General DLC review

[Yunru]

3 hours ago, DarkMaster13 said:

Natural gas is H4C, hydrogen and carbon. 

No, natural gas is natural gas, encompassing a range of things that could be called "natural gas" including farts. 

Leave your real life expectations and definitions at the door, and embrace the fact that science is defining what we observe, not what we expect. 

[TheMule]

On 1/11/2021 at 6:42 PM, TripLykely said:

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)

But you have hundreds tons of cobalt ore. Slugs are for early game power, very low requirement. A bunch of wild ones is enough to power your base and don't eat too much.

In short they replace the manual generator in the early phase of the game, and maybe can be extended for a bit longer, to complement a coal generators.

Ranching one single slug is also an option. It isn't sustainable, but it's not the first thing in ONI that isn't.

 

BTW, you all are assuming that meteors are gone for good, but I doubt it. They were our source of metal ore, and filtration medium.

I think Klei disabled them to allow us explore and test the new rockets, w/o having to build a full scale space setup (bunker doors, regolith removal) every time. With all the restarts we have to perform, moving rockets to early game was a good idea.

But, bunker doors are still part of the game, so I suspect meteors are coming back at some time in the future.

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 1/12/2021 at 10:10 AM, JaxckLl said:

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.

I disagree with much of this.  I think Plug Slugs are pretty cool.  The only part I really agree with is the "consume an extremely limited resource."  All the other critters consume something that is renewable.  Adding a morph that consumes something renewable would be awesome.

As for power.. They produce quite a bit of it, actually, both as the critter and as a byproduct (hydrogen).  Lets start with the wild slugs.  A Wild slug that has been fed produces 400 watts of power for about 75 seconds -- the duration of night -- and consumes 15kg of metal ore.  5% of that mass gets returned as hydrogen (750g) which will run a hydrogen generator for 7.5 seconds.  Assuming that the generator hasn't been tuned up, that's 800 watts for 7.5 seconds.

That means each wild slug, as long as it is fed, will produce 3600kJ of power per cycle, or just shy of 1 jumbo battery.  Assuming no battery losses, that's 60 watts of power for the cost of 15kg of metal ore.  Of course, the slug won't always start sleeping immediately at night -- they must crawl to a proper location to hang -- and batteries leak power, so you won't actually get the full 60 watts.  A good stable design will get pretty close.  A tame slug has 4 times the production and 4 times the metabolism of a wild slug.  So a tamed and fed slug will produce 1600 watts for 75 seconds and consume 60kg of ore, producing 3kg of hydrogen.  Thus 1 tame slug or 4 wild slugs will produce 144kJ of power (counting the hydrogen).  That's a steady 240 watts of power, provided you have enough batteries to capture the output from the slugs at night.  If you keep your generator tuned up, for the measly cost of 5kg refined metal every 3 cycles, then the numbers become 39kJ (65 watts) for a wild slug and 156kJ (260 watts) for a tamed slug.

Alternatively you can use them to supplement power at night.  1 wild slug (fed) produces 400 watts while a solar panel produces at maximum 380 watts.  Since there is a ramp-up/ramp-down production during the day, the average comes out to around 300 watts continuous per panel.  I haven't done the specific math on this one, but my observations show that 3 panels and 2 wild slugs will provide about 850 watts of power continuously if you use a battery to catch the extra during mid-day.  With only one battery being used, your leakage losses are lower and there is less heat added to your base.  With the solar panels providing power in the day and your slugs providing power at night, the hydrogen will be available for when you need extra power in burst situations -- 15 seconds of run time per cycle.  You could use more panels and not feed the slugs, but then you'll need more batteries to hold power during the night.

Finally, there's the calories... I don't farm slugs for calories -- there are much more efficient critters for that.  However, they are still providing calories when they die, even if I don't feed them.  It isn't a lot, but its free food!

[TripLykely]

6 hours ago, TheMule said:

But you have hundreds tons of cobalt ore. Slugs are for early game power, very low requirement. A bunch of wild ones is enough to power your base and don't eat too much.

