have to do with sugar production?  It seems like you should grow plants to produce sugar, but AFAIK, you only produce it by feeding sulfur to sweetles.