Water and Oxygen recycling

[TheKilltech]

Water and oxygen recycling is a hugely important topic for space missions with human participants in the real world. Or rather it's the very minimal requirement. And given that in ONI we manage a spece colony where water and oxygen are not necessarily included in infinite supply this is also a topic. While i do understand that the game deviates in some details from reality for simplicity and gameplay smoothness i really think it would be worthwhile to make an exception for these two special cases. Namely: it should try to preserve the total amount of atomic oxygen and hydrogen in all reactions to allow to simulate closed loop systems which can run with a finite amount of a resource infinitely. I feel this is especially more of interest for the new spaced out DLC where those resources are not entirely renewable in all locations.

For example one critical water loop in ONI goes like this: water -> farm irrigation -> plant growth -> harvest  -> food consumption ->  lavatory -> polluted water -> water sieve -> water.

So if this loop is to preserve water then a some rebalancing is needed. For one plants growth criteria needs to change: instead of requiring a fixed amount of irrigation and fertilizer per cycle they should need a fixed amount of resources to reach maturity (at least for irrigation). So this implies that if plants get a growth buff, they should consume more resources per cycle. And it also implies that a harvested plant always contains the identical amount of water. Whenever a dupe consumes food this water should be added to his internal storage (aka bladder) and obviously this additional water should leave the dupe when they relieving themselves on a latrine. As for the outhouse... well, it could make use of the new polluted mud to enable the retention of the water as well even if this makes things a little more complicated.

similar one loop for oxygen can be described in similar fashion:  oxygen -> dupe breathing -> carbondioxide -> carbon skimmer -> polluted water -> water sieve -> water -> electrolyser -> oxygen.

in this case it's actually easy to fix because all that needed to change is the carbon skimmer: it should output slightly more polluted water than it took in water, by just the amount that when run through an electrolizer reproduces the exact same amount of oxygen that was converted through breathing to carbondioxide. probably this could be done just so that the skimmer preserves mass instead of deleting it. 

I could go through all main processes and suggest a balancing preserving oxygen and water should my view find the approval of others.

 

As it is, I find the game actually a lot more complicated then reality really is because in real I know oxygen and hydrogen can't simply vanish in chemical processes thanks to Mr Lavoisier (well okay, there are some instable isotopes of those elements in the mix thus a very small amount actually decays into other elements, but that is really negligible). So in ONI, instead of looking for where the water/oxygen went and just try to regain/recycle it from there, I have to worry about unreal process that annihilate or create stuff out of nothing and really need to get all the math done to know the end result. So I have to calculate if resource loops are net positive or negative which is a very unintuitive, complicated and unrealistic concept to grasp. And it now gets especially annoying when plant growth buffs are involved that impact the amount of resources consumed in a cycle. 

[KonfigSys]

you will not be able to make correct calculations:

there are so many variables that are hard to calculate correctly.

you are trying to balance thinking about it as a closed system but it is not 

like for oxygen

incoming  - geysers producing water (hence oxygen derived from water) you can estimate it (not exactly though for steam vents as the output depends on pressure; the output stated if vents work in vacuum)

outgoing -  rockets, expansion of your base (as you dig, you increase the empty space which is to be filled with oxygen)

dup traits are changing - they can breath more or less oxygen

using atmosuits - not producing CO2

I personally like it. If you can make exact calculations it will quickly become boring.

On one of my vanilla games at very late stage I tried to get to the maximum number of dups and oxygen was the only stumbling point (I did not use morbs at that time). 

No digging as the asteroid was completely excavated, I changed priorities for rockets (first priority was to maintain oxygen pressure at the colony and the rest was going to the rockets), no plants at all, just fishes, animals that do not consume any water/plants. I realized that even small variables effect the system like how often dups going to pee as it produces extra water. Or p water created by running generators.

Practically you can make any asteroid sustainable with just pips planting trees. I made the 3rd planet (metal volcanos) sustainable even before Klei added the natural gas geyser with morbs -> p oxygen -> breathing and puffs -> meat and algae -> fishes -> meat

I guess everyone has his/her own playstyle. For someone crunching numbers is what he/she likes in the game. As long as you enjoy it.

[TheKilltech]

8 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

you will not be able to make correct calculations:

there are so many variables that are hard to calculate correctly.

you are trying to balance thinking about it as a closed system but it is not 

In the cases that supply of a resorce is not infinite (not counting teleporters or rockets) you would want to make closed systems and try to shield them from external influences to prevent leakages. And of course there will always remain influences that will cause you resource amount to change - like if you vent your oxygen into space you don't really expect it be preserved, no? Generally speaking whenever you are not able to make a closed loop you will have leakage and that is perfectly fine. 

Geysers will always be add mass from nowhere while space venting will do the opposite and that isn't anything I would ever think of changing. Same goes for wild growth as that just makes the game more accessible. Those are perfectly fine mechanics. It's just that if you don't have the renewable sources available in a location and can prevent leakages from happening it should be possible to create closed loop systems just as you can do it for wash sinks <-> water sieve. Like, you know - on an actual space ship where you cannot replenish any resource, thus cannot also allow to waste anything. And for that case it is merely important that you have enough processes to work with were resources don't disappear. Of course you won't mind when additional stuff is created out of nothing instead - and even if you don't want it, it's easy to deal with.  

8 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

dup traits are changing - they can breath more or less oxygen

why should it matter how fast they breathe? as long as the inhaled amount of oxygen equals the exhaled oxygen bound in the carbon dioxide the oxygen remains preserved. sure, realistically you would also excrete some of the inhaled oxygen as water on a lavatory, but for the game, let's keep things simple. 

8 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

I personally like it. If you can make exact calculations it will quickly become boring.

I disagree here. Do you really find reality to be so boring? I mean look at how many people are employed in universities researching and in all sorts of engineering doing just that with great joy. Do you really think that if you worked as an engineer in a spece agency designing stuff for different missions you would get bored that quickly?

8 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

I guess everyone has his/her own playstyle. For someone crunching numbers is what he/she likes in the game. As long as you enjoy it.

I think my issue with ONI is that while it tries to do take a lot of inspiration from actual physics, the sustainable resource loops end up being completely unintuitive and often feel more like exploits then anything actually intended. Sure, I admit that figuring out how to use all those exploits into achieving sustainable loops is quite some fun in itself. But i still think that this is a design oversight and a big missed opportunity. Because what I ultimately want, means that players will be given a lot more tools to work with to achieve sustainability and having more options is always more fun then being forced into a singular best design. 

I mean i understand that the devs tried to make the game as easily accessible for players and focused mostly from the early game perspective thus entirely neglecting any long term balancing and what it means for closed loops system. Its not so easy to understand how much of an impact this actually makes even in the early game - because you effectively make resources a lot more available/accessible then before. But now that the game had a little time to mature, I think they could give it some more focus, especially because we are faced with much stricter limitations on renewables in the new DLC. 

And when you look at it, it isn't even that hard to do achieve. It requires a little work here, some rebalancing there and perhaps a few minor changes to some mechanics but no big redesign of the whole game. 

[KonfigSys]

Just take your example of 

wash sinks and toilets <-> water sieve

the system generates extra mass. And as I pointed out the quantity depends on the dup schedule. 

Take breathing. It is not even close to mass preservation. Dups exhaust much less bounded oxygen (see below 100 to 2)!!! If you add atmo suits as I pointed out you have a leakage of oxygen out of the system at higher rate. Traits are important to consider - it is not only about speed of consumption (add to the equation atmo suits that completely change your calculation as you cannot accurately estimate the time dups spend in atmo suits unless there are no atmosuits) as you do not produce same amount of bounded oxygen (without atmo suits proportionally same but in absolute values - not). "as long as the inhaled amount of oxygen equals the exhaled oxygen bound in the carbon dioxide the oxygen remains preserved" - it is NOT; well in ONI universe.

