General DLC review

[JaxckLl]

The DLC as it stands has three main features, only one of which is kind of implemented well.

* The only feature that works in the current game is the multiple maps. This was a clever way to squeak out additional performance which also helps to concentrate the experience and encourage experimentation with all the different ways to generate basic resources. Rocket interiors are a gimmick and honestly one I could live without. They're extremely exploity right now, and it doesn't feel clever or satisfying.

* The new resource economy has some great ideas, but it's a little janky at the moment (and obviously unfinished since we don't have uses for radioactive elements yet). I'll discuss each of the new cycles that exist in a separate bullet.

* Sulphur is renewable via Geyser or extremely poorly through a Sour Gas Boiler (the amount of Sulphur produced from a typically efficient Sour Gas Boiler isn't even enough for a single Grub/Grub ranch). It's an isolated chain which leads to calories or crappy rocket fuel. We need a conversion source of Sulphur, a way of generating Sulphur that scales with player investment (such as a machine that breaks down Nat Gas into Hydrogen and Sulphur). I'd also like to see a machine which can convert CO2 directly to NatGas, especially since such technology will be essential for our real life exploration of Mars.

* Sucrose needs additional uses outside one mediocre recipe & crappy rocket fuel. Perhaps it can take on a role like Salt, and be able to be ground down into "Granulated Sugar" and added to food to make it "Sweet". "Sweet-tooth" would be a new trait that provides dupes with an additional morale bonus whenever they eat a sweet food. It would also be interesting to add in a third way to produce plastic, albeit one which is less energy efficient than other methods. Sucrose can be refined into Cellulose (perhaps this process also uses Algae), which can then be Crushed or put into a Metal Refinery to produce Plastic. This would serve as a great early-game source of Plastic.

* Mud is a great material that fits into the world of ONI well. Sand has never been a very interesting mechanic, mostly because it's not in large enough quantities to matter. Having a biome that is mostly Mud (much like the mostly Sand asteroid from the base game) is interesting, and it's great to have some solid sources of Water. However the new Sublimation Station currently serves no purpose. The Sublimation Station stands as an alternative to just digging out another dozen tiles of floor. Why waste time, energy, and metal on a machine when instead I can just dig out my base faster? My suggestion would be to make the Sublimation Station an actual Station rather than a machine. The "Sublimation" room would accelerate & increase the efficiency of off-gasing, making it a natural upgrade to PO2 generation as opposed to a subpar alternative. This would also solve the problem of how the Station cannot accept other off-gasing materials it really should be logically able to (such as Slime or Bleachstone).

* Plug Slugs are terrible. They are the worst power source in the game and it's not even close. They need a massive redesign to have a place in the game and they need an extremely rewarding morph. They are a noob trap which ruins playthroughs.

* The final major feature of the expansion is rocketry & space exploration. Unfortunately, neither rocketry nor space exploration are at all worth it. Rockets aren't even good enough to support our starting two asteroids, let alone the others that exist in the cluster. They're fiddly, exploity, and unnecessarily annoying. Rockets are a massive resource sink that does not provide substantial enough returns to justify the cost. Space exploration is extremely dull, with the starmap devoid of any points of interest actually within reach of our crappy rockets. Rockets need to be more straightforward to use, far less resource intensive, more capable of executing round trips, and they need to provide resources in some fashion to make rocketry a valid alternative to Oil exploitation.

* My principal suggestion would be to put resources on the Starmap itself. One crate can be collected by your command module, with additional tonnage collectable by the Cargo Bay. This would provide a player-directed source of high quality renewables, such as Ice, Metal Ore, or Glass. As an additional incentive, I would add "Coupons" and "Prototypes" which can be discovered in these space crates (or rarely buried on an asteroid). A Coupon would be inserted into your Printing Pod, providing you a special printable option. There would usually be some hidden information, so you might see "2 Hatch Eggs and 2000kg of a random Terran resource" or "4000kg of Algae and three random seeds from a Slime biome". Prototypes allow the player to build a late game machine with alternative resources, but only once. So you might be able to build a Solar Panel with 4000kg of Algae and 500kg Copper Ore, or a Steam Turbine with 6000kg of Igneous Rock. This would turn rocketry into a resource positive system while also making it a valid alternative to tech rushing (an important consideration since research & rocket piloting are linked skill trees).

* Finally the tech tree also needs some tweaks. As of right now, tech rushing is far, far too important. There are some trees which are absolutely essential, usually only for one important building (such as Liquid Reservoirs & Steam Turbines, or Automation Wires & Atmo Sensors). This ends up making other trees dominated options, in particular rocketry, medicine, and morale. The Prototype system I outlined above would make tech rushing no longer essential, as the player would have access to these late game technologies in a limited capacity. This allows the player to focus on other things, and potentially shake up their general research order from playthrough to playthrough. If I get a Steam Turbine prototype early, I no longer need to invest time & resources into rushing the Steam Turbine research to set up a cooling loop. I'll need the research for my second cooling loop and my industrial brick, but that I can do at my leisure rather than feeling like I need to keep continuously researching.