Again, I think in their current form slugs are a trap for new players, because grooming and breeding slugs seems intuitive. Easy power, many tons of cobalt (where have you seen hundreds btw, I’ve never seen over 100). Personally I like slugs, ONI does a great job with synergy between critters and industry, and I look forward to whatever evolution (morphs preferred most) Klei throws at us. It’s too cliche to angle my position behind ‘what about new players’ which is fair. In reality if a new player ranches and grooms a bunch of slugs thinking it’s easy power and food depleting their cobalt it affects me not. And given Klei’s catalogue they don’t seem to mind punishing new players with their games (part of why I like them)

[JaxckLl]

15 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I disagree with much of this.  I think Plug Slugs are pretty cool.  The only part I really agree with is the "consume an extremely limited resource."  All the other critters consume something that is renewable.  Adding a morph that consumes something renewable would be awesome.

As for power.. They produce quite a bit of it, actually, both as the critter and as a byproduct (hydrogen).  Lets start with the wild slugs.  A Wild slug that has been fed produces 400 watts of power for about 75 seconds -- the duration of night -- and consumes 15kg of metal ore.  5% of that mass gets returned as hydrogen (750g) which will run a hydrogen generator for 7.5 seconds.  Assuming that the generator hasn't been tuned up, that's 800 watts for 7.5 seconds.

That means each wild slug, as long as it is fed, will produce 3600kJ of power per cycle, or just shy of 1 jumbo battery.  Assuming no battery losses, that's 60 watts of power for the cost of 15kg of metal ore.  Of course, the slug won't always start sleeping immediately at night -- they must crawl to a proper location to hang -- and batteries leak power, so you won't actually get the full 60 watts.  A good stable design will get pretty close.  A tame slug has 4 times the production and 4 times the metabolism of a wild slug.  So a tamed and fed slug will produce 1600 watts for 75 seconds and consume 60kg of ore, producing 3kg of hydrogen.  Thus 1 tame slug or 4 wild slugs will produce 144kJ of power (counting the hydrogen).  That's a steady 240 watts of power, provided you have enough batteries to capture the output from the slugs at night.  If you keep your generator tuned up, for the measly cost of 5kg refined metal every 3 cycles, then the numbers become 39kJ (65 watts) for a wild slug and 156kJ (260 watts) for a tamed slug.

Alternatively you can use them to supplement power at night.  1 wild slug (fed) produces 400 watts while a solar panel produces at maximum 380 watts.  Since there is a ramp-up/ramp-down production during the day, the average comes out to around 300 watts continuous per panel.  I haven't done the specific math on this one, but my observations show that 3 panels and 2 wild slugs will provide about 850 watts of power continuously if you use a battery to catch the extra during mid-day.  With only one battery being used, your leakage losses are lower and there is less heat added to your base.  With the solar panels providing power in the day and your slugs providing power at night, the hydrogen will be available for when you need extra power in burst situations -- 15 seconds of run time per cycle.  You could use more panels and not feed the slugs, but then you'll need more batteries to hold power during the night.

Finally, there's the calories... I don't farm slugs for calories -- there are much more efficient critters for that.  However, they are still providing calories when they die, even if I don't feed them.  It isn't a lot, but its free food!

15kg of a non-renewable per cycle, plus 5kg of Refined every three? Just for power? That's an awful trade when instead you can use dupe time, coal, water, or just raw heat. That's not to mention "free" sources such as Solar or wild Lumber. Your numbers make the argument against Plug Slugs even more damning because under optimum conditions, a ranch of Plug Slugs is barely competitive with a pair of Coal gens. Those Coal gens will be fed by Sage Hatches, which have a far, far greater return on calories negating your nonsense point about Plug Slugs producing "free" calories.

At every point in the game there is a better option than Plug Slugs. This is because they consume too valuable of a resource for too paltry a return. I honestly see no way to balance Plug Slugs that consume Ore which makes them an attractive option compared to sustainable & upgradable forms of power.