Property	Base Value	Positive Trait	Negative Trait
Oxygen Consumption	100 g/s	Diver's Lungs (-25 g/s) Deeper Diver's Lungs (-50 g/s)	Mouthbreather (+100 g/s)
Carbon Dioxide Production	2 g/s	Diver's Lungs (-500 mg/s) Deeper Diver's Lungs (-1 g/s)	Mouthbreather (+2 g/s)

table is taken from Gamepedia

Now you convert CO2. for example, to O2 using oxyfern - if it is domesticated you spend water and 98% of water converts into oxygen. So it is not like you simply convert CO2 to oxygen. If you take wild oxyfern it is a bit better as you remove water from the equation and then you have more "free" oxygen produced in the loop. Dup+Wild Oxyfern (14 oxyferns) net positive of oxygen and create mass. But if you take wild oxyfern, all these calculations do not make any sense, you can simply add another wild plants and create mass of water/oxygen in any quantities you wish.

Boring issue. Reality is not boring because you have so much unknown and so many tasks. People do one project and move to the next one. It is good if there are random events in a game. It adds more reality and joy. People do irrational things, robots should not. Like meteor showers, you could not predict them in the game (only detected by radars) and you need to create a system of warnings and protection. Perhaps, it is not boring for you if you know that if you do A it will be always B but not C in the game. Then what about diseases? It is a probability chance there. If you know that this trip the dup will not catch the disease and the next time it will, you will not simply send him out when the chance of getting the dup sick is 100%.

 Now to the main part - what is your proposition to Klei?

As I understand you want the plant water consumption to be tied up to the plant products but not to the time? Right?

I am not against of that but think about:

why do you need all these things that speed up production (farm station of microelements, rub-rub, etc.) if you do not get efficiency benefits.

Let's say you have one plant and it takes 1 kg of water per bogy fruit per cycle. Now you need to spend dup time for microelement station, feed grub-grub, feed extra grub-grub plant with Sulphur to get 2 kg of fruit per cycle but you spend 2 kg of water. Would you do all these enhancement things or simply add another plant? I would just double the number of plants and will not spend dup's time, extra resources as it does not benefit a bit just a matter of space saving. (and I remove agricultural station, grub-grub plants from the green house).

There are positive points in your proposition. When the fruit is ready, the plant stops consuming water; currently it is not the case.

 

 

[TheKilltech]

1 hour ago, KonfigSys said:

"as long as the inhaled amount of oxygen equals the exhaled oxygen bound in the carbon dioxide the oxygen remains preserved" - it is NOT; well in ONI universe.

Yeah, i am very much aware that this is not the case in ONI. The quoted line is therefore a suggested balancing change!

And I very much know the other examples how it is in ONI. Hence again my suggestion to rebalance those wherever this can be done with minimal work. I mean this is the suggestions/feedback sub-forum, hence why i wrote that here. Sorry, I do not entirely understand what you were trying to tell me with these example to be honest. 

1 hour ago, KonfigSys said:

Boring issue. Reality is not boring because you have so much unknown and so many tasks. People do one project and move to the next one. It is good if there are random events in a game. It adds more reality and joy. People do irrational things, robots should not. Like meteor showers, you could not predict them in the game (only detected by radars) and you need to create a system of warnings and protection. Perhaps, it is not boring for you if you know that if you do A it will be always B but not C in the game. Then what about diseases? It is a probability chance there. If you know that this trip the dup will not catch the disease and the next time it will, you will not simply send him out when the chance of getting the dup sick is 100%.

As for being boring, in engineering you want your creations to behave perfectly reliable and deterministic - because you will expose them to the outside world which comes with its own factor of unpredictability. You can hardly predict all the factors that a mars rover will encounter during its mission - but what you certainly don't want to deal with is having something like a random conductivity issues in the cables you use for interior wiring of the rover. Same should go for ONI: the environment around out colony should have some random behavior and events - that I wholeheartedly agree with and think there isn't enough of that in the current DLC - but please give us the tools to make all the stuff we engineer work fully reliably.

Can we agree on that part?

1 hour ago, KonfigSys said:

Now to the main part - what is your proposition to Klei?

As I understand you want the plant water consumption to be tied up to the plant products but not to the time? Right?

I am not against of that but think about:

why do you need all these things that speed up production (farm station of microelements, rub-rub, etc.) if you do not get efficiency benefits.

Let's say you have one plant and it takes 1 kg of water per bogy fruit per cycle. Now you need to spend dup time for microelement station, feed grub-grub, feed extra grub-grub plant with Sulphur to get 2 kg of fruit per cycle but you spend 2 kg of water. Would you do all these enhancement things or simply add another plant? I would just double the number of plants and will not spend dup's time, extra resources as it does not benefit a bit just a matter of space saving. (and I remove agricultural station, grub-grub plants from the green house).

There are positive points in your proposition. When the fruit is ready, the plant stops consuming water; currently it is not the case.

For one, this thread it called water and oxygen recycling - hence it deliberately excludes other elements from the equation. So in terms of farming speeding things up still reduces fertilization costs or wattage spent for lightning for example. But I agree that this that every buffing that comes with a cost (be it resource, dupe time, energy) needs to yield a relevant gain to be worthwhile... and there is a ton of options to achieve just that other then through reduced the destruction rate of water and oxygen. 

An obvious possibility is to make well tended plants yield a different fruit variant with a higher morale bonus. A variation of this could be that instead of a better fruit some bonus additional non-food resource may be generated in the process. 

Another example could be that unfertilized plants (via farm station) could already mature at 50% growth - and therefore only yield half the calories per harvesting chore. This means unfertilized plants would be twice as manual labor intensive. Take this just as a simple example just to sketch the concept that could be explored here. It could be given more depth and I think this could be the main way by which various ways of plant tending would pay off. 

One could also think of rebalancing the net heat production of plant growth for some plants and how that would interact with growth boosts to make it also attractive (though that's only something for advanced players).

Also some plants could be given an atmosphere interaction during their growth phase like emitting some gas or converting one into another. tending to these plants could therefore have an impact on this behavior.

...this is just what comes immediately into mind but one could easily continue the list. I would expect a payed gameplay designer to be aware of such things when exploring a suggestion like this hence i didn't bother to mention it as my post was long enough already.

[babba]

On 12/25/2020 at 1:20 AM, TheKilltech said:

...So in ONI, instead of looking for where the water/oxygen went and just try to regain/recycle it from there, I have to worry about unreal process that annihilate or create stuff out of nothing...

There is players which know exactly what produces/deleted/caps how much or what is happening in detail with so and so. IMHO this is a minority and small portion of the players and it is also the players which are very active in the forum.

"...about unreal process that annihilate or create stuff out of nothing..." -> It is a common concept of the game. The focus is that the players have fun, the game does not want to be a "realistic simulation". The designers will often throw in fantasy names for things, to make sure they can not be nailed down to ( total ) "realism". In that way anything can be done in the way the developers want it to be, but the nice thing is that they listen to you, me and the forum community on feedback, suggestions and input.

If players tend to lack or miss something in the game, Klei tends to bang some additional source(s) in. Players also like that there is "Various ways to get cheese", a nice phrasing @misotoma recently used in the forum.

At the end of the day, game content needs to be ( visual ) understandable for the players, be able to run on the players computers at reasonable speed and should make fun. The programmers are carrying so many compute values and calculation stuff around, sometimes its good to set values to zero to save computing time and to avoid game crashes in order to progress with the games development. Interesting with this game is also that there is these 3 types of players:

a.) Editor players - The editor "players" tend to know most likely what is happening exactly with every item in the game and in the "Simulation". Like @KittenIsAGeek @blash365 @Sasza22 @psusi @Neotuck @mathmanican @nakomaru >>> "Claymator" is the greatest build name ever !

b.) Non editor players -> "Normal" players

c.) Editor and non-editor players, playing both combined and mixed. I call it "Assisted god mode".