* There's three things that prevent a player from building something in ONI, resources, research, or initiative. We've already discussed the first two, so let me explain what I mean by initiative. ONI is a very complex game and so many systems are interconnected that one relatively small step forward often requires three or four other steps forward to provide the essential infrastructure. A bathroom loop doesn't just need pipes & toilets, it also needs a Sieve, it also needs Water Reservoirs, it also needs a pipe-bridge priority sink. A basic bathroom loop requires half a dozen researches and three layers of infrastructure (clean Water pipes, PWater pipes, wires). More complex builds require dramatically more investment of thought & focus on the part of the player, they require initiative. The current balance of ONI makes resources & initiative the limiting factors because research is so unengaging.

* A suggestion that has come up for how to make research engaging is to add Satellites to the starmap. Satellites would be extremely expensive to launch, or can be repaired from broken satellites that will randomly spawn. Satellites provide Telescope vision of the starmap, but their primary job is to provide Cosmic Research Data to your colony. Most late game techs now require some amount of Cosmic Research Data, only a minimal amount of which is provided to the player pre-Satellites (I'd imagine Telescopes provide a trickle, and Rocket Launches would provide a small burst). Cosmic Research Data would require the new Satellite Uplink to be built in Space, attached to a Cosmic Research Station via automation wires. The Cosmic Research Station creates the new "Science Lab" building which increases the efficiency of other forms of research and allows Cosmic Data to be spent on higher tier researches. Cosmic Data can also be spent to print Coupons, making Satellites an attractive as well as necessary investment.

[Sasza22]

You mentioned yourself that stuff is still unfinished. Resource balance will likely get some tweaks, maybe we`ll get other sources of sulfur who knows. Sucrose even mentions some other uses in it`s description; iirc something connected to recreation so it might get a special building for that or become a food/medical item for stress reduction.

I touched the sublimation station topic in a different thread. I think it has a purpose but can be ignored, similar to the microbe musher. I`m not going to argue about plug slugs either.

I have to agree with the tech tree. It made more sense in the base game but now it has a lot of dead options. Like if you want to get glass tiles or the glass hanging pot from the free glass you get at the start you need textile research (useless in the swamp start) and plastic bed research (also useless for the most part). It also became pretty hard to read. I think it needs a graphical redesign and maybe a reshuffle. It would work great as a ring with basic research starting in the middle and branching out in all directions.

[Pulstar]

I think plug slugs just need a numbers tweak. Considering how much iron I get now from one volcano (and I have 3 on my small icy "4th" planetoid, and 5 other metal volcanoes elsewhere in the cluster) I can see myself trading some of it to turn into into hydrogen to fuel rockets with the cryogenic grapejuice once the hydrogen engine is put into the DLC. Just not 18 tons of iron and 300 slugcycles™ to fill up a single 900 kg fuel tank from the base game. I could never support more than one hydrogen rocket flying constantly in the base game.

[JaxckLl]

2 hours ago, Pulstar said:

I think plug slugs just need a numbers tweak. Considering how much iron I get now from one volcano (and I have 3 on my small icy "4th" planetoid, and 5 other metal volcanoes elsewhere in the cluster) I can see myself trading some of it to turn into into hydrogen to fuel rockets with the cryogenic grapejuice once the hydrogen engine is put into the DLC. Just not 18 tons of iron and 300 slugcycles™ to fill up a single 900 kg fuel tank from the base game. I could never support more than one hydrogen rocket flying constantly in the base game.

Plug Slugs eat Ore, not refined Metal.

[Yunru]

I still say there should be hatch variants that turn processed metals into ore. 

[TripLykely]

11 minutes ago, Yunru said:

I still say there should be hatch variants that turn processed metals into ore. 

This. Which leads nicely into a Plug Slug morph that turns power into ore.

Hard to pick apart the OP, well thought out ideas. We’re still so early in early access I’m hoping a lot of aspects get fleshed out over time (sooner than later, please)

 

[Pulstar]

7 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

Plug Slugs eat Ore, not refined Metal.

My bad, obviously that should also change unless we get a renewable source of ore like rockets trips provided in the base game.

[sheepsy90]

15 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

My principal suggestion would be to put resources on the Starmap itself. One crate can be collected by your command module, with additional tonnage collectable by the Cargo Bay. This would provide a player-directed source of high quality renewables, such as Ice, Metal Ore, or Glass. As an additional incentive, I would add "Coupons" and "Prototypes" which can be discovered in these space crates (or rarely buried on an asteroid). A Coupon would be inserted into your Printing Pod, providing you a special printable option. There would usually be some hidden information, so you might see "2 Hatch Eggs and 2000kg of a random Terran resource" or "4000kg of Algae and three random seeds from a Slime biome". Prototypes allow the player to build a late game machine with alternative resources, but only once. So you might be able to build a Solar Panel with 4000kg of Algae and 500kg Copper Ore, or a Steam Turbine with 6000kg of Igneous Rock. This would turn rocketry into a resource positive system while also making it a valid alternative to tech rushing (an important consideration since research & rocket piloting are linked skill trees).

