[Game Update] Spaced Out Testing Branch is Open! - 447728

[goboking]

Atmosuits both facilitate end-game building projects (good) and trivialize virtually every environmental hazard in the game (bad).  A small maintenance cost in form of some dupe labor time and a bit of reed fiber sounds like a fair way to balance the latter without impeding the former, in my humble opinion.

[Radam]

Previous version of masks was better as a lowtech atmo suit replacement. It should have just had like 10 mask capacity and masks made of stone. 

This new system basically requires as much setup as atmo suits. 

[Sasza22]

Imo we could use a hybrid of the old and new mask system. Keep the station draining oxygen from around itself to reduce the setup needed but keep the racks and mask delivery. Or instead of using the oxygen around let it accept bottled oxygen. We need more buildings acepting bottled gasses. It could run on both regular and polluted oxygen as well.

Now with a crafting station in play there are options for more equipment. Maybe protective boots to eliminate soggy feet debuff for the high difficulty playthroughs, protective goggles to reduce eye irritation etc. (sunscreen should be a medicine item imo)

[TheRealBamboo]

Can I just say, I think that the atmo suit change is terrible, I get that its a testing branch, so i don't have to deal with it yet, but after maybe an hour of using it, my dupes all end up trapped inside their rooms unable to get out cause all their atmo suits are broken (I know it can be disabled, but this update ruins this kind of base design). Instead maybe the atmo suits should be wearable, but not provide oxygen, or just don't make the change

[TheRealBamboo]

55 minutes ago, Radam said:

Previous version of masks was better as a lowtech atmo suit replacement. It should have just had like 10 mask capacity and masks made of stone. 

This new system basically requires as much setup as atmo suits. 

I don't want to have to micro manage suits and their decay. Especially because there arent any systems put in place to make it easy or automated. What a massive fail. And yeah they could have just made the atmo suit dock have the masks get re-docked and their oxygen put back into the atmosphere or into the dock, saving mats. Maybe some of the mats could be lost in the process, but its better than having to develop not-that-useful masks

[The Plum Gate]

I think the fact that these stations don't require power set them apart from the complexities of atmo suits.

I keep imagining a single purpose building with limited passers-by type approach - like 4 mask and a single point of refill.

It's nice to see the masks hanging up and have interactive buttoms and resource information, etc.

-

I'm still partial to it being a personal item where the checkpoint is a que to fill up their bottle / mask capacity from the checkpoint in a port.

This would greatly simplify things in general.

However, I do like that the current implementation is not sucking all the air out of my base like there's a hole in the back of it leading to the vacuum of space.

Oh by the way,

It looks like - If the crafting station recipes were an oracle's prophecy - it would be indicating the next planetoid will most likely have an igneous starting biome.

Edited January 16, 2021 by The Plum Gate

[Sasza22]

33 minutes ago, The Plum Gate said:

It looks like - If the crafting station recipes were an oracle's prophecy - it would be indicating the next planetoid will most likely have an igneous starting biome.

Iirc the arboria (forest) start was mostly igneous rock. I imagine they want this as the thrid starting asteroid.

[JoelleEmmily]

OH GOD! NO! A DURABILITY SYSTEM! Durability systems are always a pain in the butt, never realistic, and only serve to inconvenience players. And what's the point? It's not to add complexity, being a hassle isn't complex, it's just annoying. "It forces you to be pre-plan and be prepared!" First of all, you can't *PRE* plan, you either plan, or you don't, and how? By making the player lug around or stock extra supplies? To occupy a precious inventory slot that could be better used carrying more cobblestone... or other such bric-a-brac... To force players to return to their core base from time to time? I already avoid atmo suits and jet packs because I find them barely useful drains on my time and resources, and I don't use any of the other clothing at all. I MIGHT equip stuff I find in lockers, but mostly, I don't even do that. Jet packs? I think I built one once just to build one... or I might've watched a youtube video and thought, 'that's a wast of time, and is laggy,' and not built one ever.

A durability system will just make those kinds of prop pieces even less desirable, and will break automation setups which rely on dups for some portion of operation. If a dup has to throw on a suit to go mess with an oil well, or or babysit the new reactors in some way, and the suits degrades to unusable, those set pieces suddenly become inaccessible without warning. In saying that, I can guess why this is being implemented... to try and cause a reactor meltdown by unexpectedly walling off an area if the player isn't micromanaging checkpoints... Which is a really smarmy way to get an event to trigger... All Durability systems do, is create anxiety from artificially derived scarcity...

When generating anxiety isn't a core factor in gameplay, durability serves no useful purpose. In a survival/horror game like Aliens: Isolation, flashlight batters running out in 5 minutes, adds to the overall discomfort you're meant to feel; when it's in a Zelda game, it makes you want to dig out your SNES and play Link to the Past. That other game you'all made, Food not Included, durability makes sense, the point of the game is to constantly find resources, constantly stay on the move, explore... Oxygen Not Included is about creating your own systems and supply lines, doing experiments, balancing production loads, building and expanding bases... if it was about scarcity and running out of stuff, you would've never implemented geysers or steam turbines... Survival of your dups, is auxiliary to making your base efficient.