I am not judging posted content, just some 50 cent input from me my dear friend

Posting suggestions is always great ! Wishing everyone a nice good year 2021

Cuddles and hugs for everyone @Gurgel @pether @chemie @Slvrsrfr @goboking @watermelen671 @minespatch @Xenologist @Daxterr @Madbro @Oozinator @yoakenashi @Smithe37 @sakura_sk @Beowulfe @Yaslana @cpy @natanstarke @Rainbowdesign @RonEmpire @Cairath @Lbphero @__IvoCZE__ @ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy @g5457s @Galifrey1965 @Steve8 @darknotezero @JRup @AndreyKl and everyeveryeveryone ...we are all ONifriends !

2020 Intellectual Challenge Award Winning Post @ZombieDupe

[JRup]

7 hours ago, babba said:

It is a common concept of the game. The focus is that the players have fun, the game does not want to be a "realistic simulation".

Nobody asks where the gases in those hot-boxed atmosuits go.. Do they now?

[KonfigSys]

20 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

In the cases that supply of a resorce is not infinite (not counting teleporters or rockets) you would want to make closed systems...

TheKilltech, as I understood you have two ideas in your proposition:

have water/oxygen remain in the closed loop; the plants' products consume certain amount of water. If I am not right, please feel free to correct - I have just tried to sum up to understand better. 

You suggested also some rebalancing for farming to accommodate your 2nd idea. Well, if you think through that and suggest the complete well-thought change with all these tiny but important details we may support you. The devil is in details as you know. Like water is preserved in fruits (to follow the water conservation logic), then dups pee exactly same amount of water they consume. What about spoiled food then. So many details to be considered.

Klei went by a simple but bullet-proof route - there is an unbalanced situation which is very hard if possible to balance (taking into consideration all processes including energy production), they stabilize it by adding sources and allowing some matter disappear. The last two processes are controlled by players and players balance their worlds like they want. Like you have 5 iron volcanos in Tundra - it is very unlikely you will use them all, as an example.

I agree on the boring part. Some processes to have 100% accuracy (building functionality), some random events to spice up the game.

Of course, it is forum and all suggestions are welcome but then they are discussed and polished and get modified based on other player's feedback or no change is made. 

To sum up my point - your suggestion does not provide enough well-though details to be acceptable.

I hope it does not sound rude (I did not mean to be)  - if you go through details alone or with help of other players on the forum, the idea may be sold and be supported by most p[layers and implemented by Klei.

[TheKilltech]

9 hours ago, babba said:

"...about unreal process that annihilate or create stuff out of nothing..." -> It is a common concept of the game. The focus is that the players have fun, the game does not want to be a "realistic simulation". The designers will often throw in fantasy names for things, to make sure they can not be nailed down to ( total ) "realism". In that way anything can be done in the way the developers want it to be, but the nice thing is that they listen to you, me and the forum community on feedback, suggestions and input.

If players tend to lack or miss something in the game, Klei tends to bang some additional source(s) in. Players also like that there is "Various ways to get cheese", a nice phrasing @misotoma recently used in the forum.

But realism isn't here the problem. Spaced out DLC design is. Those geysers the devs tended to bang in? those are missing in almost all planetoids unlike on the prior starting map - at least in my world the very only water geysers are on the starting colony and I haven't seen any oxygen geysers so far.

Fair enough, they made it feel like we are now really playing a game where we build and maintain space colonies. And the most critical aspects of space colonies is to have sustainable water and oxygen cycles NASA guys put a lot of though into - and also in ONI these things are very important (hell, the game is even named after one of these difficulties). And now the devs throw stones in our way by making the game significantly harder then it needs to be - just because they decide to destroy those most critical resources for us right in front our eyes!

and as for "various ways to get cheese" and

9 hours ago, babba said:

At the end of the day, game content needs to be ( visual ) understandable for the players, be able to run on the players computers at reasonable speed and should make fun. The programmers are carrying so many compute values and calculation stuff around, sometimes its good to set values to zero to save computing time and to avoid game crashes in order to progress with the games development.

So the devs just destroy ways to get cheese and we are left with a single one. And no, it's the least understandable one for players - neither visually nor otherwise. Because how it is clear that pips and the wild growth that they plant are the critical component to make everything run sustainably? I can tell you that even the devs didn't think this through when then implemented pips... but as wild plants create resources out of nothing they are indeed the only geysers we can make ourselves and our only alternative.

On the other hand implementing working resource cycles would massively change that. if everything can be recycled from our colonies, they they become themselves huge sources for all the resources we need that can be tapped into. and since cycles build on the principle of preservation they can be tapped at any point thus through combination the number of ways to make cheese explodes beyond the comprehendible. The only downside of proper resource cycles is that they make the game substantially easier. Then again this also makes it more accessible since different player types will find their own way to make their colonies work out making use of one of the plenty options available and won't need to look up stuff on the internet. 

Also this doesn't come at any performance cost. It merely comes at the cost that some game designers need to do all the math to ensure stuff is preserved and balance processed around that accordingly. but yeah, balancing usually is the most work intensive and delicate aspect of games.

 

[TheKilltech]

3 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

TheKilltech, as I understood you have two ideas in your proposition:

have water/oxygen remain in the closed loop; the plants' products consume certain amount of water. If I am not right, please feel free to correct - I have just tried to sum up to understand better. 

yeah sounds about right. Maybe I'd say that i want to make closed loops merely possible for certain resources but I don't necessarily want to enforce it everywhere.

3 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

You suggested also some rebalancing for farming to accommodate your 2nd idea. Well, if you think through that and suggest the complete well-thought change with all these tiny but important details we may support you. The devil is in details as you know. Like water is preserved in fruits (to follow the water conservation logic), then dups pee exactly same amount of water they consume. What about spoiled food then. So many details to be considered.

Yeah, exactly. The devil is in the detail. So I rather want to make sure this has enough support to begin with before I put a lot of effort into writing a 10 pages long paper on rebalancing with all the math included. And when you want all the details then there is no way to restrict it to just one loop - like i said, recycling gives opens a huge amount of options because everything becomes strongly interconnected. For example the oxygen loop changes suggested for the carbon skimmer obviously effectively make the coal generator a net oxygen producer... so it also should be part of such a rebalance... and suddenly the essay gets really long. 

Also there is not a single way to do this. I have a whole universe of ideas how this could be implemented - so any detailed description i would write down would just be one of a million of those possible. that's also a reason why i am withholding the details for now.

3 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

Klei went by a simple but bullet-proof route - there is an unbalanced situation which is very hard if possible to balance (taking into consideration all processes including energy production), they stabilize it by adding sources and allowing some matter disappear. The last two processes are controlled by players and players balance their worlds like they want. Like you have 5 iron volcanos in Tundra - it is very unlikely you will use them all, as an example.

Like I see it Klei went the bullet sensitive way of not having a balancing concept at all. They just did what programmers often do and started coding and then dealt with the issues as they came up. Their balancing seems mostly be driven by "when the players cry loud enough about something we should probably change it". I mean no disrespect to the great work the devs achieved here, since their game is still very fun without question and it has quite some success. But i am good at reverse engineering how stuff came to be and i see the driving factors were everything but balancing consideration. Or better said their balancing was never done never under any consideration of long-term playability and that's a fair approach given that only a few players will normally reach that. But that also means that they missed that long-term balancing has a huge impact on early gameplay as it conveniently makes things a lot easier and more varied. But one needs to have the long term consideration in mind to understand why that is so.

