Early/Mid tier gameplay feedback

[TheKilltech]

I have started a new colony for the new content and am currently at just about 100 cycle and have settled the first two planetoids using the teleporters and am currently preparing my first rocket. So here is my feedback so far:

1. it's a bit odd that there is only one starting option initially, but I assume that's just so this specific starting parameters can be tested.
2. My biggest issue at the start of the game was the evil traps the game has set out for me. One is the new plants. The starting area has access to two seemingly easy food plants: the "bog bucket" and the "spindly grubfruit plant". I initially wanted to use the grubfruit as my main and experience its novel interaction with the beetles that roam around it, and due to this being one of the starter plants i got the impression sulfur was similar to dirt in this new environment. But then i realized that while i have enough sulfur to keep it going for a while, probably 100 cycles later on that would have starved my colony to inevitable death as there is just no early/mid tier viable way to produce sulfur once its gone... and i have 20 hungry mouths to feed!
3. Same goes for the sweetle. Luring players into developing a strong sulfur dependency is plain evil without any means to sustain it!!
4. My suggestion for point 2/3 is add some way to give players a sustainable sulfur source that can be tapped into mid game to keep a least a part of sulfur reliant farms operational. Or just make it so the sulfur give some kind of bonus rather then being the critical component.
5. Also the codex is in a terrible state. I was completely unable to judge how viable a sulfur based farming might be solely on what is written in the database. No way to check if i could replenish it somehow around mid tier. I had to rely on external sources to find that out. 
6. A bit similar but less devastating: metal. I haven't run out of metal yet, but I am already forced to mine the entirety of the two maps to have enough. Add that power slugs' diet combined with no metal volcanoes on neither of the two planetoids makes it really something i keep worrying all the time about. So a power slug farm feels like another trap for new players to kill themselves many cycles/hours into the game as there is no way to recycle the metals out of the excreted hydrogen. Power control stations are similar in effect, but at least i know that so didn't even get the idea to build one. 
7. The metal shortage is a reason why I didn't try gas masks for my telescope personal. I only heard they are not reusable and cost metal... and that's certainly not worth it since dupes can handle the vacuum pretty well without any tools.
8. It is especially evil that specifically the new content lays out potentially colony ending resource shortage traps. I mean this will be the stuff most players will want to experiment with first. 
9. Another resource issue: reed fibers. There is no alternative to get in on the first two planets, neither deckos nor thimble reed nor any new way to produce it.
10. Solar energy. It's nice that its much more accessible now. But I found that the teleporter rooms have nice big windows made of glass that can be deconstructed. So it means solar panels require actually only the research but no need for a glas forge.
11. There are some nice special rooms made for the neural vacillator with some sensors and a little riddle to open them. But what's the point when a player can just remove the walls and skip it? The walls are incidentally made out of obsidian, unlike all other ruin tiles, yet every dupe can still easily deconstruct them. 
12. So far I don't like the linearity of progression with little to no alternatives. the first new planetoid is always the same connected via teleporters, and after telescopes have unveiled everything on both rocks i found i have exactly one possible destination for my new rocket. A giving the player a little choice here would go a long way.
13. teleporters or more even generally storage: there is no way to specify the amount to store (or in case of a teleporter conveyor loader, send over to the other colony). So at one point i needed to sent a food over and after my order was ignored for a little too long, an increase in priority at some point caused that 90k calories were transferred in short time causing a little starvation problem in my main home...
14. Colony sustainability: the 2nd colony has for example no water geysers and lacks a few other critical resources which is why i have to supply it from my main, at least for the start. I find that design decision not so much fun, but more importantly because of the the point mentioned above it's annoyingly difficult to control how much is imported/exported. So that needs to be fixed if colonies are to depend on each other. Especially before everything is automated there should be a way to tell dupes exactly what resources and more importantly how much to send over!