How about something like an asteroid that moves through the star map that can be exploited when reached in time.

[Sasza22]

6 hours ago, sheepsy90 said:

How about something like an asteroid that moves through the star map that can be exploited when reached in time.

Like a comet. Travelling to the outside tiles of the starmap and coming back every 60-70 cycles with extra resources.

[Pulstar]

Yeah, I was also thinking about having small (smaller than the 3 more distant planetoids are) random destinations of opportunity to reintroduce the more exotic "old" space destinations and some of their functionality along with providing "renewable" resources. As simplistic as the old spaceflight/starmap system was, I miss destinations such as the satellite, the ice giant or the gas giant. Also how are we supposed to get Gassy Moos now?

You could have a few smaller ones spawn and despawn every now and then. The time factor could be interesting. Maybe you would need faster rockets if you want to mine/loot more of them before they are gone, or maintain more rockets and crews or just carefully pick your target if you have just one rocket and few dupes/fuel to spare. Some could have critters your ranchers could get, maybe some could have loot requiring a scientist dupe or engineer? Lots of potential for this idea.

[leyt1125]

I wander how many devs are working on this DLC. It was announced half year ago and ready for 30%? 50%? Anyway its very very slow

[Sasza22]

6 hours ago, leyt1125 said:

I wander how many devs are working on this DLC. It was announced half year ago and ready for 30%? 50%? Anyway its very very slow

The dlc seems to be pretty complex. There`s a ton fo unimplemented features that wouldn`t work without the rest of the stuff done (like the nuclear stuff). If we consider how much stuff they did make already and how long it took for the base game to be done it doesn`t look that slow. But if we just consider the stuff that`s now playable there isn`t a lot. And we got a holiday break in between too so it adds to the slow feeling.

I expect some big things to be added over the next 2 months.

[evilcat19xx]

Well written! I really liked your review, very detail, concise, and on point. I hope the developers also read this post.

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

The only feature that works in the current game is the multiple maps.

True.

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

Rocket interiors are a gimmick and honestly one I could live without. They're extremely exploity right now, and it doesn't feel clever or satisfying.

I hope they can update it, but not remove it.

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

It would also be interesting to add in a third way to produce plastic, albeit one which is less energy efficient than other methods. Sucrose can be refined into Cellulose (perhaps this process also uses Algae), which can then be Crushed or put into a Metal Refinery to produce Plastic.

I like this idea

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

Plug Slugs are terrible.

I really like them, but their diets is terrible.

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

The final major feature of the expansion is rocketry & space exploration. Unfortunately, neither rocketry nor space exploration are at all worth it.

True!

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

Rockets are a massive resource sink that does not provide substantial enough returns to justify the cost.

Well said!

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

Space exploration is extremely dull, with the starmap devoid of any points of interest actually within reach of our crappy rockets.

Really important point. Currently there is no point for space exploration!

On 1/7/2021 at 12:32 PM, JaxckLl said:

I would add "Coupons" and "Prototypes" which can be discovered in these space crates (or rarely buried on an asteroid). A Coupon would be inserted into your Printing Pod, providing you a special printable option.

Great suggestion!

 

[DarkMaster13]

Plug slugs are not terrible if you're not feeding them or only using them in limited quantities as a very early power solution.  You do need a massive battery rack to handle them.  However they're completely blown out by putting down just a few solar panels.

Better research is something I think the game really needs.  Ideally something that isn't a dupe standing around in one place.  The only part about it that's good right now is when you have to balance your clean water usage.  I'd really prefer it if 90% of research work didn't involve the research station.  If we needed to go out and collect research packages from PoI's and locations in space, that'd help a ton.  If we had to do production lines to make resources for the stations, that'd help a ton.  If we needed to find relavent resources in the world to do research related to that item, that would help a ton.  As is, it's something you only need to worry about getting enough water/dirt, which is really easy after the early game, and leave a dupe or two to do nothing else until the whole tree is finished.  You can stop doing everything else in your base in the mean time until you do finish.

[leyt1125]

16 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

 However they're completely blown out by putting down just a few solar panels.

I think solar panels should be unavailable in the first half of the game, with them there is no need for coal / oil / any other generators, they are built too easily on turn 10 from ready-made glass. Make them out of steel, turn on meteor showers, then there will be at least some sense in any other energy recources

[JaxckLl]

5 hours ago, leyt1125 said:

I think solar panels should be unavailable in the first half of the game, with them there is no need for coal / oil / any other generators, they are built too easily on turn 10 from ready-made glass. Make them out of steel, turn on meteor showers, then there will be at least some sense in any other energy recources

Absolute nonsense. Solar Panels give the player a reason to push into the Space Biome. They provide a nice baseline of power which makes developing multiple bases much more manageable. Coal is still really good, especially once you get Hatches. Petrol is still the best energy resource in the game, and extremely abundant to boot.