In fact when you do balancing you don't start with the details - and forgive me when i follow that path. Instead you should first start with a general concept what you want to balance and more importantly why i.e. what is it that you are trying to achieve. One way to do this is to pick a set of fundamental paradigms that you want to follow and argue how the implication of those align with what you set your goals to be. That's why i started by suggesting such a paradigm (conservation rules) and argue why it would improve the game. once that is settled it makes sense to go deeper into the details. But even then a single paradigm isn't enough to iron out all the things. hence I rather throw out different ideas how things could be done to see where the wind is blowing and derive which other paradigms to chose to make the most people happy. But it's also hard if you don't know the architecture of the underlying code, because more often then not it makes sense to pick some paradigms specifically to make implementation easier and better for performance. Only then I really have enough specifications to figure out everything up to the last formula and number. 

So maybe we should first debate the general directions we like and figure out why we do to derive the driving paradigms for a long term balancing schema.

[KonfigSys]

I told my opinion: one small change - an attempt to balance oxygen/water/plant things - may open a Pandora box. The game is successful and enjoyable as it is. One starts rebalancing it and it may not necessary come positively or accepted by players community positively. I saw how often devs (not Klei) screwed a very perfect game trying to improve it (just an example SIMS 3->SIMS 4).

I see that your suggestion may lead to changing a lot of details and the game not necessary gets better. Devs have limited resources - so it should be a really big boom (which turns into big bucks) to make a big change. 

On the surface what you proposed might lead to a serious game overhaul. At least it looks like that, if you provided details we could see that it was not so time-consuming for developers or game-breaking for players.

Perhaps, you do not need 10 pages of calculation but 10 points what has to be changed but I am afraid as soon as you pool one string you will see 100 changes to be made. I already gave you an example in another thread that CO2 to O2 conversion by plants is not so simple (water is consumed and hence you do not get 1 to 1).

[TheKilltech]

21 hours ago, KonfigSys said:

Perhaps, you do not need 10 pages of calculation but 10 points what has to be changed but I am afraid as soon as you pool one string you will see 100 changes to be made. I already gave you an example in another thread that CO2 to O2 conversion by plants is not so simple (water is consumed and hence you do not get 1 to 1).

So let's start with the changes around the carbon skimmer as it is perhaps the thing having the most overall impact, yet can be reduced to a few core changes only. i tried to make this so that it could be considered a stand alone change.

Option A:

1. Buff dupe CO2 production from 2g/s to 10g/s (and accordingly for dupes with traits). So this fixes a mass ration of 10 O2 : 1 CO2 as having the same atomic oxygen number... (don't overthink it, it's just balancing)
2. Carbon Skimmer -> the above mentioned ratio means that the intake of 300g/s CO2 needs to produce an excess of 3 kg * (9/8) = 3.375 kg water per second so that elektrolizer can retain all oxygen back. That would be a lot which is why i would tune down the elektrolizer (3, below) so only 1kg excess water is produced. in total that's
   input 1000g/s water, 300g/s CO2
   output 2000/s p water
3. electrolizer -> water deletion to compensate for the skimmer overproduction
   input  296g/s water (from 1000g/s)
   output 888g/s O2, 112g/s H2 - same as before
4. Algae Terrarium -> analogue to carbon skimmer. 
   input 300g/s water, 30g/s algae, (optionally 4g/s down from 0.333g/s CO2)
   output 40g/s oxygen, 300g/s p water (from originally 290.33g/s), maybe additional new 30g/s dirt to not make the algae vanish (or as mud that's 75g/s mud and 255g/s p water). mass equation looks off but this is due to the fix mass ratio between CO2 and O2.

Option B:

1. Buff dupe CO2 production to 69g/s and lower oxygen consumption to 50g/s (yes, OMG) fixing 32 O2 : 44 CO2 (realistic) mass ratio that has for same atomic oxygen number.
2. Carbon Skimmer: input 1000g/s water, 300g/s CO2 -> output 1245g/s p water
3. Algae Terrarium: input 300g/s water, 30g/s algae, (optionally 44g/s CO2) -> output 32g/s O2, 255g/s p water and 75g/s mud
4. All plants (wild or not) convert CO2 to O2 at the same ratio as mentioned in 1. If they can do that they gain up to 50% growth buff (depends on the plant). domesticated growth time may need to be prolonged due to this buff. example bristle blossom: 25g/s CO2 to 28g/s O2 for wild and domesticated giving a 20% growth boost. wild plants still convert at the same ratio even if they are not growing (harvest ready, or growth conditions like light or temperature not met). domesticated plants however will stop conversion under these circumstances. so 2 plants cover the oxygen need for one normal dupe.
5. every starting location guarantees to have enough wild plants around to support the starting dupes.
6. a new puft variant is added: converts on average 83g/s CO2 (same mass as normal puft) into 500g/s coal. The destroyed 60g/s O2 compensates the oxygen production from coal generator which is buffed to output 60g/s CO2 down from 20g/s. The puft <-> generator loop still destroys 50% of atomic carbon/coal per loop given how brutal mass annihilation is for the the generator. generator CO2 output temperature needs to be significantly lowered to compensate the increased output so total heat generation stays similar.

Note that these changes massively impact the first few minutes of the game. CO2 build up will be huge in option B though with plants around at the bottom of the colony it should become even easier to manage (but not so if all plants are on top). a little later farms (which one needs to build anyway) and skimmers will simply maintain O2 levels and gas pressure without much work at all. Only if the player starts a massive expansion he will need additional O2 production to fill the new space - since neither plants nor skimmers produce any new oxygen.

In any case there are a lot of other processes affected by this, but let's just go with this as an isolated change where the other affected processing change may be rebalanced later, but don't necessarily have to. Specifically:

• Atmo Suits: they delete oxygen by not emitting CO2. Fine, not everything needs to be usable for closed cycles. If players make closed loop recycling very popular and deliberately begin to avoid this because of it, it'll need a change.
• Polymer press, Gas range, ethanol distillers and the 3 other combustion generator (wood, ethanol, natural gas) may be considered for minor rebalanced to update their CO2 output and because they also introduce new p water into the system. But i don't think this is a must have really.
• slicksters.. more CO2 means it would make sense to increase their consumption. what that means for oil production is another issue though.
• polluted water/mud/dirt/slime emissions including the new sublimation station should be checked. But also: optionally
• it would be beneficial to rebalance farming given its irrigation need for water. Theoretically the skimmer is now a water producer but this shouldn't affect farming negatively if it were left unchanged.
• CO2 geysers may need to be looked at
• heat balance wherever mass equation of processes was changed and especially when it is not conserved.

[AndreyKl]

18 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

Note that these changes massively impact the first few minutes of the game.

Both options also break heat management over a knee.

Electrolizer is currently a 'heat deletor' if you are supplying it with water that is near boiling temperature, but with your 'A' changes it will have a much larger chance to cook the colony - it effectively produces heat energy by generating materials from nowhere. Same is true for your other proposed changes that have uneven input/output (plants), they overcomplicate heat management. Proposed change with electrolizer also affects hydrogen based power generation (it will become massively easier to support) and how many dupes you can support from single geyser. 

I think 'B' option massively affects power generation, coal generators will stay in use a lot longer. And that's just superficial changes, it is likely to have deeper changes long term with how much co2 gets produced (->fuel).

 

It seems to me that your example is exactly what KonfigSys talked about, but proposed changes are far from small. 

On 12/26/2020 at 7:37 PM, KonfigSys said:

one small change - an attempt to balance oxygen/water/plant things - may open a Pandora box.

 

 

[TheKilltech]

1 hour ago, AndreyKl said:

It seems to me that your example is exactly what KonfigSys talked about, but proposed changes are far from small. 