[Sith515]

1. Early access, deal with it. Also there's teeechnically two options (they're the same thing)
2. Bog buckets are as infinite as your pol water geyser. There's also a chance to find liquid sulfur geyser, which makes that infinitely sustainable.
3. Same goes for sweetle.
4. As i said with geyser. Also if you heat crude oil to 500+C, it flashes to sour gas, and if you cool that sour gas down to -150-something C, it separates into methane (liquid nat gas) 66% and SULFUR 33%.
5. I do also wish codex had as much info as clicking on critter/plant itself, with the whole "how much it eats/produces"
6. There are gold/alum volcanoes on third asteroid. You just gotta rocket there.
7. Gas masks are wack, but it's still early access so there's high chance klei will fix it.
8. Isn't that the whole idea? "Oh crap, time to start a new run, i'll know better next time"
9. Third asteroid.
10. Solar can't power your industrial brick without like 8+ panels, but 3-4 is plenty for a regular base.
11. You're right, but i never want to bother with micromanaging dupes to properly stand where i want them to stand.
12. So far we're in early access.
13, You should try dancing with automation, smart storage, buffer/filter gates and all the crazy stuff. Experiment more with what's given.
14. Seek alternative ways to reach sustainability. You shouldn't always do one same design for all troubles, that's exactly what the DLC tells you to.

[TheKilltech]

3 hours ago, Sith515 said:

2. Bog buckets are as infinite as your pol water geyser. There's also a chance to find liquid sulfur geyser, which makes that infinitely sustainable.
3. Same goes for sweetle.
4. As i said with geyser. Also if you heat crude oil to 500+C, it flashes to sour gas, and if you cool that sour gas down to -150-something C, it separates into methane (liquid nat gas) 66% and SULFUR 33%.

yeah, the sulfur geyser isn't in my save file. will have to start anew. but yeah, as of the lastest patches this feedback is mostly resolved. As for the sour gas way to make sulfur... yeah, it's not something anyone will be capable to achieve that so early on to make the very first food farm sustainable. Also, this way requires oil which wasn't available on my first planetoid. so it's really not an early game solution. 

3 hours ago, Sith515 said:

8. Isn't that the whole idea? "Oh crap, time to start a new run, i'll know better next time"

sure, if you don't mind filtering out players leaving only those types persistent enough that don't mind that 10 hours of their gameplay were wasted. it's a design decision how friendly/open you want to make your game to a wider audience and i can tell you that setting up such traps will make a few people give up on the game. but ofc that's their decision what they do with it. i for myself can find that out on my own and dodge the time cost. 

3 hours ago, Sith515 said:

13, You should try dancing with automation, smart storage, buffer/filter gates and all the crazy stuff. Experiment more with what's given.

automation looks to be out of place for one time problems. Why would i want to set up any automation to send over 200kg of refined metal a sigle time?? also automation is completely not suited to these kind of tasks as building counters is very complex, resource, space and time consuming - it by far takes more of everything compared to the amount i want to send over. And yeah, this is especially needed very early in the game when going through the teleporter for the first time and when possibly most of the automation stuff isn't even researched.

3 hours ago, Sith515 said:

14. Seek alternative ways to reach sustainability. You shouldn't always do one same design for all troubles, that's exactly what the DLC tells you to.

I experiment a lot actually. still i found the game gave me no alternatives here. unlike in reality i cannot make a closed loop system retaining all water properly. the game just messes up too much to allow that. so i have only one option which again feels kind of annoying and way too linear. it's also nothing i can do on short notice. on the other hand i have to switch between colonies in this DLC all the time and need to rely that they can run on their own for a while but without a sustainable way for the most basic requirements i have to check up stuff a little more frequently then i'd like to.

[Sith515]

11 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

As for the sour gas way to make sulfur... yeah, it's not something anyone will be capable to achieve that so early on to make the very first food farm sustainable. Also, this way requires oil which wasn't available on my first planetoid. so it's really not an early game solution. 

There's enough sulfur to make a single farm of grubfruits last forever and then some. After ~300 cycles I'm yet to run out of that stuff with 22 farmtiles of grubfruits running flat out. So it can stretch from being early game "temporary" solution till lategame with sgas boiler. Also there's plenty oil on tele asteroid so it's easily accessible via telepipes.

11 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

sure, if you don't mind filtering out players leaving only those types persistent enough that don't mind that 10 hours of their gameplay were wasted. it's a design decision how friendly/open you want to make your game to a wider audience and i can tell you that setting up such traps will make a few people give up on the game. but ofc that's their decision what they do with it. i for myself can find that out on my own and dodge the time cost. 