[Kludge]

I don't get why Plug Slugs are getting a bad wrap.  If anything, they're OP.  Free hydrogen and 1600 watts/slug if you get ranching going early game.  I didn't bother with any generators for over 200 cycles, just from having two slug farms & making sure they don't get space cramped.  If anything, they might need a nerf...

[TripLykely]

24 minutes ago, Kludge said:

I don't get why Plug Slugs are getting a bad wrap.  If anything, they're OP.  Free hydrogen and 1600 watts/slug if you get ranching going early game.  I didn't bother with any generators for over 200 cycles, just from having two slug farms & making sure they don't get space cramped.  If anything, they might need a nerf...

You’ve eliminated a lot of a finite resource, metal ore, that’s why slugs get a bad rap. In 200 cycles x #slugs x ore eaten = many tons of ore you will never get back. Do you need all of that ore, maybe or maybe not, depends on play style. On the swamp slugs are a noob trap because the ore they will consume is cobalt, which has really great thermal properties. You have no way to get more cobalt (as of now)

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 1/7/2021 at 11:32 AM, JaxckLl said:

The DLC as it stands has three main features, only one of which is kind of implemented well.

* The only feature that works in the current game is the multiple maps. This was a clever way to squeak out additional performance which also helps to concentrate the experience and encourage experimentation with all the different ways to generate basic resources. Rocket interiors are a gimmick and honestly one I could live without. They're extremely exploity right now, and it doesn't feel clever or satisfying.

* The new resource economy has some great ideas, but it's a little janky at the moment (and obviously unfinished since we don't have uses for radioactive elements yet). I'll discuss each of the new cycles that exist in a separate bullet.

* Sulphur is renewable via Geyser or extremely poorly through a Sour Gas Boiler (the amount of Sulphur produced from a typically efficient Sour Gas Boiler isn't even enough for a single Grub/Grub ranch). It's an isolated chain which leads to calories or crappy rocket fuel. We need a conversion source of Sulphur, a way of generating Sulphur that scales with player investment (such as a machine that breaks down Nat Gas into Hydrogen and Sulphur). I'd also like to see a machine which can convert CO2 directly to NatGas, especially since such technology will be essential for our real life exploration of Mars.

* Sucrose needs additional uses outside one mediocre recipe & crappy rocket fuel. Perhaps it can take on a role like Salt, and be able to be ground down into "Granulated Sugar" and added to food to make it "Sweet". "Sweet-tooth" would be a new trait that provides dupes with an additional morale bonus whenever they eat a sweet food. It would also be interesting to add in a third way to produce plastic, albeit one which is less energy efficient than other methods. Sucrose can be refined into Cellulose (perhaps this process also uses Algae), which can then be Crushed or put into a Metal Refinery to produce Plastic. This would serve as a great early-game source of Plastic.

* Mud is a great material that fits into the world of ONI well. Sand has never been a very interesting mechanic, mostly because it's not in large enough quantities to matter. Having a biome that is mostly Mud (much like the mostly Sand asteroid from the base game) is interesting, and it's great to have some solid sources of Water. However the new Sublimation Station currently serves no purpose. The Sublimation Station stands as an alternative to just digging out another dozen tiles of floor. Why waste time, energy, and metal on a machine when instead I can just dig out my base faster? My suggestion would be to make the Sublimation Station an actual Station rather than a machine. The "Sublimation" room would accelerate & increase the efficiency of off-gasing, making it a natural upgrade to PO2 generation as opposed to a subpar alternative. This would also solve the problem of how the Station cannot accept other off-gasing materials it really should be logically able to (such as Slime or Bleachstone).

* Plug Slugs are terrible. They are the worst power source in the game and it's not even close. They need a massive redesign to have a place in the game and they need an extremely rewarding morph. They are a noob trap which ruins playthroughs.

* The final major feature of the expansion is rocketry & space exploration. Unfortunately, neither rocketry nor space exploration are at all worth it. Rockets aren't even good enough to support our starting two asteroids, let alone the others that exist in the cluster. They're fiddly, exploity, and unnecessarily annoying. Rockets are a massive resource sink that does not provide substantial enough returns to justify the cost. Space exploration is extremely dull, with the starmap devoid of any points of interest actually within reach of our crappy rockets. Rockets need to be more straightforward to use, far less resource intensive, more capable of executing round trips, and they need to provide resources in some fashion to make rocketry a valid alternative to Oil exploitation.

* My principal suggestion would be to put resources on the Starmap itself. One crate can be collected by your command module, with additional tonnage collectable by the Cargo Bay. This would provide a player-directed source of high quality renewables, such as Ice, Metal Ore, or Glass. As an additional incentive, I would add "Coupons" and "Prototypes" which can be discovered in these space crates (or rarely buried on an asteroid). A Coupon would be inserted into your Printing Pod, providing you a special printable option. There would usually be some hidden information, so you might see "2 Hatch Eggs and 2000kg of a random Terran resource" or "4000kg of Algae and three random seeds from a Slime biome". Prototypes allow the player to build a late game machine with alternative resources, but only once. So you might be able to build a Solar Panel with 4000kg of Algae and 500kg Copper Ore, or a Steam Turbine with 6000kg of Igneous Rock. This would turn rocketry into a resource positive system while also making it a valid alternative to tech rushing (an important consideration since research & rocket piloting are linked skill trees).

