Alternative Tube Materials?

[The Plum Gate]

The transit tube network is a bit of an expensive proposition.

Wouldn't having less expensive materials in a non transparent form achieve the same goal but with a setback of perhaps bad decor and increased stress.

Perhaps even disallow junctions on these pieces such that the junctions and entrances would need to be made of the more expensive materials?

[larkvi]

In my experience, by the time you are building a transit tube, plastic should be a completely solved problem, whether via a oil->petroleum->plastic press process or a glossy drecko ranch. For example, I have one glossy ranch and a separate (terminal) shearing room (my design attached. filtration for the washroom in the empty space because it is taking advantage of the same cooling loop); I was fairly late setting it up, but had still produced something like 25T of plastic by day 300. Day 560, I have built a basic tube system and still have 90T of plastic. All it costs are some dupe time and a little bit of dirt for the mealwood (and temperature control line).

[The Plum Gate]

The problem with this, is the drekos not being available on a swampy start.

We have to dig down to the oil - and this can take some cycles of long commutes, etc. It would be nice to have transit tube that could be made of metal ore as point to point only type restriction due to materials. 

[Sasza22]

Transit tubes are meant to be a late game tech. I like that they force a large investment in plastic. There aren`t other huge plastic sinks in the game other than ladders for the extra 25% speed and the statue for the victory condition.

I prefer it when we can constantly progress so for example getting to the third asteroid for dreckos is a thing requiring a large setup including even a base on said asteroid but rewards you with new tech options to upgrade your main base.

[The Plum Gate]

This seems like gameplay that favors victory conditions or scenarios - it's a nice want-to-add. It seems like right now we have a minimal victory condition - persistence, we get the initial scenario - it's rather bland unless you make something of it.

[Hechicera]

I think the small map without resources introduces game pace issues (Which is your point in the last post), game goal issues (which you I think allude to in OP) as well as more not less monotony.

The game was to maximize initial asteroid (with a build optimize loop) then go to space to get more stuff to further fine tune the ((optimization - build optimize loop)). Whether the end goal was sending one dupe off to the tear or not seems to be moot to most players. 

Now they stick two things into the loop:

A. the teleporter linked asteroid

B. Rockets for things you used to need 1/4 - 3/4 of the way through the build loop (variance due to player tech preference on what they rushed and starter asteroid)

The first introduced tedium as you need to plumb infrastructure to additional points.

The second adds more tedium, as you still need to plumb rocketry to the surface, but earlier than before.

Whichever one you do first makes the infrastructure runs feel redundant and tedious on the second.

With both interrupt paths now having things you want depending on player tech rush preference, or as a hard limit for later things depending on start asteroid : you end up in the dreaded loop I know from MMO farms. "I need the drop to farm the drop". Which is ugh. This being ONI you can still do things, but with more dupe opportunity cost at lower tech levels. situation does make solving basic things (perhaps for the fourth time) at lower tech levels more tedious.

[The Plum Gate]

Getting them from their chambers and protected comfort to a build point on the surface or near the depths is a chore to begin with. I'm also noticing that there is not an obvious source of oil on the swampy start - so there's that. I have to teleport to terra planetoid to get this I assume.

I can see how many players will continue to defer to the terra start as the defacto standard.

[sakura_sk]

On 1/19/2021 at 12:32 PM, The Plum Gate said:

The problem with this, is the drekos not being available on a swampy start.

Is it still uncertain if dreckos and pips drop from the pod before discovering other planetoids/biomes that contain them? Because I think they are not "locked" for printing and can pop up even if you haven't travelled to any planetoids yet.

Unless we are talking about "no care packages" playthrough.

[The Plum Gate]

3 hours ago, sakura_sk said:

Is it still uncertain if dreckos and pips drop from the pod before discovering other planetoids/biomes that contain them? Because I think they are not "locked" for printing and can pop up even if you haven't travelled to any planetoids yet.

Unless we are talking about "no care packages" playthrough.