Isn't that how you play all colony management games? Frostpunk, rimworld, ONI, etc etc. You build stuff, then "oh crap", begin again with new knowledge. The only difference is allowance between "oh crap" and "game over", Also it's still not as finite if you know how and what to set up. Also, once again, bog buckets are as infinite as your pee water geyser and oxygen is as infinite as your brine geyser.

11 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

automation looks to be out of place for one time problems. Why would i want to set up any automation to send over 200kg of refined metal a sigle time?? also automation is completely not suited to these kind of tasks as building counters is very complex, resource, space and time consuming - it by far takes more of everything compared to the amount i want to send over. And yeah, this is especially needed very early in the game when going through the teleporter for the first time and when possibly most of the automation stuff isn't even researched.

Since you have a one-time problem then you can just micro it one time. If it constantly requires resupplying, then something went wrong. Also an extremely simple manual switch still counts as automation.

11 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

I experiment a lot actually. still i found the game gave me no alternatives here. unlike in reality i cannot make a closed loop system retaining all water properly. the game just messes up too much to allow that. so i have only one option which again feels kind of annoying and way too linear. it's also nothing i can do on short notice. on the other hand i have to switch between colonies in this DLC all the time and need to rely that they can run on their own for a while but without a sustainable way for the most basic requirements i have to check up stuff a little more frequently then i'd like to.

If "second colony" means tele-asteroid, then you can just tele water or even o2 in there. One full o2 pipe feeds 10 dupes which would rarely be a thing in there. Solar for power and dreckos (btw you get them on third asteroid) in full chlorine for food. Alternatively, hatches with constant shipping of ronks from volcanoes on first asteroid. That's a thing in newer maps too.

Rocket-asteroid might need more stuff, but with a co2 geyser you can probably run slicksters into oil/petrol into pol.water into o2. Or pips&arbor -> ethanol & pol dirt -> pol water etc etc.
There are ways to achieve that, but once again,

This is early access. Stuff will be added and expanded. Or so i hope as well.

[Adirelle]

On 12/22/2020 at 4:01 AM, Sith515 said:

This is early access.

And that's why feedback like TheKilltech's is still worthy.

I agree ways to easily produce Reed Fibers are a bit lacking in early game. Basically, the first asteroid has no icy biome, which makes temperature control difficult: you need steel and plastic but plastic requires crude oil from the second asteroid, which requires reed fibers to build atmo suits.

Concerning the slugs, taming them is a no no: 4 tamed slugs will eat almost 1 ton of metal ore every 4 cycles. I just keep them wild. They do not spread nor produce a lot of energy, but at least it is free. Maybe there is a way to keep them tamed and alive while not feeding them every day but without a way to produce metal ores, this is not sustainable.

[KonfigSys]

a simple automation to support the teleport asteroid:

just pipe in O2 to the teleport and have a 2K vent on the destination side. The main base normally has over production of O2 considering all that sublimation going on in the swamp.

food automation - just see what types of food you produce in the main colony (just a simple click on the food icon at the top left corner).

Then you split the food accordingly (just transfer the minimum food type produced to the teleport location). For instance, I produced small amount of fish and meat at the beginning and a lot of bogy jelly. So I set the conveyor from the kitchen to the teleport to deliver only two items - barbeque and fish sticks (not necessary a conveyor, you can set manual delivery of only one-two specific items with high priorities). As I have a CO2 filled hole where I bring the exit of conveyor from the teleport, the food drops down and stay fresh forever. If the food balance starts getting too high, you can always stop the conveyor belt at the main base. Later, I simply built a fish pool filled with ethanol in the teleport location and had enough fish to feed two punks there. Wild plants also generate substantial amount of food there if you do not destroy them. Later I brought pips and planted bogy there. So I had excess food there with no resources to be used.

[TheKilltech]

On 12/22/2020 at 4:01 AM, Sith515 said:

There's enough sulfur to make a single farm of grubfruits last forever and then some. After ~300 cycles I'm yet to run out of that stuff with 22 farmtiles of grubfruits running flat out. So it can stretch from being early game "temporary" solution till lategame with sgas boiler. Also there's plenty oil on tele asteroid so it's easily accessible via telepipes.