• Early game Plug Slugs are dominated by Mousewheels. Mousewheels are cheaper, easier to set up, and can be kept for as long as needed without any risk of exhausting a valuable resource.
• Mid game Plug Slugs are dominated by Coal & Hydrolysis. Two Coal gens produce more steady power than the perfect scenario you described, and are far cheaper to maintain. Sages into Coal also produces dramatically more calories than Plug Slug's negligible return.
• Late game Plug Slugs are dominated by Steam & Lumber. Lumber takes time to set up, but once done provides a permanent & steady source of power & dirt for no further investment. Steam from geothermal sources is much the same.
• Finally, Plug Slugs have no place in a base that has even the crudest of Petrol Boilers.

The only niche Plug Slugs *might* have is alongside Mousewheels. However for that to be the case, starvation ranching would have to be reenabled. There's no way an ore eating critter can be effectively ranched in the early game. Plug Slugs are a dominated design which does not have a place as an exciting or valid option. They do not build into any interesting systems, and they do not make any resource cycles more interesting.

[KittenIsAGeek]

7 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

• Early game Plug Slugs are dominated by Mousewheels. Mousewheels are cheaper, easier to set up, and can be kept for as long as needed without any risk of exhausting a valuable resource.
• Mid game Plug Slugs are dominated by Coal & Hydrolysis. Two Coal gens produce more steady power than the perfect scenario you described, and are far cheaper to maintain. Sages into Coal also produces dramatically more calories than Plug Slug's negligible return.
• Late game Plug Slugs are dominated by Steam & Lumber. Lumber takes time to set up, but once done provides a permanent & steady source of power & dirt for no further investment. Steam from geothermal sources is much the same.
• Finally, Plug Slugs have no place in a base that has even the crudest of Petrol Boilers.

• Early game Plug Slugs free up your dupes.  Yes, Plug Slugs eat a non-renewable resource (and I keep hoping there will be a morph that ingests a renewable), but in the early game the impact is fairly minimal.  One tile of ore, after being dug out, will feed a slug for 46 cycles.  Additionally, wild Slugs don't have as quick of a decay as tamed slugs, so if you decide to not feed them, you'll still get 300 watts out of them for a couple dozen rest cycles.
• Mid-game Coal is not achievable on the Swamp cluster world that the Plug Slugs call home until you start shipping from Terra.  It isn't renewable without hatches, and the few pockets I've found on the swamp start asteroid have been barely enough to make ceramics and refined carbon.  Sure, sages and coal produce more calories and power than slugs -- but you have to import them from another asteroid first. Hydrogen is definitely a good fuel, provided you have a way to generate it.  The small amount emitted by the slugs is great at covering burst periods of your base activity.  If you've switched to electrolysis by this point in your game, your total available hydrogen is going to be limited by the amount of dupes breathing the oxygen.  In the later part of the game, where you're creating LoX or Oxylite, OR if you decide to vent oxygen to space, then the availability of hydrogen increases dramatically.  Usually around cycle 200 or so is when I've established things enough to transition my power supply to a source other than slugs -- and by then they really haven't impacted my supply of metal ores that much.
• Steam and Lumber are very excellent power sources.  Fully renewable and definitely capable of powering your base.  Once you achieve these, or have access to Petrol, there really isn't a strong argument to continue using your slugs.  However, all three will require that you have visited other asteroids.  The slime world lacks crude (required for plastics and petrol), and lacks trees.  There is also not a good source of heat to power the steam turbine on the slime asteroid -- but you can work around that.

My argument wasn't that they're The Best.  I was arguing that I think they're a great critter and they are useful.  Do they scale well?  Not as they stand.  I could certainly tame a stable with 8 of them and power some continuously-running industrialization -- except that they only eat a non-renewable resource.  Until they have a morph that consumes a renewable, they can't really be used in large quantities.  However, taming 1 or 2, or feeding 8 wild ones, is definitely a useful alternative that has been working quite well for me.