Many cycles into several playthroughs and the drops seem largely related to what's already on the map with some decorative seeds and salt water being exceptions.

I have not seen any version of them yet.

[sakura_sk]

6 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

Many cycles into several playthroughs and the drops seem largely related to what's already on the map with some decorative seeds and salt water being exceptions

Hmmm... Maybe it's only for Terra then...?  Sorry.. Terra start can print plug slugs and slicksters without "discovering" swamp.

Maybe I had travelled to  the next planet (to drop a rover or something..) early on and then started the printing pod giving me dreckos and pips in my swamp start.

[Hechicera]

Relying on a random pod drop is not a sufficiently fun game play loop (whether they are locked or not). It leads to any run that doesn't get the now necessary random care package being seen as a "dud". They aren't fun. Ones you get them are fun. Fun being randomly predicated on getting a care package is not something I'd choose to play often. I also avoid the phone/gamble gameplay loops too, because that is what that becomes. And I don't play a game like ONI to be getting the "blinking lights! SPARKLES! YAY! a Drecko egg!" reward thing, if that makes sense. Pod cycle isn't a Diablo 3 "loot shower", nor do I want it to be.

The core loop in the base game that was fun was building and then improving the build. Whether it was I messed up, I thought of a better design or I got better tools to do more builds it was all the same fun loop. The goal was one I set each time, and each time it was not the last one. Even a rebuild aver my third mess up was a new idea.

But in the current loop I already know how to plumb connections to a point the first time. Then I just repeat that without new tools or new problems to solve with it in order to get to better tools. It becomes grindy more than fun. The game is already grindy, but the with the goal being one you set each time was fun. This doesn't give me that feel.

I get we have asked for more challenges to force creativity. And I see that though in the DLC. Artificial resource scarcity, and some biome challenges are great. And I know smaller maps may help other things. I am interested in the goals I see of the DLC, but find the current iteration adds tedium. I can see moving space earlier as a goal there, but then adding the two porter points and giving us three places to plumb too in addition to the usual mid-game ones means doing the same loop over and over, with exactly the same late-early/midgame tools not the fun loop to repeat.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this well ...

[sakura_sk]

The way I see the DLC is:

Terra start : difficulty 0 (easy) [comparison to Terra-base game difficulty +2 : less water sources, no oil biome]

Swamp start : difficulty +1 [No reed fiber in starting map]

 

Overall DLC intentions: (IMO of course...)

-space/rocket earlier built (earlier research and small map)

-customable rocket modules (the need for more than just an atmo suit to accomplice dupe survival)

-shatter planetoids to travel (each having different resources which can/cannot be found in starting planetoid)

 

I don't see the core loop changing in any of these. What changed is in DLC everything is shattered (collision of the original asteroid and all..). Isn't the goal the same as the base game? Early on survival, later on explore/automate everything, send dupes to infinity and beyond (maybe when DLC is finished?). You still can have one core base (although smaller) and travel to temporary bases to other planetoids to retrieve resources.

As for plastic. I usually prefer dreckos because I find it more passive. Establishing a range and let it spit plastic as you expand instead of actively building/cooling polymer presses. If that drecko is an early care package -yay!- . If not until cycle 100-150 I will go find one drecko to wrangle and ranch either from a nearby biome (terra) or by rocket travelling to the next planetoid (I think in my first playthrough in swamp I went to the rocket planet by cycle 85-86 to retrieve one drecko egg)

But maybe that's my style of play that is not effected by the DLC..? 

Edit: @The Plum Gate are you sure you want to build a tube system at the moment..? (Not never... but after some bug fixes occur)

Spoiler

 

*Am I the only one who finds bugs hilarious? 

 

 

[Sasza22]

On 1/24/2021 at 2:43 PM, sakura_sk said:

Is it still uncertain if dreckos and pips drop from the pod before discovering other planetoids/biomes that contain them?

It seems they can appear. It`s a leftover from the base game where you had an achievement for taming each critter type iirc. That required the pod to print them even undiscovered (as no map had all of them i think). But it is different for resources and plants.

