Suggestion: Planning Overlay

[goboking]

It would be convenient if we had an overlay that allowed us to post notes to ourselves and lay down blueprints (build orders that go unfilled until manually given a priority).  I don't know how difficult this would be from a programming perspective, but I'd consider it a huge QOL addition to the game.

[MooChiChi]

I always plan, build and test (larger) builds in sandbox-mode. Then I take screentshots of plumbing, ventilation, automation etc. and use them as blueprint, when my dupes recreate it in survival. For more complex games like (definitely) ONI I also use a spreadsheet, to collect all the relevant data for me.

Probably not the reaction you was hoping for. Here is a bee

 

[thundersen]

I agree that blueprint plans which won't be built until explicitly allowed would be very helpful. A new "Forbid" command would go a long way, if an extra overlay is too much effort. That command would toggle a "Forbidden" state on each blueprint which could be visualized with a red X instead of a priority. That's how Rimworld does it and I miss that feature in ONI.

[failsafe.db]

Actually I totally agree with goboking. The good example of how this works can be seen in Prison Architect. That game is also a base management, though it is much less complex than ONI. Anyway, when I start building a new prison, I always use planing tool to draw shapes of buildings and particular rooms, so that later, after I start filling those buildings I don't have to reconstruct them because I forgot about one single thing. 

I would say that ONI ask for this solution even more than PA, since there is much more to control. For example it would be nice if I could from the very beginning shape my advanced base and implement particular solutions regarding for example heat. The temp overlay is helpful, though it is not very convinient to use it all the time. But there is more to pre-manage before we actually start the base. I know that base can be easily reconstructed, though it takes time and resources, but mainly time. One could easily reconstruct single room, but twenty? This would make a huge mess.

 

Anyway, good job with this game. I've been looking for something easy to have some rest from World of Tanks and I ended with something that is five times more complex and brainconsuming ;-P. I love this game. Trully!

[2tallyGr8]

The easiest way I think to implement this would to have a priority 0, where what ever was set to that priority was lower priority than idling, and so could be used to plan. Then, the priority tool could have them set to a higher priority when certain parts of the planning needed to be done. This could also give players the option to disable deliveries to storage containers, if that was necessary.

[goboking]

3 hours ago, 2tallyGr8 said:

The easiest way I think to implement this would to have a priority 0, where what ever was set to that priority was lower priority than idling, and so could be used to plan. Then, the priority tool could have them set to a higher priority when certain parts of the planning needed to be done. This could also give players the option to disable deliveries to storage containers, if that was necessary.

That's probably the easiest way to handle it, but hiding it behind an overlay cleans up screen clutter.