* Finally the tech tree also needs some tweaks. As of right now, tech rushing is far, far too important. There are some trees which are absolutely essential, usually only for one important building (such as Liquid Reservoirs & Steam Turbines, or Automation Wires & Atmo Sensors). This ends up making other trees dominated options, in particular rocketry, medicine, and morale. The Prototype system I outlined above would make tech rushing no longer essential, as the player would have access to these late game technologies in a limited capacity. This allows the player to focus on other things, and potentially shake up their general research order from playthrough to playthrough. If I get a Steam Turbine prototype early, I no longer need to invest time & resources into rushing the Steam Turbine research to set up a cooling loop. I'll need the research for my second cooling loop and my industrial brick, but that I can do at my leisure rather than feeling like I need to keep continuously researching.

* There's three things that prevent a player from building something in ONI, resources, research, or initiative. We've already discussed the first two, so let me explain what I mean by initiative. ONI is a very complex game and so many systems are interconnected that one relatively small step forward often requires three or four other steps forward to provide the essential infrastructure. A bathroom loop doesn't just need pipes & toilets, it also needs a Sieve, it also needs Water Reservoirs, it also needs a pipe-bridge priority sink. A basic bathroom loop requires half a dozen researches and three layers of infrastructure (clean Water pipes, PWater pipes, wires). More complex builds require dramatically more investment of thought & focus on the part of the player, they require initiative. The current balance of ONI makes resources & initiative the limiting factors because research is so unengaging.

* A suggestion that has come up for how to make research engaging is to add Satellites to the starmap. Satellites would be extremely expensive to launch, or can be repaired from broken satellites that will randomly spawn. Satellites provide Telescope vision of the starmap, but their primary job is to provide Cosmic Research Data to your colony. Most late game techs now require some amount of Cosmic Research Data, only a minimal amount of which is provided to the player pre-Satellites (I'd imagine Telescopes provide a trickle, and Rocket Launches would provide a small burst). Cosmic Research Data would require the new Satellite Uplink to be built in Space, attached to a Cosmic Research Station via automation wires. The Cosmic Research Station creates the new "Science Lab" building which increases the efficiency of other forms of research and allows Cosmic Data to be spent on higher tier researches. Cosmic Data can also be spent to print Coupons, making Satellites an attractive as well as necessary investment.

This is a great post, but I have a different viewpoint on pretty much everything.  Since you started with resources, I'll start there too.