[The Plum Gate]

I have teleported the next planetoid, and only found squeeky pufts and a few angry crabs.

On the bright side. This is a new area to me,

But now I'm trying to find reed fiber and have had no luck with this either.

I can't build the atmo suits without it.

[babba]

What about Cork ?

Having the transport tube made out of Cork would make Irish players very happy.

[The Plum Gate]

1 hour ago, babba said:

What about Cork ?

Having the transport tube made out of Cork would make Irish players very happy.

Wood, even, but I have yet to see this in my current playthrough either.

Even without tubes, having elevators or some transit system that achieved the same vertical efficiency as poles would make this a heck of a lot nicer. I know we are tempted towards the use of metal floor tiles and plastic ladders, but again with the material costs here - properly implementing the builds also requires cooling those materials down before installing them or you get a heatwave effect.

As a side note, I noticed some weirdness with brine that might have just been my imagination, but it seemed like they ran faster through it that they would have over normal dry tile.

[MachineryMan]

On 1/26/2021 at 6:47 AM, The Plum Gate said:

I have teleported the next planetoid, and only found squeeky pufts and a few angry crabs.

On the bright side. This is a new area to me,

But now I'm trying to find reed fiber and have had no luck with this either.

I can't build the atmo suits without it.

This is a main idea of DLC. To make the game interesting again. And more complex.

The vanila game used to go like this:

1. You put a toilet, a bed and a table. Plant 10 strange plants with worms, so as not to starve to death.

2. You dig a swamp biome, plant 5 reeds, make suits.

3. You dig up the oil, dip a pump in there, wow!, now we have a billion watts of electricity, a ton of plastic, and endless lead for cheap high voltage wiring, and a pile of lime for steel. This is the end of fun part of the game.

4. A boring phase, lasting anywhere from a day to a couple of months. You dig out the entire asteroid, wondering just whether to put a flower pot or a statue in that corner. Met a difficulty? Is it hot? You wrap this difficulty in lead pipes, run water through them, and a steel aquatuner-steam generator system. Is it very hot? Same thing, but you run petrolium instead of poluted water. Is it cold? Ignore it. Is it very cold? See "is it hot?" instructions, only instead of an aquatuner-steam generator system, you pipe through a "pile of water - 70 degree boilers" system.

4.1 You dig up an earth pig, make 10 farms, automate it, put the kid on barbecue and forget about the food problems.

5. From nothing to do you build a rocket with six research modules and a telescope. You fill the rocket with steam. You fly it to unexplored asteroids until you explore petrolium engines. Somewhere around here you're putting a system of plastic shipping tubes because you have nothing to do while the rocket flies.

6.Out of boredom, you change the engine, refuel the petrolium, wow, now you fly farther than before (Visually, nothing changes, you just wait longer for the rocket to come back and don't do a damn thing). You find a carbon asteroid, fly to it with a cargo module until you get a bunch of fulleren.  You make a Supercooler. Build a "terribly complicated" oxygen cooling system (actually, see "Is it hot?", just imagine that you need to cool it down to -200 degrees, not 20 degrees, and you're not running water through the pipes, but a super-cooler)

7. You pump liquid oxygen into the rocket. Wow, now you fly even further, you deliver materials from space to make a super insulator.You can also bring in niobium to make thermium and ignore cooling altogether where it was needed.  Copy the oxygen cooling system, but pump hydrogen into the chamber and lower the temperature on the aquatuner to -258. You make the hydrogen pipes out of a super insulator and for the first time you apply automation more complicated than "press the button, it's on".

8. Struggling with sleep, you put the hydrogen engines in, fuel the hydrogen, and are a little surprised by the rocket's blast temperature (Otherwise, nothing changes, but you wait even longer for the rockets). You realize you've made it through the game. No challenge or difficulty from point 3 onward. 

The way the game goes now is this:

1. Stabilize Asteroid 1. When you try to dig down you find yourself in a hot granite biome with volcanoes. Decide not to go there yet. No point.