[Hechicera]

My prior starts in this beta were on Terra, so I had been watching the "heat creep". With regards to magma layer, which is there on both swamp and terra, the creep looks at least 2x slower on the test branch. So the pre-magma layer of hard rock was just slightly less hot at turn 200 on the new map as it was at turn 100 on my prior terra start. That helps for longevity on both but there was more than the bottom heat creep on terra. On both maps the rock biome between the base and border biomes was untouched, so comparison should be fairly accurate.

The oxygen mask changes are all interesting and positive except having to plumb O2 to the dock. The opportunity cost for this is too large and delays making them useful except as a pre-thimble reed crutch. If you have access to reeds, you can get a (better) suit at nearly the same opportunity cost.

On 1/15/2021 at 4:05 AM, kerosene said:

The second approach is harder and much more work and it's what in my opinion players should be doing. Will the atmosuit changes be enough to incentivize the second approach?

The key becomes controlling your gases and more specifically controlling the temperature of your gasses. You then need to control things that may heat (or cool on swamp) your gasses. One thing this DLC did was make me set up a sandbox game and test temperature dispersion heavily in it with controlled settings. Spoilering as the results I'm sure will bore any longer term players.
 

Spoiler

 

I think most people understand solid transfer in ONI, and it is consistent (left, right, up, down). What becomes interesting is gas<->gas heat dispersion in ONI. It is not consistent. It transfers very fast horizontally, which is useful in a base with floors and a shaft/HVAC exit vents. It also disperses well if layered with the heat on the bottom and the cold on top. It does not disperse and may reach a semi-equilibrium if set up with heat on top and cold on the bottom. I'm fine with that, if heat rose in solids the asteroids would heat up even faster than now.

That above is needed to understand what you end up needing to control as you open up the asteroid. Which has heat on the bottom and cold on top at worldgen for now, so set for fast heat dispersal the second solids touch gas and that gas touches another gas. And if you want open environment you have to control that, or let it not happen as equilibrium of base materials (not counting vents and what you create) is still "too hot". Your biggest runaway scenario, and the critical control point is then gas<->gas heat exchange, so controlling that point (or before) becomes the crux of long term temperature management.

 

The real game play advantage of all the user "airlocks" is temperature control. That is a huge part of the game area staying livable, even if the thing most easily seen is convenience (my chlorine stays in my sterile room). The other artifact is all the user designs for heat deletion of course. Don't control it, just delete it! One of the biggest perks of the atmosuit is its ability to make more "airlock" doors viable.

So the short answer to this is to incentivize by making it easier for the player to control heat exchange at doors, esp. gas<->gas heat exchange. OR, change the temperature gradients of the asteroids to cold base, hot top. That may make it too much a different game. OR you can slow down the temperature dispersal through gas in the game. That also could change the game a lot depending on where it was tweaked. They already offer low-end, early game temperature management tools (heat and cold) but due to the speed at which temperature disperses into a large gas area (fair) those items train the player to have small, contained gas pockets early to maintain temperature. Which is fair but incentivizes base design away from your question, as well as trains a player in that method of problem solving the temperature question. Lowering speed of gas<->gas temperature dispersion would help there though.

The real reason fewer open more areas is the opportunity cost associated longer term with temperature management of that path of game play. I also played with that challenge as my main goal and ignored space previously, in the base game. So trying to incentivize it as well as supplant temperature management as a self-goal with exploring more asteroids as a game goal is a tall order.

[paramehdic]

Unable to pin errands in any of the builds, also not sure how this relates to / is calculated vs colony report information.
Current build if open all resources causes crash.

[The Plum Gate]

5 hours ago, paramehdic said:

Unable to pin errands in any of the builds, also not sure how this relates to / is calculated vs colony report information.
Current build if open all resources causes crash.

Yes, there are several unpinable stats it appears.

[TrayneRek]

On 1/17/2021 at 8:15 AM, JoelleEmmily said:

Survival of your dups, is auxiliary to making your base efficient.

Survival of your dupes is 100% paramount. Without the dupes you have no colony. Period.

[vonVile]

The DLC doesn't work on my PC computer. After double clicking the icon to load it instantly stops. The ONI icon doesn't even have time to appear in the task bar. This bug has been reported a while back, but hasn't been acknowledged by Klei.

[The Plum Gate]

7 hours ago, vonVile said:

The DLC doesn't work on my PC computer. After double clicking the icon to load it instantly stops. The ONI icon doesn't even have time to appear in the task bar. This bug has been reported a while back, but hasn't been acknowledged by Klei.