[JaxckLl]

There's no defensible way to describe Plug Slugs as "great". They're clearly an alpha build, one which uses a janky & dysfunctional design which has been balanced suboptimal to literally every other power source in the game. Plug Slugs feel like a mod they're so at odds with the design goals of other ONI power sources. Moving to the second asteroid is extremely easy and should be a high priority item achieved before taking your fifth dupe. Indeed, I usually reserve my fifth pick for a dedicated teleport, with the presumption being that the sixth dupe will be taken on the second asteroid. It's childplay at that point to bring over hatches to the Swampy asteroid and get Coal going. You also have access to abundant Ethanol on the second asteroid, which can make a Petrol Generator a viable option for both asteroids.

There's never a point in the game where Plug Slugs are a good option. They are at best an opportunity resource, like starter Oxylite. However in practice their not even really worth that effort. The effort of dumping them in a room is not worth the risk of losing valuable metal ore.

[DarkMaster13]

11 minutes ago, JaxckLl said:

There's no defensible way to describe Plug Slugs as "great". They're clearly an alpha build, one which uses a janky & dysfunctional design which has been balanced suboptimal to literally every other power source in the game. Plug Slugs feel like a mod they're so at odds with the design goals of other ONI power sources. Moving to the second asteroid is extremely easy and should be a high priority item achieved before taking your fifth dupe. Indeed, I usually reserve my fifth pick for a dedicated teleport, with the presumption being that the sixth dupe will be taken on the second asteroid. It's childplay at that point to bring over hatches to the Swampy asteroid and get Coal going. You also have access to abundant Ethanol on the second asteroid, which can make a Petrol Generator a viable option for both asteroids.

There's never a point in the game where Plug Slugs are a good option. They are at best an opportunity resource, like starter Oxylite. However in practice their not even really worth that effort. The effort of dumping them in a room is not worth the risk of losing valuable metal ore.

I would not go that far.  You're going to want a rancher anyway so you can move sweetles around.  So you may as well throw the slugs into a loft ranch with wires to capture their power.  Even before that you can trap one on a floating rock with a wire underneath it to save yourself a bit of dupe labor.  Are they better than other options you have access to later?  No.  Are they worth using?  Yes.  Same purpose as an oxygen diffuser is or normal hatches.

All we really need is a morph that consumes something else or an alternative diet option for them to convert into for long term use.  Then they'll fit their own niche within the game just fine.

Assuming of course that something happens with solar.  At the moment that's still a far better choice for power than anything else you could possibly do in the game.

[TheMule]

On 1/17/2021 at 4:22 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

Early game Plug Slugs free up your dupes.  Yes, Plug Slugs eat a non-renewable resource (and I keep hoping there will be a morph that ingests a renewable), but in the early game the impact is fairly minimal.  One tile of ore, after being dug out, will feed a slug for 46 cycles.  Additionally, wild Slugs don't have as quick of a decay as tamed slugs, so if you decide to not feed them, you'll still get 300 watts out of them for a couple dozen rest cycles.

This. Today, slugs are a good early game option. Better for sure than manual generators, that consume precious early game resources (oxygen, food and infrastructure - the same dups consume). Would I ranch them? Probably not, I just collect them and keep them wild. I guess I could optimize their food distribution but I don't bother. When I see my dups spending too much time on the hamster wheel, I look at the slugs, if they are low on food, I drop some ore on their platform. BTW, I don't do solar. I think meteor are disabled for testing purposes and I want to test the viability of a map in case they re-enable them.

Maybe this is a personal style thing. I don't have many games over 2000 cycles. When a map is solved, all interesting resources being collected, and the base fully renewable, I start over.

I can't remember, in all maps I've played so far, 2600+ hours in, a single game in which I ran out of all metal ores. Maybe one specific ore, but not all of them.

By cycle 2000 I usually still have tons of the metal ore from the starting biome (be it copper or alluminum). On maps that have golden amalgam, I switch to that as standard building material as soon as I demolish the first swamp biome.