2. Send a trained hero man (or women in my case) to asteroid 2. Stabilize it. Arrange delivery of what you need from Asteroid 1. Dig up Ethanol. Transfer to Asteroid 1. You get to the oil biome and realize your ass is boiling there. Decide to stay out of it for now.

3. Ethanol generates a lot of energy and a lot of CO2. But it's finite. You build rockets, you fill them with CO2.  Build a semblance of an industrial zone, first steel comes out. It is scarce and you have to think where to use it.

4. Prepare for landing on Asteroid 3. You land, stabilize. There are both woolly fatties and swampy biomes with reeds. You choose what you like best. Reeds are easier. Woolly fatties are harder, but potentially evolve into plastic fatties. Either way, you now have Reed fiber. Which means suits.

5. You conserve Asteroid 3. You go back to Asteroid 2 with the suits, dig up the oil, or rather the oil wells, think about how to cool it all down and start using it. The first Petrolium shows up, which means deep space is open. Piles of lime show up, which means steel.

And so on. See? Much more interesting. As for the plastic transport tubes, the asteroids are very small and fast transport is not needed so soon. Here the balance was observed just perfectly. In general, the DLC is a more mature and thoughtful game than vanila.

[catrue]

Я тоже немного поиграл около 400 циклов после последнего обновления и тоже хотел поделиться небольшими отзывами. Прежде всего, я за то, что тростниковое волокно стало редким ресурсом, его нет даже на третьем астероиде в биоме слизи. Но его все еще можно найти там после разделки дреко. А вот механика с поломкой костюмов совсем не обрадовала. его следует улучшить, как предлагалось ранее.
Прежде всего, в игру следовало ввести не просто постоянный износ костюма, а износ от агрессивной среды или температур был бы гораздо более очевидным. Кроме того, слишком мало времени, когда костюм приходит в негодность, после пары трех прогонов он выходит из строя, это очень плохо. Вместо того, чтобы получать удовольствие от игры, вам следует следить за состоянием костюма. Кроме того, это не показывает, что костюм недостаточно хорош, вы можете добавить шкалу износа как срок службы дубликата или как шкалу воздуха, чтобы понять, как долго он прослужит.
Теперь о собственно ремонте костюма. Это очень неудобная, а главное недоделанная механика. Было проще сделать дубликат с определенным навыком, чтобы починить его на месте в шкафчике, чем постоянно тащить его к машине и обратно. Можно было реализовать эту механику как поломку механизма из-за разрыва трубы или намотки из неподходящего материала и температуры. В качестве опции. Вы также можете добавить дубликат умения - швея, без которого ремонт в механтронике становится невозможным. Это было бы удобно и интересно. Но то, что есть сейчас, я крайне недоволен. Эту механику явно нужно пересмотреть. Вот мое мнение ...

 

[The Plum Gate]

@catrue, I agree, the quality of life stuff will need polishing on the atmo suits - the craft table might need some threshold settings for instance. A repair table might be a good place for them to start for all these durability challenges. I think the durability being shown as a status bar is a good idea - it needs to be a little more emphasised though, perhaps as a showing up over the suit rather than just over the name of the duplicant - this would help with visibility.

@MachineryMan, yes, I hit the boring phase of it rather quickly, the process of trying to build a rocket - honestly, it feels more like I'm supposed to take of from terra on the swampy start - space is just so much easier to get to from it since it's a shallow planetoid - I can just teleport there and not have to travel great distances on the home world. I can pipe the resources over to it and have it on the launch pad - this last map, no wheeze worts anywhere on my first planetoid. If it's not one thing it's another.

I have thought about moving most of my crew there while I retool the home base, but I like doing weird things once I get food and oxygen stable - gives my dupes time to level up. Give me time to goof off and lob suggestions at the forums.

[babba]

What about having the tubes made out of old toothpaste 

So it kills all germs, but the toothpaste tube dilutes and disappears when coming in contact with water. It's what normally comes out of tubes - Toothpaste. Glitter colors would be very nice..Glitter white, glitter green, glitter pink, glitter blue, glitter magenta, glitter yellow, glitter strawberry, or glitter coconut. 