• Sulphur: Its great to actually have a use for sulphur.  It isn't a new resource, but having a use for it is.  The fact that we can now use it to generate calories or power a rocket is a great improvement in my opinion.  I do agree with your idea that the petroleum refinery should output some sulphur as one of its other byproducts is natural gas.  However, I'm not sure that we need a building to produce natural gas from crude or petrol. We already have geysers for natural gas (and not petrol) and other than cooking, natural gas is simply a fuel like petrol.
• Sucrose: I do like your idea of granulated sugar.  I have an insanely powerful sweet tooth, so its my opinion that a little more sugar can't hurt anything. =^.^=  I also like your plastics idea, but it seems to me that we'd need a way to produce algae if that's the case.  
• Mud: I agree that mud is great.  I've been having a great time on the new asteroid filled with mud.  However, I disagree with your assessment regarding the sublimation station.  I've found it to be a wonderful tool on the new asteroid. One station can supply 5 or 6 dupes with all the polluted oxygen they need, and once you pair it with deoderizers,  you can easily pressurize your base to whatever you like, and get prolific amounts of clay to turn into ceramics.  With that said.. I do think that it would be great if the station would sublimate other materials such as Slime or Bleachstone.
• Plug Slugs:  These little guys ROCK!  The trick, I've found, is to use a lot of batteries.  Currently I'm on cycle 200 of my base and I'm using over 1kw of power almost continually.  My base's power set up is 8 slugs that are untamed but fed and 3 solar panels.  Rarely, a hydrogen generator kicks in, but usually the slugs and the panels are sufficient.  I do agree that a morph would be great -- perhaps one that eats refined metals instead of metal ores, since ores aren't renewable.  If you DO decide to tame slugs, I recommend only taming one or two, or you'll run out of metal ores far too quickly.
• Rocketry:  You say that rocketry isn't capable of sustaining the first two asteroids -- but I haven't needed rocketry to make those asteroids sustainable.  The teleporters allowing you send water to the terra asteroid and metals back to the mudball are plenty to get those two sustainable.  I can't remark farther on this yet, since I haven't launched any rockets yet.  As far as range and fuels -- that's a work in progress. Klei told us when they opened it up to alpha that the rocketry stuff wasn't anywhere near completion. 
• Starmap:  I've enjoyed the new star map. The new method of scanning the area around the asteroid with telescopes is kinda nice. I have a couple of targets ready for exploring once I put the finishing touches on my rocket and finally get around to launching it.  It makes more sense to me than having a vertical hierarchy of targets.
• Tech Tree:  I disagree with your assessment about the tech tree.  While I do certainly rush certain researches, the particular "rush" I have changes from asteroid to asteroid.  The entire point of the tech tree is that certain branches are going to have different technologies, so you need to build your own priority of what tech you want to unlock first.  There really isn't anything in the tech trees that are critical to early game survival.  Are there particular buildings that make play easier?  Absolutely!  I tend to revise my base multiple times during play as new technologies are finally researched and unlocked so that things become more efficient or better resources can be used.  I do agree with you about the medical branch.  In my opinion it is under-utilized.  It is usually the last branch I research because I never have any medical issues to deal with in my bases.  The most common ailment my dupes get in the current DLC is hypothermia.
• Initiative: Quote: "A bathroom loop doesn't just need pipes & toilets, it also needs a Sieve, it also needs Water Reservoirs, it also needs a pipe-bridge priority sink."  I disagree with this statement.  Early in the game, I dig a pit in the ground, build a pump at the bottom and a liquid vent at the top, then I seal it off.  Fresh water gets pumped in to the sink and lavatory, and polluted water goes into the pit.  Later, when I DO get a sieve built, I'll start recycling the water and build showers.  In my current map, the only reservoir I have built is connected to my metal refinery.  Basically, what I'm arguing is that you don't need to build something complex right away from the very start.  You can build the necessary components (sink/toilet) and add the nice stuff such as sieves later.  As for the "bridge priority" sink.. all you need to do is make certain that the liquid can always flow out of a sink.  You can do this by building the sink at the 'front' end of the polluted water line with at least two pipe segments between it and the toilet.  The water flows from the sink, past the toilet, and eventually into wherever you catch your waste.  Bridges are definitely useful and a more robust design, but they aren't necessary.  Your statement that a lack of initiative prevents players from playing is, I agree, spot on.  But that's always the case. The only alternative is to coerce or attempt to force people to play.  Personally, I think that the complexity of ONI is one of its engaging factors for play.  Over the years, many MMORPGs that I used to play have continually and systematically reduced their complexity for play -- and I no longer play them.  I started getting bored as things became less complex, and eventually I no longer had any drive to play them.  "Oooh, sit down, click a bunch of buttons in the right order and I win" got really boring.  In my opinion, the great thing about ONI is its complexity.  That complexity, however, is completely determined by the player.  You can plug in a gas or liquid filter by simply researching to that part of the tech tree... or you can design a more complex system of valves and bridges that utilize the way ONI mechanics works to do the filtering without wasting power.  Either way accomplishes the same goal, but the differences in complexity will appeal to different players in different ways.
• Satellites: This is an interesting idea.  I personally haven't had any difficulty getting cosmic research done, but the idea of building a research satellite appeals to me.  That said.. The best "deep space research" satellite I can think of would be hollowing out an asteroid and building your base inside it.   The shell of the asteroid would protect your base from high velocity space debris and protect your dupes from solar radiation.  .. Hang on.. isn't ONI's premise that we're trapped inside an asteroid and we must hollow it out to build a sustainable base.... Perhaps, as an alternative, one of the last tech tree researches could add to the robots we can build.  We've got one for cleaning up messes, and one for getting a base started on an asteroid.  Maybe we could get one that we could fire off into space and it would report back periodically with new solar system scans, opening up our starmap.  Maybe it would require a nuclear power source or something.

Anyway, while I disagree with your point of view, I am glad that you took the time to write up the initial post.   Thank you for your point of view.

1 hour ago, TripLykely said:

On the swamp slugs are a noob trap because the ore they will consume is cobalt

Only if you don't dig up.  Right above the starting biome is a LOT of copper ore.
However, I agree that we should be able to feed the slugs a renewable resource later in the game, such as refined metals.  As far as I know, they're the only critter that exclusively eats a non-renewable resource.

[TripLykely]

51 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

Only if you don't dig up.  Right above the starting biome is a LOT of copper ore.

Absolutely, but a new player is unlikely to a)know cobalt has great properties and should be conserved b)that copper is easily accessible doing the logical early solar setup. Doing solar early may not even be obvious to a new player as they may not realize ready-made glass is easily available. I imagine many new players would over pursue slug ranches for power as they appear an easy solution thus depleting a precious limited resource. Obvious caveat, theres been a lot of talk about slugs and I'm entirely sure Klei has something in the works to improve them (morph, diet, mechanic, something). I like the idea of slugs and look forward to further fleshing out the idea.

[JaxckLl]

@ KittenIsAGeeek: Thanks for the reply, here's what I have to say about your response.