So, I don't really see ore as precious. I fail to see having a alternate use for it as a bad thing. 

 

For sure, slugs aren't a long term solution but I don't think everything in ONI should translate into fully sustainable state.  Rust comes to mind, yes you can use it for oxygen production for a long time in certain maps, but it's not meant to be fully sustainable either, and I don't have a problem with than. Stone hatches aren't sustainable (on a large scale) w/o a regolith melter or really a lot of volcanoes. The fact that something consumes a finite resource isn't a problem per se. 

[Hechicera]

On 1/17/2021 at 10:22 AM, KittenIsAGeek said:

Usually around cycle 200 or so is when I've established things enough to transition my power supply to a source other than slugs -- and by then they really haven't impacted my supply of metal ores that much.

I think it may depend on map seed, and what you are hoarding. I agree with your take on plug slugs generally. But by cycle 200 on one swamp map where due to seed + placement of the new & existing POIs I was had almost no iron, and very short on cobalt, I was starting to decon my cobalt batteries to feed the slugs. I chose to hoard excess copper/wolframite to fund future industry/automation/shipping needs. I agree on using the batteries with them. But feeding them their batteries, and reducing numbers, was just to keep one ranch alive for further testing w/o relying on eggs from pod somewhere in the low cycle 200s. Keeping them wild would have solved this, but I wanted to both see the efficiency of tame vs wild and ensure they didn't die out for more testing. And I did this in a no frills survival game.

I found them really useful for early hydrogen, esp. on a seed where I only got one tiny bit of the hydrogen/chlorine biome. You have rust to get initial chlorine. Small but enough. But I was suffering, with all that frozen biome from too much pO2/O2 by cycle 100 or so. So I did not want to set up an electrolyzer. Base morph gave me more than enough with just one ranch tame.

I can see where they are meant, with the recharge ability, to be a nice complement to solar. Since I didn't rush that tree though, or rush deconing the POIs for glass, it was badly mismatched. By the time I got my solar up in a more relaxed, hybrid source power start I was already feeling the pinch of the slugs diet. So some resolution on the diet needs to happen for them to have any long term use in that niche.

I think the current morph is so-so but really do see uses. And that is fine for a base morph, including diet. It fits with a swamp biome start. And I do agree completely with the diet of more focused morphs being from renewable sources. I see two specific focuses for morphs to make them a critter you keep past cycle 200ish. One morph that focuses on the recharge output for the renewable solar complement. Balance day solar with night slug on batteries and fully renewable "non dirty coal" (sorry cute hatches) source. It would be nice if that diet was more organic"ish" and something I could target by cycle 100-150 with renewable swamp resources so I could keep a single ranch alive for later morphing regardless of map seed issues. I'd like to see a second morph that could work more on the refined metals and have that one focus as a renewable hydrogen source. Good for your space program or to compliment a more industrial setup that gets O2 from a non-electrolyzer source. Right now the diet keeps the starter morph from being OP (between recharge and hydrogen), since it has high hard to renew cost paired with a large efficiency bump when tame.

On 1/14/2021 at 2:41 PM, DarkMaster13 said:

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

The ability to get sulphur from both sewage related off gassing and from swamp polluted water/mud off gassing would also make chemical sense.

 

[Majestix]

On 1/17/2021 at 6:35 PM, JaxckLl said:

There's no defensible way to describe Plug Slugs as "great"...

You have now had several people tell you that they like and use Plug Slugs. Nothing else matters. What's your problem? There are many different ways of playing the game. The only way to defend what you are writing is to claim that you have found the only "correct" way to play the game. Just accept that not everybody shares your opinion, which is just that: an opinion.

Anyway, the original post was kind of a click bait, since it was not a review. About half of it is suggestions of completely new mechanics, rather that an actual evaluation of the currently existing ones. Calling this a review is like writing a novel and calling it a review of an existing one under the pretext "here is what I think should have happened in the book I am reviewing".