[MachineryMan]

On 2/3/2021 at 4:51 AM, The Plum Gate said:

space is just so much easier to get to from it since it's a shallow planetoid - I can just teleport there and not have to travel great distances on the home world.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the way to the first neighbouring planetoid should not be a teleport, but a rocket. I disagree. The first problem is that there are no normal CO2 sources. Second, you need resources from both asteroids for a normal rate of development, you'd just get tired of hauling everything in rockets at half a ton payload capacity. It's boring.

And the first planetoid is the only one that has a teleport system for that very reason. And that's why the oil biome is located there, so there's no boring flying back and forth for 500kg of petrolium.

But, I remind you, there is no limit to the complexity of the task. I can build 2 infinite vaults and an autodropper in a rocket, carve out an entire planetoid and transfer it to the main asteroid in 1 go. But I don't do that. You can fundamentally not use the teleporter either.

Your logic is a bit strange) First you complain about the high cost of transport tubes, now you make a suggestion to remove the teleport. But I have a feeling that my poor English did not allow me to understand you. Partly because I didn't play Terra at all, started straight away with the second one.

 

[The Plum Gate]

7 hours ago, MachineryMan said:

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the way to the first neighbouring planetoid should not be a teleport, but a rocket. I disagree. The first problem is that there are no normal CO2 sources. Second, you need resources from both asteroids for a normal rate of development, you'd just get tired of hauling everything in rockets at half a ton payload capacity. It's boring.

And the first planetoid is the only one that has a teleport system for that very reason. And that's why the oil biome is located there, so there's no boring flying back and forth for 500kg of petrolium.

But, I remind you, there is no limit to the complexity of the task. I can build 2 infinite vaults and an autodropper in a rocket, carve out an entire planetoid and transfer it to the main asteroid in 1 go. But I don't do that. You can fundamentally not use the teleporter either.

Your logic is a bit strange) First you complain about the high cost of transport tubes, now you make a suggestion to remove the teleport. But I have a feeling that my poor English did not allow me to understand you. Partly because I didn't play Terra at all, started straight away with the second one.

 

No, this isn't what I was trying to convey -

My current play though has a decent second, oily planetoid - space is closer to the main affairs of the base, and the teleporters for resources are very near at hand also. It's rather convineint actually - I won't have to tear up the whole planet trying to get to everything.

My thought was that it would be easier for me to build my rockets there ( on the second oily asteroid ), or even conduct astronomy research there as well. If memory serves me correctly, I can just use the resource teleports to fill in the resource gaps. I ran out of easy to get water pools in the first swampy start, so I moved my researcher over to the second asteroid, I teleported dirt back to the swampy start because the only dirt I found was near space and I want to conserve this for later sleet wheat farm, and so on. I haven't even breached the surface of the home planetoid but I'm sure I'll have rocket platforms on all of them at some point - so it's really a moot point about where those go so early on in the game.

I think where we've had the miscommunication is on what wer're calling the first and second asteroid - sort of like starting from 0 vs starting from 1. So, I consider the first asteroid as the starting asteroid, swampy in my case, the second is the one that has teleporters to the first, ..the others, I have yet to find any general consensus on how to number them since they're random, so most people say the first nearest asteroid that you have to fly to ( and i call this the third, or as I stated, the first nearest requiring a rocket to get to... )

I agree, trying to put all rocketry on the third is probably a bust. The second has co2 sources via petroleum processing if it's being done there.. there's the slickster issue I've had as well. having transported a few eggs back to the starting asteroid, and hatched them, they shortly thereafter vanished into thin air, leaving no meat behind, just a sad amount of oil. SO I don't know what's going on with that, the temperatures they were in were fine, etc.