Hmm, yeah well, the intention always was to have the biggest improvement with a smallest number of changes to implement. The intention was to open Pandoras box of possibilities. And sure, when you give players so many options and powerful tools, they will come up with a lot of funny builds that one could see exploiting ONI physics. 

Take heat for example and what it means when there are mass defects in a preserving loop. It means that deliberate preheating and cooling of inputs at specific processing steps allows to delete or create heat as desired. Sure, that means that well experienced players can abuse that to perfectly control heat to their liking and in option B the big mass defects give a huge leverage to achieve that much easier. So I am aware how many possibilities this opens up und including powerful exploits - than again, the whole of ONI feels like exploiting the weird physics to do stuff in a way the devs certainly did not intend is how people run their colonies already and enjoy that. That said, why fear it, if it brings people more fun?

1 hour ago, AndreyKl said:

I think 'B' option massively affects power generation, coal generators will stay in use a lot longer. And that's just superficial changes, it is likely to have deeper changes long term with how much co2 gets produced (->fuel).

Partially as intended even though the initial motivation for this is a different one. But yeah, in the new content solar is too easy and by deconstructing windows for glass you can make it your first source of energy. Didn't even consider building a coal generator in the new DLC so far. Anyway, why would it be a bad thing if all energy options would become interesting even up into the late game, at least in a backup capacity? It's not like coal generators in reality aren't very competitive power producers - its just that in nowadays climate CO2 recycling is quite slow (the natural way) and tech solutions aren't well developed.

As for making CO2 into fuel... for us it's quote complicated process but it makes you really appreciate how ingenious and powerful nature is to make plants and algae master the process so well and power our entire civilization for so long in so many ways.

[cpy]

I wonder what would be more fun, to have or not to have conservation of mass and energy.

[psusi]

On 12/24/2020 at 7:20 PM, TheKilltech said:

Namely: it should try to preserve the total amount of atomic oxygen and hydrogen in all reactions to allow to simulate closed loop systems which can run with a finite amount of a resource infinitely

Then the hydrogen generator would have to consume the same amount of oxygen that you got from the electrolyzer to produce that hydrogen, and emit the same amount of water that you had to feed the electrolyzer.  Now electrolyzers and hydrogen generators are free energy machines; just loop a few kg of water between them and collect all the free power you need.

On 12/24/2020 at 7:20 PM, TheKilltech said:

For example one critical water loop in ONI goes like this: water -> farm irrigation -> plant growth -> harvest  -> food consumption ->  lavatory -> polluted water -> water sieve -> water.

So now BBQ and pacu = free water?  Or if dupes only eat those they wouldn't produce any additional pwater in the toilet?

On 12/26/2020 at 7:04 PM, TheKilltech said:

Option A:

You're numbers don't add up somewhere.  Dupe turns 100g of oxygen into 10g of CO2 which becomes 337.5g of oxygen again when run through the carbon skimmer and electrolyzer.

On 12/26/2020 at 7:04 PM, TheKilltech said:

Carbon Skimmer: input 1000g/s water, 300g/s CO2 -> output 1245g/s p water

So the carbon skimmer turns CO2 into water without needing any hydrogen?  So it just creates hydrogen out of nothing?

23 hours ago, AndreyKl said:

Electrolizer is currently a 'heat deletor' if you are supplying it with water that is near boiling temperature,

Only if you are starting with cold water and heating it to near boiling first, which long term, means only if you have a pwater geyser.

 

[TheKilltech]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

Then the hydrogen generator would have to consume the same amount of oxygen that you got from the electrolyzer to produce that hydrogen, and emit the same amount of water that you had to feed the electrolyzer.  Now electrolyzers and hydrogen generators are free energy machines; just loop a few kg of water between them and collect all the free power you need.

Yes, that would be a consequence if ONI tried to rigorously implement the paradigm. But that is a very distant thought for now and i would settle for at least exploring the possibility of allowing us to make one closed loop. This means I wouldn't rally for to change this for now (i.e. not in the first iteration) because i don't think it would have such a big immediate positive impact. Sure, you could run a hydrogen fuel cell with recycled hydrogen, thus effectively build a large scale battery storing energy via hydrogen gas. But here comes the design trouble if you want to allow a "perpetum mobile" i.e. a loop which infinite free creates energy or rather go for energy conservation here... it gets complicated so let's discuss it later when it's clearer it's something interesting to explore.

1 hour ago, psusi said:

So now BBQ and pacu = free water?  Or if dupes only eat those they wouldn't produce any additional pwater in the toilet?

Yeah, the latter. The idea was that food stores the info how much water went in to produce and upon consumption it ends up in the dupes bladder. In case of food that didn't take any input water you don't get any new one. That was the general idea to show how one could change things in principle to achieve conservation without going further into details how to rebalance all the details aspects in the corresponding processing chains.

1 hour ago, psusi said:

You're numbers don't add up somewhere.  Dupe turns 100g of oxygen into 10g of CO2 which becomes 337.5g of oxygen again when run through the carbon skimmer and electrolyzer.

Deliberately made a mistake, to see if anyone even reads them :D. no not really, thanks for pointing it out. I'll go through the numbers and edit/fix my it. EDIT: hmm, my calc goes like dupe turns 100g O2 to 10g CO2 which then the skimmer turns into 33.(3)g pwater which sieves turns into same amount of water, which finally the elektrolizer turns into 100g O2. where did i get it wrong?

1 hour ago, psusi said:

So the carbon skimmer turns CO2 into water without needing any hydrogen?  So it just creates hydrogen out of nothing?

You are right. I tried to suggest the smallest possible change here so the consequences of it were imaginable enough for most. That comes at the cost of sacrifices I had to make. A real carbon skimmer would require some type of hydroxide compound to make the reaction work. To do it correctly would mean the skimmer needs to be fed some input resource and output something else. Adding new materials would be a complicated option and taking existing ones would require to check how that balances with all other processes that use those (including making sure the hydrogen goes through a closed loop too that preserves its number). So in fact, this suggestion only focuses on preserves the oxygen.

But yeah, if that change worked as a "proof of concept" for the general suggestion, this would be a point that should be corrected later.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 12/25/2020 at 8:16 PM, babba said:

There is players which know exactly what produces/deleted/caps how much or what is happening in detail with so and so.

I saw my name tagged, so I had to read up and.. I decided instead to skim.  Everyone was quite verbose in this thread!  Anyway...

On 12/25/2020 at 1:11 PM, KonfigSys said:

Take breathing. It is not even close to mass preservation. Dups exhaust much less bounded oxygen (see below 100 to 2)!!! If you add atmo suits as I pointed out you have a leakage of oxygen out of the system at higher rate. Traits are important to consider - it is not only about speed of consumption (add to the equation atmo suits that completely change your calculation as you cannot accurately estimate the time dups spend in atmo suits unless there are no atmosuits) as you do not produce same amount of bounded oxygen (without atmo suits proportionally same but in absolute values - not). "as long as the inhaled amount of oxygen equals the exhaled oxygen bound in the carbon dioxide the oxygen remains preserved" - it is NOT; well in ONI universe.

Property	Base Value	Positive Trait	Negative Trait
Oxygen Consumption	100 g/s	Diver's Lungs (-25 g/s) Deeper Diver's Lungs (-50 g/s)	Mouthbreather (+100 g/s)
Carbon Dioxide Production	2 g/s	Diver's Lungs (-500 mg/s) Deeper Diver's Lungs (-1 g/s)	Mouthbreather (+2 g/s)

table is taken from Gamepedia

OK, lets take a look at a basic dupe that breathes 100g/s of oxygen in and exhales 2g/s of CO2. First off, as far as conservation of mass goes, you would observe similar behavior in humans.  By volume, we inhale about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other stuff.  We then exhale about 4% (by volume) CO2, 78% nitrogen, and 16% oxygen.  This adds up to a loss of 1% to 2% oxygen that is not replaced by CO2.  This oxygen eventually finds its way out of your body in the form of water, after doing work to produce energy for your cells.  Anyway, back to the game...