Hmm, on my map the sulfur wasn't that plentiful somehow. I admit I didn't do the math, but I still doubt it would have lasted for more then 100 cycles.

On 12/22/2020 at 4:01 AM, Sith515 said:

Isn't that how you play all colony management games? Frostpunk, rimworld, ONI, etc etc. You build stuff, then "oh crap", begin again with new knowledge. The only difference is allowance between "oh crap" and "game over", Also it's still not as finite if you know how and what to set up. Also, once again, bog buckets are as infinite as your pee water geyser and oxygen is as infinite as your brine geyser.

No? I haven't given up on any colony I started. In fact in the vanilla game I have only two, one main and one creative/sandbox testingground. I really don't like to run my colony into a game over moment and instead try to fix things. Yeah, the resulting architecture will get "complicated" but on the other hand my colonies have a lot of stories to tell and the weird setups remind of them whereas a clean ideal colony is just sterile and boring. So it's a bit like RL cities.

On 12/22/2020 at 4:01 AM, Sith515 said:

Since you have a one-time problem then you can just micro it one time. 

That's what I was trying to do... and my feedback is this micro is terrible to even do the most trivial task. You just have barely any means to control how much stuff is transported. 

[JaxckLl]

1-4) This has largely been addressed by the addition of the Liquid Sulphur Geyser. It would be nice to have more sources, my suggestion would be to add in Sour Gas Vents and a machine which can convert Natural Gas to Hydrogen, Carbon Dioxide, and Sulphur.

5) Agreed. Codex should show the same info as data panels when clicking on an object.

6-8) Agreed. I have another thread discussing the specifics of why Plug Slugs are terrible and badly need a total rework. There's honestly no way to balance a "Ore for Power" exchange that maintains viability. Not unless ores become renewable.

9) There should be some Dreckos on the Terra asteroid, as well as some Reed Fibres. Honestly I don't find it to be too big a deal to be without atmo suits, especially since the new version of Space is so forgiving (no you don't need Oxygen Masks to run a rocket/telescope)

10) This is a great change, I don't know why you're disparaging it. A reliable power base line being the normal for starts in ONI means that the resource availability on asteroids can be really be pushed. Why not a start inside a ruined base with lots of CO2, Glass, and Ceramic, but not Algae, critters, or coal?

11) Honestly I hate the blacked out rooms and would be happy to see them completely disappear. If my dupes are capable of touching the outside of the room, I as the player should be able to see inside.

12) Totally agree. Rockets need to be better and need to generate resources renewably, so then rockets can become a valid alternative to Petroleum boiling. An upgraded Deodorizer may also be in order, as a way to make Sublimation a viable Oxygen source when compared to Rust or Water.

13) Yeah, we some more automation tools. I'd really like an "Automation Station" which requires dupe operation but allows us to set specific commands for throughputs. This station could be the foundation for a new type of room the "Command Centre". Command Centres allow you to designate a dupe as "Captain", a title which confers significant benefits (such as the Captain never suffering stress reactions while on a mission). The Captain can also help other dupes with their tasks, giving both a performance boost.

14) The solution is to produce food & oxygen on both asteroids. It's clunky, and takes a lot of work to set up, but that's what where we're at right now.

[babba]

39 minutes ago, JaxckLl said:

...There's honestly no way to balance a "Ore for Power" exchange that maintains viability. Not unless ores become renewable...

If we are lucky Klei will dlc add in Regolith+metals raining down in some way in January 2021. Rocket resource shipping will be improved during the year + there is the Interplanetary Cannon ( or what its called ) which someday will popup in survival mode to shoot resources from one asteroid to the other, its already listed in the ingame information wiki. Also there should be lots of geysir stuff and world generation work done by Klei in 2021. I`m sooooo looking forward to have these things in the game sometime in 2021 Once all that + all rockets + option to play big maps + radiation & reactor is in the dlc...then it is the dlc beta testing package I originally expected. The current dlc is an pre-ejaculation to collect cash.