• Sulphur. You misread my suggestion about NatGas. What I'd like is two new conversion options, one to break down NatGas into Hydrogen & Sulphur, the other to convert CO2 to NatGas. The former lets us scale Sulphur consumption to NatGas production, and gives the player something else to do with a continuous NatGas supply. As NatGas is a highly renewable late game resource, such a system would let us diversify late game food even more and in a way unique to Spaced Out. The second system opens up NatGas use as a fuel for rockets and allows for a small scale dedicated NatGas system to switch on the Cooking Range. I'd imagine such a system would be quite power intensive, potentially allowing for the use of NatGas as a "battery biproduct" when paired with Solar Panels. NatGas is an interesting material to explore especially with how it fits with Spaced Out's newfound appreciation for Sulphur.
• Sucrose. Algae is renewable via the PO2 -> Slime Puft route. It's not the best because of the complexity of the Puft. I would like to see some kind of solar-based Algae renewal system. Perhaps a new type of fluid which produces Algae when exposed to the sun? Provides another use for Glass, and would make early & mid game Pacu ranching much more viable.
• Sublimation. I've been trying Sublimation more in my current playthrough. It's okay. It's still not very good compared to other Oxygen sources, but I can see it having purpose as an early game tool. I still would like to see it get a buff and become a station rather than a machine, as I feel that would make it a more interesting and less spammable design for late game bases.
• Plug Slugs. Yeah no. I have run out of ore three times in my current game because the teleporter spawned as far away as possible. If I had been ranching Plug Slugs, I'd have had to restart because of lack of metal. They are a trap, and a really bad one at that.
• Rocketry. You misunderstood my point. The first two asteroids are sustainable without rocketry, which is a problem. Everything you can do in vanilla you can do between the first two asteroids. This makes rockets uninteresting, especially since they are so costly for so little return. I get it that rocketry is unfinished, I'm reviewing the DLC as it is right now and providing feedback which I feel will steer Spaced Out in the best direction. The issue right now is not one of the availability of rockets, its one of a lack of incentive to use rockets at all. It's not just that rockets aren't very good, it's that there's nowhere to go with them.
• Starmap. I'd like it to be more interactive, but yes I agree that the Starmap is quite a cool feature.
• Tech Tree. Calories are extremely sparse on the first two asteroids in Spaced Out, especially compared to vanilla. Grills are still a must get first thing, as are all the techs for a bathroom loop. My problem with the tech tree is that there are apparently loads of options, but in practice there's almost always a dominant choice which should be gotten first. It's the same issue with Civilization's tech tree; there's almost never a good reason to not get Libraries first. There's a dominant choice because certain resources are essential or too valuable compared to other options. Why would I waste time researching Juicers when instead I could get Solar Panels?
• Initiative. That's why I said "bathroom loop" not "bathroom dump". The point of a bathroom loop is that it is pumpless and only time you spend power is with the Sieve. If you have a reservoir on either side of the Sieve, you can just run it whenever you have free watts in your grid, potentially making it completely power neutral. The bridge priority exit is necessary because Bathrooms are slightly water positive, so if you have a closed system like I'm describing you will eventually fill up with too much PWater. My point about initiative is that the complexity of ONI is such that there is almost always an optimum model for a build. Players are discouraged from investing mental energy in a system once they discover this optimum, because the discovery of the optimum models is mentally taxing. As systems become more complicated, the optimums become more complicated and it becomes less interesting to fiddle & experiment because the return of an optimum build gets pushed further & further out. I feel that this perfectly describes rocketry at the moment. It is an intensely complicated system which requires infrastructure on three different maps, at least one highly skilled dupe, and significant resource investment which in turn requires its own complex infrastructure. The initiative of the player is drained when approaching rocketry because each step forward is so complex and offers its own opportunities for optimization and thus suboptimization. Streamers who play ONI professionally are barely capable of setting up working rocket networks. The system is far too complex and the rewards far too amorphous for the average or new player.
• Robots. I would love to see a robot rocket. 99% of all rockets humans have launched have not had people on board, it seems very strange that ALL rockets in ONI need a professional pilot. Perhaps robot rockets require some kind of control centre & satellite coverage?

[Romyleigh]

  I don't think you're supposed to ranch plug slugs. You're just supposed to ranch 1 plug slug. It's 1600 watts all night. Fill a rack of batteries and set timers on all your expensive stuff so it only runs at night. Then just round up all the others and let em starve in a room for 40 free watts/ slug forever. Even if you don't want to feed ONE, you can still stick them all in a room for a small amount of totally free watts forever with no maintainance and they drop dead and leave meat every once in a while. Loss of cobalt to even 1 plug slug still hurts but they're obviously not meant to be used as anything but a stepping stone to sustainable power. You can either lose the metal to a slug or the coal to a generator so... it's a choice.