So the average dupe breathes in 100g/s of oxygen and breathes out 2g/s of CO2.  But, this is not the end of the recycling loop.  An oxyfern, when farmed, breathes in 625mg/s of CO2 and "breathes out" 31.25g/s of oxygen.  If we normalize the value such that an oxyfern "exhales" the same O2 the dupe breathes, then it takes in 1.92g/s of CO2 -- just shy of what the dupes breathe out.  In other words, if we normalize for the CO2 production, oxyferns will replace slightly more oxygen than the dupes breathe in.  If you chose to not water or fertilize the ferns, then you simply need four times as many per dupe.  In fact, if you place a dupe in a sealed room with 1000g/sqaure of oxygen  and 13 "wild" oxyferns, your dupe will never run out of oxygen, and CO2 will never build up, and eventually (many hundreds of cycles) they may experience popped eardrums.  So the combination of oxyfern + dupe maintains the conservation of mass.

There are, of course, other combinations, but this was the simplest that came to mind. 

 

 

On 12/24/2020 at 5:20 PM, TheKilltech said:

For example one critical water loop in ONI goes like this: water -> farm irrigation -> plant growth -> harvest  -> food consumption ->  lavatory -> polluted water -> water sieve -> water.

I don't believe this particular loop was ever meant to be continually recyclable.  First of all, you're forgetting that the water is being used to do the work of growing things (food, which allows dupes to do work).  If E=mc^2, then mass=energy, so you're losing some of the mass in the process of doing work (growing).  You'll never get a 1:1 water -> farm -> food -> dupe pee ratio because then nothing would be lost in the process of doing work.  

I believe this is why all asteroids have at least 1 geyser that produces water.  The developers knew that water would be a critical resource that could never be completely renewed.  There are complicated methods that get around this problem, but in most real game circumstances you won't get more water out than you put in to any particular process.

 

On 12/24/2020 at 5:20 PM, TheKilltech said:

similar one loop for oxygen can be described in similar fashion:  oxygen -> dupe breathing -> carbondioxide -> carbon skimmer -> polluted water -> water sieve -> water -> electrolyser -> oxygen.

in this case it's actually easy to fix because all that needed to change is the carbon skimmer: it should output slightly more polluted water than it took in water, by just the amount that when run through an electrolizer reproduces the exact same amount of oxygen that was converted through breathing to carbondioxide.

In this particular loop, you're forgetting about the hydrogen.  The carbon skimmer isn't adding hydrogen back to the oxygen in order to produce polluted water.  Rather clean water is being contaminated with carbon dioxide to remove it from the breathable air space.  Then the polluted water is going through a water sieve to remove the contaminating CO2 leaving the water clean again.  Nothing in the loop adds hydrogen back to oxygen to create water, so it makes sense that electrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen, then breathing the oxygen, would result in a net loss of water.

Anyway, there are recycling loops that work, but they are often quite convoluted and sometimes require a bit of periodic maintenance.  For example, if you're using oxyferns to recycle a dupe's breath, then you must start with an excess of CO2, or your oxyferns will spend a lot of time wilted and not producing any oxygen.  If you chose too few oxyferns, then the O2 will slowly be lost.  If you chose too many, then eventually there won't be enough CO2 for all the ferns.  

It is much easier, then, to create a fully sustainable base by relying upon an input of some sort.  In fact, there are some resource loops that actually produce a bit more RSS than they use -- though they will take a large input of energy.   For example,  you can use an oil well to convert water to oil, then send it through a boiler to turn it into petrol.  Then, if you burn the petrol, you get more polluted water back than you lost producing the oil -- giving you a sustainable source of water on a rock that doesn't have any water geysers -- assuming you can produce enough heat to keep the boiler running.

Another example is the polluted water > tree > ethanol > generator loop.  You will get extra water out of that process, provided you can do something with all the heat.

 

That's just my thoughts on this whole thing.  Take from it what you will.  I personally do not have any problems with how things currently work, and I don't have anything against the posted suggestions.  I'm just offering my point of view.

[TheKilltech]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I don't believe this particular loop was ever meant to be continually recyclable.  First of all, you're forgetting that the water is being used to do the work of growing things (food, which allows dupes to do work).  If E=mc^2, then mass=energy, so you're losing some of the mass in the process of doing work (growing).  You'll never get a 1:1 water -> farm -> food -> dupe pee ratio because then nothing would be lost in the process of doing work.  

I believe this is why all asteroids have at least 1 geyser that produces water.  The developers knew that water would be a critical resource that could never be completely renewed.  There are complicated methods that get around this problem, but in most real game circumstances you won't get more water out than you put in to any particular process.

In game I doubt devs really gave much thought to how recyclable water is here. they just tested it and noticed water loss and added geysers so people could play. at that point they had little reason to think it over.

As for your E=mc^2 remark, it's not how it works. The loop perfectly preserves the water at the end in theory. it's not the water being spend on growth but rather sunlight energy - so indeed it doesn't run all on its own. it takes an external energy source (sunlight), because otherwise energy conservation combined with thermodynamics would make less and less energy usable for the loop (more and more energy would end up unrecoverable allocated in heat due to increasing of entropy).

Sure the loop is far more complicated in reality. It's difficult to track oxygen, hydrogen and carbon because they go sperate ways at some stages and the breathing loop (recycled via plant photosynthesis) and food cycles (also plants) are actually interconnected in our world (as you pointed out correctly in your response to @KonfigSys). So all in all writing down all reactions in these two real loops, you will find they are perfectly closed for the 3 element C, H and O(all atomic numbers are preserved), but looking at the energy balance, more is consumed then gained (i.e. no closed loop for energy) with the energy difference spreading evenly as heat. this loop has been perfectly sustainable for billions of years here on earth with the sun constantly adding more energy which kept this wheel turning. There is also the "Biosphere 2" experiment that went to prove such sustainability but failed due to inability to prevent gas leakage, because plants and microbes proved to be not well enough understood to balance them, because the food gave too little morale bonus and because of a technicality that resulted from the inmate dupes neglecting to build a hospital room.  

2 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

In this particular loop, you're forgetting about the hydrogen. [...]

you are right and i responded to this here: 

 

2 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

That's just my thoughts on this whole thing.  Take from it what you will.  I personally do not have any problems with how things currently work, and I don't have anything against the posted suggestions.  I'm just offering my point of view.

And thanks for the feedback and also the elaboration on the oxyfern. it was always too rare to really bother with it for my colonies but its interesting to realize that it is setup quite close to what i thought of in option B. Means that at least in sandbox mode i can test it out quite well.

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

3 minutes ago, TheKilltech said:

water being spend on growth but rather sunlight energy

That's not entirely true.  Plants, through the process of photosynthesis, turn sunlight, CO2,  _and_ water into sugars.  All three are necessary for most plants on earth, and simply eating the edible portions of the plant does not return all the CO2 and water to the environment.  Some comes back through the decay process.  Some water returns to the environment through evaporative cooling of the plant.  Basically what I'm saying is that while the various elements aren't lost in the process, the way to get them back is never simple or straightforward.

..but most ONI plants do not require sunlight.  Some, in fact, will refuse to grow while in sunlight.  So there's no way to make a direct comparison between earthly plants and ONI plants.  Its quite possible that the ONI plants which require water actually do turn that water into the energy needed to grow.  IDK ... I'm not a research duplicant.