Make sure your .NET 4.0 runtimes are all up to date. These usually make themselves available through windows update, but sometimes fail to install for whatever reason.

[ATM Reaper]

Ok so Ive been playing the testing branch and I have to say the rocketry looks good. Big help on the starter planet was the new design of the oxygen masks, much better. One thing I would improve on the Oxygen masks though is they should be automatically replaced with a new one when the durability runs out. I had 3 complete sets made but had to keep guessing if I had stations without a mask. Just an auto replenish setting or even a graphic that makes it clear when a station doesnt have a mask allocated to it.

Next point however, it is very unstable. Id consider dialing down the feedback mechanism a bit. I have a very good rig and it is crashing on it so others must be having a nightmare.

[The Plum Gate]

44 minutes ago, ATM Reaper said:

Ok so Ive been playing the testing branch and I have to say the rocketry looks good. Big help on the starter planet was the new design of the oxygen masks, much better. One thing I would improve on the Oxygen masks though is they should be automatically replaced with a new one when the durability runs out. I had 3 complete sets made but had to keep guessing if I had stations without a mask. Just an auto replenish setting or even a graphic that makes it clear when a station doesnt have a mask allocated to it.

Next point however, it is very unstable. Id consider dialing down the feedback mechanism a bit. I have a very good rig and it is crashing on it so others must be having a nightmare.

It appears the the station governing oxygen mask usage is built in the always allow state - such that anyone can pass by it regardless of if there is a mask available. I haven't looked carefully at what happens when an o2 mask runs out of durability but I did notice my stations were empty at one point. And also noticed that the gate was not set to vacancy mode, it seems like this default setting might negate a delivery request - as you have noticed, others have mentioned the auto delivery was working correctly but not what state they had their gate in - so perhaps check the setting on the gate building and see if this is a determining factor in that aspect of operation.

An empty mask building might get a replacement mask if the gate is set to vacancy and you have gas masks in storage.

[JoelleEmmily]

On 1/18/2021 at 4:44 PM, TrayneRek said:

Survival of your dupes is 100% paramount. Without the dupes you have no colony. Period.

Not really, you can start a game where your dups do not eat, take no stress, and do not become sick... you can even god build, paint resources... but the one thing you absolutely cannot do without mdding the game, is change how production and supply work. It's obvious that the entire game is designed around processing raw resources into ever more refined products... Also, if you're creative building or in debug mode, you can easily let your dups die, and still mostly play the game... Even in normal mode, a dup will starve to death at about the same rate as the printing pod will offer new ones, one could, hypothetically, starvation build an entire base on one new dup every 3 days.

Dups are 100% expendable, replaceable, and auxiliary to making an efficient base. Exclamation mark.

Edited January 20, 2021 by JoelleEmmily
Sass

[Notecja]

On 1/14/2021 at 8:33 PM, Ipsquiggle said:

Add Wormwood sounds

There are missing Wormwood sounds from DST? XD

[ATM Reaper]

Well one problem is the mods that are being updated arent being updated on the client as they should. I now have a PC that has certain mods working on it and my laptop that doesnt. Some of the ones that work on my PC say not compatible with DLC on my laptop. I have not manually moved any files on any mods so the update system is just not working right.

[Yunru]

19 minutes ago, ATM Reaper said:

Well one problem is the mods that are being updated arent being updated on the client as they should. I now have a PC that has certain mods working on it and my laptop that doesnt. Some of the ones that work on my PC say not compatible with DLC on my laptop. I have not manually moved any files on any mods so the update system is just not working right.

That's a steam thing that's been happening for a while (hence the existence of the mod manager mods), thankfully at least one of them (namely the one I'm using) has been updated for the DLC, and you can use that to force update the others.

[ATM Reaper]

10 minutes ago, Yunru said:

That's a steam thing that's been happening for a while (hence the existence of the mod manager mods), thankfully at least one of them (namely the one I'm using) has been updated for the DLC, and you can use that to force update the others.

Any chance of sharing the name of the mod manager mod your using as I could defo do with forcing update on my mods if possible.

[Yunru]

The one I use is apparently just called "Mod Updater" and is by "Stephen".

[ATM Reaper]

3 minutes ago, Yunru said:

The one I use is apparently just called "Mod Updater" and is by "Stephen".

Got it now, thanks, hopefully that sorts it for me.

[vonVile]

On 1/19/2021 at 2:05 AM, The Plum Gate said:

Make sure your .NET 4.0 runtimes are all up to date. These usually make themselves available through windows update, but sometimes fail to install for whatever reason.

I updated all .NET and the game still won't load. Same problem. Click to start and Steam immediately kicks out unable to load.

[The Plum Gate]

37 minutes ago, vonVile said:

I updated all .NET and the game still won't load. Same problem. Click to start and Steam immediately kicks out unable to load.

And I suppose steam is also up to date? This sounds fishy. Like a firewall rejection.