[JaxckLl]

15 hours ago, Romyleigh said:

  I don't think you're supposed to ranch plug slugs. You're just supposed to ranch 1 plug slug. It's 1600 watts all night. Fill a rack of batteries and set timers on all your expensive stuff so it only runs at night. Then just round up all the others and let em starve in a room for 40 free watts/ slug forever. Even if you don't want to feed ONE, you can still stick them all in a room for a small amount of totally free watts forever with no maintainance and they drop dead and leave meat every once in a while. Loss of cobalt to even 1 plug slug still hurts but they're obviously not meant to be used as anything but a stepping stone to sustainable power. You can either lose the metal to a slug or the coal to a generator so... it's a choice.

If you're "not supposed to", then the option wouldn't exist. Plug Slugs produce a pitiful amount of power, they consume an extremely limited resource, and they do not provide a good return on calories when ranched. They are a terrible critter at the moment, there's no argument otherwise. 10W in a cycle is meaningless. The only way forward with Plug Slugs involves some or all of these points,

• They need to consume something other than metal ore, and that something needs to be sustainable (my suggestion is Ice). Ore is an extremely expensive resource which is totally non-sustainable. Even if meteors were to come back, that wouldn't solve the problem. Plug Slugs are presented as an early game option while meteors are a late game resource. By the time the player can effectively deal with meteors (and their extreme heat), Plug Slugs will be gone.
• Plug Slugs need a better output of power. When wild Plug Slugs were flat 400W they were barely worth it. Those numbers made the natural supply of Plug Slugs competitive with the normal start of a pair of Mousewheels. Now, you could double the population of wild Plug Slugs and they still would not generate a comparable amount of power.
• A great suggestion that came up in another thread is the Slug Plug, a station which can have a Plug inserted by a Rancher to provide the max output from the Slug during the day part of the cycle. The "Recently Plugged In" debuff would prevent the player from continuously using such a station with the same slug, encouraging maintenance of the existing population of Slugs as a continuous source of power. The Slug Plug would also serve as a great source of power for rockets or when establishing new bases.
• We need reasons to ranch Plug Slugs that strategically make sense. As you pointed out, the optimum build for Slugs right now (provided you are using the console to provide a continuous supply of Ore) is to have a single breeder and a large wild population. A shift in diet to reduce the disincentive to ranching and the introduction of a bonus like the Slug Plug would make ranching Slugs more widely viable. It's clear that starve ranching is not the direction Klei wants to take Plug Slugs, so that's why I'm focusing my suggestions around that issue.
• Finally, Plug Slugs really want a high end morph. This morph could be associated with the new radioactive systems, perhaps acting as a consumer of radioactivity.

[NewWorldDan]

14 minutes ago, JaxckLl said:

We need reasons to ranch Plug Slugs that strategically make sense. As you pointed out, the optimum build for Slugs right now (provided you are using the console to provide a continuous supply of Ore) is to have a single breeder and a large wild population. A shift in diet to reduce the disincentive to ranching and the introduction of a bonus like the Slug Plug would make ranching Slugs more widely viable. It's clear that starve ranching is not the direction Klei wants to take Plug Slugs, so that's why I'm focusing my suggestions around that issue.

I'm eventually anticipating a return of hydrogen rockets.  Feeding slugs and the Saturn Critter Trap to make hydrogen - especially with water being relatively scarce - will be an alternative to running elctrolyzers and venting the surplus oxygen to space.  But the slugs need a renewable source of ore, or a morph that eats refined metals, because that will run out fast.  I suspect the devs have more in mind for hydrogen than just a source of clean power.

One of the best parts of the DLC is that I'm maximizing the in game resources and mechanisms as never before.  All these asteroids without renewable water present challenges if you want sustainable colonies on each.  I do.  Heck, I could do with more of them.  Asteroids without any special resources that only function as space stations on the way to farther out otherwise unreachable asteroids.  

[DarkMaster13]

On 1/11/2021 at 6:07 PM, JaxckLl said:

@ KittenIsAGeeek: Thanks for the reply, here's what I have to say about your response.

• Sulphur. You misread my suggestion about NatGas. What I'd like is two new conversion options, one to break down NatGas into Hydrogen & Sulphur, the other to convert CO2 to NatGas. The former lets us scale Sulphur consumption to NatGas production, and gives the player something else to do with a continuous NatGas supply. As NatGas is a highly renewable late game resource, such a system would let us diversify late game food even more and in a way unique to Spaced Out. The second system opens up NatGas use as a fuel for rockets and allows for a small scale dedicated NatGas system to switch on the Cooking Range. I'd imagine such a system would be quite power intensive, potentially allowing for the use of NatGas as a "battery biproduct" when paired with Solar Panels. NatGas is an interesting material to explore especially with how it fits with Spaced Out's newfound appreciation for Sulphur.

I'm not sure where sulfur comes from in this equation.  Natural gas is H4C, hydrogen and carbon.  It's sour gas that's used as a source of sulfur, by cooling it so it splits into natural gas and sulfur.  A system that lets you turn CO2 and hydrogen into natural gas and oxygen would make sense at a large electric cost (minimum double the power you could generate by burning that natural gas in a generator).

You'd need oil of some kind before including sulfur makes any sense.