I've also been playing since it first opened as pre-release alpha, and I disagree with your comment:

6 minutes ago, TheKilltech said:

In game I doubt devs really gave much thought to how recyclable water is here. they just tested it and noticed water loss and added geysers

I think they put thought into recycling loops and set things up in ways that benefited game play.  I remember early games prior to geysers where you actually had to work to remove excess water from your base.  The combination of dupe pee and generators would produce so much polluted water that you had to dig large areas out just to contain the excess water.  The bugs that caused such an excess were fixed, however certain processes (petrol boilers, tree > ethanol, etc) still produce more water than they use.  They have not done anything about these processes, but they HAVE done things about code bugs that resulted in matter duplication.  In my opinion, this suggests that the devs have put thought into the various sustainability loop cycles that we've come up with.  They have addressed actual code bugs that changed sustainability loops, but have not changed process combinations that lead to extra materials.

 

Then there's the real-world view of the problem:

In the real world, the earth is so comparatively large to our systems that things like air conditioning work without causing thermal problems in the environment (relatively).  However, as humans, we still have not been able to set up any truely closed, sustainable systems.  The more we try, the more we find how complex they really are.  Biosphere 2 made it for 2 years before it became unsustainable, so we're making progress -- but we're finding that the sustainability of our planet is an incredibly complex thing, with a very large number of completely intertwined systems that rely on each other.  Perfect sustainability is very hard.

I realize that ONI is a game, and very different from real life.. and that is another reason why I think the devs have put some thought into this.  Most of the material loops we come up with are "close but not quite" sustainable.  I believe that's intentional.  Some of the processes result in too much return; some result in too little.  They all require a bit of adjustment from time to time to get things back on track.  Personally, I consider my base set-up good if I can leave it for a couple-hundred cycles at a time -- and I have to put a LOT of thought into those setups.  I think the game would get boring if I could simply set up four buildings and have a perfectly sustainable water loop that also fed my dupes (or produced my oxygen).  Every game would become cookie-cutter because once you figured out a working system, you'd always build that system.  In my opinion, that would destroy creativity.  You would stop trying to find a better way to do something, or a better way to manage some resource.  All you have to do is look at the number of threads talking about SPOM systems and you'll see this particular problem.  In my opinion, the SPOM is a terrible idea that I've ranted about in the past, but a large number of forum posters swear its the best thing ever.  There are a very large number of ways to produce oxygen for your dupes.  Zeroing in on one particular method because its easy stifles your creativity.

To put this another way...  My niece has a large number of LEGO sets.  She keeps them all separated, and with their instructions.  When she wants to build with her LEGO, she grabs a box, dumps it out, then follows the directions to build the set.  There isn't anything wrong with this.. but its been my observation that you get a lot more re-play out of LEGO if you toss out the directions and combine sets.  I think this is the direction the devs for ONI were headed.  They wanted to set up a simulation game that everyone is going to play differently.  Some people are going to use doors as actual doors.  Others are going to use them as convection plates for ovens.  Some others will use them to compress gasses.   And you'll find a large number of threads where someone complains about using a door for anything other than a door.

 

tl;dr

The point of all this is that if there is a short, obvious loop for perfect sustainability, it will destroy game play.  Everyone will use the same setup every time, and they'll get bored.  They'll "beat the game" and find themselves unsatisfied.  What ONI has done is create a game where there are optional goals to reach, but also where every game is played uniquely. 

[babba]

Topic "Reality"

On Utube there is lots of guys which run a 3 meter aquarium containing 3 tons or so of water. During those videos you then get shown their 30 sqm big equipment room where they maintain the life support equipment for their aquarium fish, tons of filters, pumps and whatnot.

Seeing those movies makes me value life and the planet even more. A large portion of humanity has no access to clean water or sanitation.

Topic "Lego compatible bricks"

Once a whole cargo container is full one the kids can build ONi, a tree house or anything out of it. Plastic...The industrial success and world harm. I used to run a merchant company using gigatons of polybags and selling tons of plastic products... Once you become part of the plastic system, then "Baal" has your soul. I will get to hell anyway for buying a hundred mainboards for private gaming, thank you Intel ( chipsets...).

I better stop now

Need all rockets Klei...Merge DLC and base game now, tank u Make great game !

BTW still no fluid plastic in the game ! Fluid plastic + fire = More ONi Fun

Make gpu use, add thick particle smoke to the game Intel++++++ Firefighter Profession and Firefighting Equipment !

  Christmas on fire @ Intel

"ONi is popular because its Lego, but without plastic !" BTWBTW also add burning Lithium ! Thank you. Also need Hydrazine fuel DLC professional rocketz...+ Reactorz Megabumbum !!! Many thanks dear Papa Klei Smurf. Kisses

[TheKilltech]

1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I've also been playing since it first opened as pre-release alpha, and I disagree with your comment:

I think they put thought into recycling loops and set things up in ways that benefited game play.  I remember early games prior to geysers where you actually had to work to remove excess water from your base.  The combination of dupe pee and generators would produce so much polluted water that you had to dig large areas out just to contain the excess water.  The bugs that caused such an excess were fixed, however certain processes (petrol boilers, tree > ethanol, etc) still produce more water than they use.  They have not done anything about these processes, but they HAVE done things about code bugs that resulted in matter duplication.  In my opinion, this suggests that the devs have put thought into the various sustainability loop cycles that we've come up with.  They have addressed actual code bugs that changed sustainability loops, but have not changed process combinations that lead to extra materials.

 [...]

I realize that ONI is a game, and very different from real life.. and that is another reason why I think the devs have put some thought into this.  Most of the material loops we come up with are "close but not quite" sustainable.  I believe that's intentional.  Some of the processes result in too much return; some result in too little.  They all require a bit of adjustment from time to time to get things back on track.  Personally, I consider my base set-up good if I can leave it for a couple-hundred cycles at a time -- and I have to put a LOT of thought into those setups.  I think the game would get boring if I could simply set up four buildings and have a perfectly sustainable water loop that also fed my dupes (or produced my oxygen).  Every game would become cookie-cutter because once you figured out a working system, you'd always build that system.  In my opinion, that would destroy creativity.  You would stop trying to find a better way to do something, or a better way to manage some resource.  All you have to do is look at the number of threads talking about SPOM systems and you'll see this particular problem.  In my opinion, the SPOM is a terrible idea that I've ranted about in the past, but a large number of forum posters swear its the best thing ever.  There are a very large number of ways to produce oxygen for your dupes.  Zeroing in on one particular method because its easy stifles your creativity.

I stand by my comment and ironically you point out the reason yourself. When you check the numbers on the wiki you'll find that a lot of stuff makes sense when two things are compared with each other. Perfect example is the oxyfern and dupe breath - those numbers fit so well to each other that reconstructing the thought process behind it seems too easy. the little deviation in CO2 makes perfect sense as well, since it seems there are always some edge cases where things don't exactly follow the equation so devs wanted to give it a buffer so in case of problems the balance tips rather in favor of O2. 

but when you start looking at entire process chains that form loops you realize the numbers for the total are completely random and all over the place like there was concept behind them at all. And by doing so you make the game very badly balanced because that favors the loops with over-production/over-efficiency. So you kind of force players to rely on those only and i totally hate that because whenever i want to do anything and think though different ideas, when i go by the numbers i always end up that there is no way around the default solution... like the game is trying to shout at me to stop thinking and just do the well documented cookie-cutter solutions/exploits. 

And here is the thing: when i start playing a new colony the game feels fairly balanced at first. those one-on-one balancing mostly works. i feel like i have enough choices for every problem. But then whenever one resource runs low with little options for resupply, such that i have to worry about sustainability i must always realize how few suddenly my options become, like there is only really one solution. with the way the maps in the new DLC are setup i have run into this much earlier... and this thread is a consequence. 

you realize the over or under-production is the criteria that decides what loops to use and which not. however, if you balance all to do exactly neither but instead conserve resources you render them all equally good - which then creates real options for the player to choose from depending on their current situation. that's makes it a fairly solid principle for balancing. 