-

So, re-approaching the topic of alternative tube materials - perhaphs being a type of material that doesn't allow junctions and is a point to point transporter is kind of what my dupes need when it comes to vertical travel. I don't know what long commute distances actually is other than travel time vs work time. I just know they're taking forever to get from the depths to the surface and that plastic networks are out of the question for a good deal of time.

-

OK, so one another note, I noticed yesterday that having liquid on the floor actually speeds up horizontal duplicant movement - like oddly faster on common tile - has anyone else noticed this, is it a bug, a hack of some sort? Slip and slide effect?

[MachineryMan]

Yes, sorry, my English did the trick this time.

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

or even conduct astronomy research there as well.

As far as I'm concerned, you have to put a telescope there anyway and explore your surroundings. It doesn't matter where the rockets end up being based. If you want to do rocket basing on the second asteroid (the first one after the native one), I don't see any difficulty in that. In my case, there's 3 flight cells between them and you can get a crew there in one go to build a whole spaceport. However, I would still recommend building on the first, home asteroid, because it's in my case in the centre of the star map, which means it's the most optimal location for space operations.

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

So, I consider the first asteroid as the starting asteroid, swampy in my case, the second is the one that has teleporters to the first, ..the others, I have yet to find any general consensus on how to number them since they're random, so most people say the first nearest asteroid that you have to fly to ( and i call this the third, or as I stated, the first nearest requiring a rocket to get to... )

Yeah, I guess so.(You dont have to read spoiler below, i worn you)

Spoiler

 

The first asteroid is home. A swamp biome without reeds. Coal and ice biomes, as well as bug biomes with lots of sugar and sulphur. A couple of wells with water. Below is a granite-iron hot biome with volcanoes. The second - teleport leads to it - mostly rust, sulphur geyser present. Below is a hot oil biome. The third one is another swampy mixed with metallic (aluminum and gold) biome. Woolly pigs, cats, volcanoes of non-ferrous metals. Bottom is a useless radiation biome, very cold, but there's wolframite. On this asteroid lies a fallen satellite. Next is a super-cold asteroid and a volcanic asteroid, but I'm not considering them. I haven't scouted the others yet. 

Purpose of the first asteroid: Starting life support, Cosmobase, endless water, later boilers on volcanoes if desired. I also think an industrial block for steel and alloys production should be located here. You could also set up beetle farms here (meat and sugar) and plant worms to pollinate plantations with grubfruit, once you tame the sulphur geyser, there's enough food to last forever.

Purpose of the second one: Starter ethanol and iron (rust deoxidation), eventually oil, lead, lime. In my opinion, this is a support asteroid. It is worth positioning two mechanic operators here to crush fossils, process petrolium and service oil wells. A material production asteroid for production. Plastics, petrolium, lime, sulphur and other semi-finished products should come from here. Potentially, we should probably start breeding crabs there for the sake of shells. 

Purpose of the third asteroid: Basically, to give the country reed fibre and algae. And, of course, kittens. Eventually, it's also a support asteroid, from where all kinds of non-iron metals will come. Potentially, all that's required is to automate the process of extracting, cooling and delivering the metals on rockets to the main asteroid.

 

 

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

SO I don't know what's going on with that, the temperatures they were in were fine, etc.

In general, I see one good thing about slicksters. They're cute. Otherwise, even molten slicksters eat too much carbon dioxide without any worthwhile purpose. And keeping them requires constant temperature control, they also multiply at wild rates and it's a shame to kill them. Maybe there are humanistic ways, but I've only invented the very bloodthirsty ones. So maybe it's a good thing they're dead.

2 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

I just know they're taking forever to get from the depths to the surface

I can only advise the use of highly specialised experts with a limited range of tasks. I don't know your level of understanding of the game, but it never hurts to re-read how priority systems work again. With the introduction of DLC, I didn't encounter this long commute alert because the asteroid is tiny. I also highly recommend this mod, because this is how the schedule should work, in my opinion. I mean, that's what the developers should have done a long time ago. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2373109589 

Dont forget to like and click favorite.

3 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

a hack of some sort?

I haven't encountered this.