But i agree with your view that if sustainable loops were easy to setup the game would boring quickly. Now if a loop has overproduction, it's makes everything quite trivial - and those are the only loops you ultimately work with in late game ONI. but my hope is that if a loop exactly preserves resources it becomes much more sensitive to even minor disturbance and if all your colony would rely only on such loops that are also interconnected amongst each other this may easily cascade into a critical failure of everything - very much like the biosphere 2 experiment showed. I think a very important reason why "perfect sustainaibility is very hard" in the real world is because there is no overproduction that gives you a safety buffer when something goes wrong, hence i doubt it would be boring. but i have to admit that this is a speculation that this would play out like that in ONI. 

[psusi]

15 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

And by doing so you make the game very badly balanced because that favors the loops with over-production/over-efficiency.

There are only two loops that are over unity: a petrol cooker ( which I've never used ), and Ethanol.  And a lot of people complain that Ethanol is not good so it must not be too OP that everyone sees it as the one true way.

15 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

So you kind of force players to rely on those only and i totally hate that because whenever i want to do anything and think though different ideas, when i go by the numbers i always end up that there is no way around the default solution... like the game is trying to shout at me to stop thinking and just do the well documented cookie-cutter solutions/exploits. 

How is that any different from what you are proposing?  Only that you want to eliminate the two over unity loops and make everything exactly unity?  Except not quite because it seems that when I've pointed out how that would break the game, you seemed to back down about making it really unity ( hydrogen gens needing oxygen and producing water for instance ).

15 hours ago, TheKilltech said:

But then whenever one resource runs low with little options for resupply, such that i have to worry about sustainability i must always realize how few suddenly my options become, like there is only really one solution.

How do you figure?  Run out of algae?  Distill slime.  Or stop using algae and use electrolyzers instead.  Or off-gas pwater or pdirt.  Run out of slime?  Ranch pufts. Run out of water?  Geysers.  Or ranch pufts fed from po2 geysers or morbs.  Or burn NG or oil.  Run out of oil?  Trade water for oil.  There are many options and many different opinions on which are better.

[TheKilltech]

22 hours ago, psusi said:

How is that any different from what you are proposing?  Only that you want to eliminate the two over unity loops and make everything exactly unity?  Except not quite because it seems that when I've pointed out how that would break the game, you seemed to back down about making it really unity ( hydrogen gens needing oxygen and producing water for instance ).

Oh, didn't notice the part about it "breaking" the game. Like we can have free solar right off the start of the game... energy is really the least problem i have encountered in my playthrough so i just figured the extra hydrogen didn't made a difference. But if you really think this may be a big issue even in this first proof of concept example i'll think about how to close the hydrogen loop.

realistically one could argue that metal ores have hydroxide compounds, like for example malachite (i.e. copper ore). Its a bit of a stretch to use that that as a replacement for the lithium hydroxide used on the ISS but it could work. for the game one could ignore the bound oxygen in that ore compound and just take it as a hydrogen source. That's however would make the carbon skimmer quite similar to the rust deoxidizer and wouldn't allow for a closed loop in terms of hydrogen (i.e. an external resource supply will be required).

The other option would be to make the carbon skimmer based on a organic process like photosynthesis. that would allow to balance the both oxygen and hydrogen, while still deleting carbon (which plants can create).

EDIT: my best idea for a reaction for this would be methanogenesis. Something microbes normally do. Anyhow, implemented via the skimmer, it would require to have a hydrogen intake instead of water... and it would produce methane (i.e. natural gas in ONI)... this means that either one would have to touch the natural gas burner or just accept that hydrogen is getting deleted. Given the natural basis of this process i wonder if it could be also implemented via something organic like plants or critters... like a "dew" plant hanging on roofs, catching the hydrogen and producing something that can be decomposed processed into water.

EDIT2: been thinking about this... and it is to fun to see how many options there actually are for this. all could be implemented and would come with their own specialty and problems to solve. hmm, really enjoying even just discussing these possibilities a lot more then logging into the game and being reminded that i still have to finish the ethanol loop soon...

anyhow: talking about only the simplest solution, i figured it's best to do it without the elektrolizer for the start. so includes to make the carbon skimmer take water as input and mix it with atmospheric CO2 into carbonated water ("club soda"?). The algae terrarium/tank would need to be reworked to use the carbonated water and algae to produce new algae + O2 + p water (hmm, if run without light it might produce polluted oxygen instead). That would however remove all possibility to create new oxygen early on. Therefore the algae tank would have an alternative mode. since realistically rocks like granite (mostly SiO2) contain a huge amount of bound oxygen, the alternative mode would convert water + algae + granite into p water + dirt + new oxygen. Yes, the algae would massively die off in the process like yeast does when it produces ethanol. An alternative route would be to run the carbonated water through a sieve to retain coal - so this creates a new preserving carbon loop that should then be balanced, so that burning coal gives less energy then what is needed to produce it via the sieve + c skimmer. also the carbonated water would be a perfectly reasonable irrigation for many "plants" that don't convert CO2 (like mushrooms normally wouldn't).

22 hours ago, psusi said:

There are only two loops that are over unity: a petrol cooker ( which I've never used ), and Ethanol.  And a lot of people complain that Ethanol is not good so it must not be too OP that everyone sees it as the one true way.

[...]

How do you figure?  Run out of algae?  Distill slime.  Or stop using algae and use electrolyzers instead.  Or off-gas pwater or pdirt.  Run out of slime?  Ranch pufts. Run out of water?  Geysers.  Or ranch pufts fed from po2 geysers or morbs.  Or burn NG or oil.  Run out of oil?  Trade water for oil.  There are many options and many different opinions on which are better.

like is that really so? are the processes you list anything more then short stopgap solution? When you go for your first shortage you stop being being interested in intermediary stuff and aim for something viable long term. And as most of the processes you listed here delete mass or aren't closed or otherwise sustainable, so you skip them (or if your really need them, minimize their use to the necessities) until you can stabilize them. and to stabilize them you need excess mass production, most importantly for water as it's involved in most processes. Okay, in the main game there are more then enough water geysers that allow a more diverse play but in the DLC where that isn't available everywhere you are left with only the two loops you initially mentioned. The pertol cooker being a bit too complicated early on you are left with one "option": ethanol. (not really optional)

The only real idea from the dev for long term gameplay is just geysers. 

[The Plum Gate]

On 12/24/2020 at 7:20 PM, TheKilltech said:

...they should need a fixed amount of resources to reach maturity (at least for irrigation). So this implies that if plants get a growth buff, they should consume more resources per cycle.

I think buffs should be free of resource needs, if not to reduce them to begin with ( this is how that mechanic works in the scheme of things ).

In the DLC it appears that has not changed. Tended plants ultimately use less resources when being tended by animals. So there's that.

This initial part of the quote is probably the best idea I have heard as un harvested plants continue to use and request resources. Making the plant require a lump sum of resources to develope and mature might simplify ag-tile resource delivery.

Additionally, following the existing framework for time buffs as increased yield over time would result in resource remainders in ag-tiles. Pouring more resources into plants, as you form a parallelism with more in should be more out, is to esentially increase yield at the time of harvest.

We are given the implicit possibility of increased resource output from plants by having an experienced farmer tend them ( to shorten harvest time, save resources and produce a seed presumably ).

I really like the idea of a mature, ready to harvest plant requiring a fixed amount of resources - how they would go about implementing it would be interesting to see.

I would simply stop resource consumption at maturity - this would nail down the maximum amount of resources required, improved utilization would occur through proper tending.

We could do this ourselves with a plant-state automation detector and automated hydroponic tiles. Or they could just have the plant go into resource consumption stasis.