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Pips. Are.a. Fun. Killer


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Although cute and adorable.  Pips are a total pain.  Can we please please review the planting pattern rules cause I swear to the sweet lord.  In the new expansion where you sorta need pips to keep lots of wild plants I’ve spent about 200 cycles trying to organize 3 rows of 10... this is a nightmare. I hate how you have to build in a really strict pattern.  Cant we just do every other tile or something and just be done with it.  This is so needlessly complicated.  Not to mention that I am using a dirt mod that makes planning this 50% faster and easier.  None the less still. It’s hard it’s not fun and it’s frustrating.  And with the new spaced out patch it’s really key to keeping bases sustainable.  Consider patching or adjusting how this works; I’d love for tamed pips to have a more predictable planting pattern (like every other tile) or tame pips ignore vertical restrictions- something like that.  Cause we’re really limited on space now.  Pips don’t work in outer space tiles. So I’m forced to plan them in the middle of the asteroid.  Next to volcanoes? I mean.  Rough.  Y’all are being brutal.  Lol I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to get farms set up to build exosuits and I’m at the breaking point with planning for pips in these tiny tiny maps. (Over 2000 hours of play)

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1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

It is not _that_ bad, but a, say, "wild planting machine" or end-game dupe skill would be highly appreciated, agreed. 

I think simplifying the pip planting rules to 1 plant per 3x3 area is simple enough to implement and reduces the frustration of this mechanic a ton. Personally I just don't wild plant because it feels kinda cheaty once you get a set up built tbh, but the point is if the devs want a mechanic in the game it shouldn't involve this amount of micromanagement.

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+1, I stopped my first real long game due to Pips and endless frustration with them...

I wanted to make wild Farm for Peppers. No mods. 

I learned from yt tutorials how to make dirt tiles and how Pip rules work. I made a big farm, with temporal metal tiles containing radiant pipes from metal refinery, and slime on top of them. Amount of micromanagement to deliver slime to each tile was enourmous, but hey, I will have wild Farm.

Except it seems that for pincha peppers you must go from bottom to top, not like with other plants so I had to redo my initial plans.

Except it seems that peppers need more space in between, so I had to redo everything once more. Manual slime delivery on every tile each time I redo things... The project was so big I made the plans at 6am, went back to sleep only to check copule hours later that not even half of the job is done...

Finally after several days of planning-waiting-manual slime delivery my pips started planting.

Except for that one spot, they avoided it at all cost. At this moment I decided several things:

  • I end this colony, because I hate it, and my cool project failed.
  • I stop playing without mods, because this is too much pain to get anything done
  • I hate pips.

I really like the idea to make tammed pips plant better, without some creazy rules I must search in random places on the internet that fail to include all exceptions that the game includes, not to say that pips seem not to follow them in the end and leave random spaces unplanted...

38 minutes ago, crbd115 said:

I think simplifying the pip planting rules to 1 plant per 3x3 area is simple enough

well, I like 3-3 pattern more, you have more space for equipment in between and your sweepers cover the area better... but any change to improve pip rules would be great and I think I could with with 1-1 pattern

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6 hours ago, boohboomagoo said:

Can we please please review the planting pattern rules cause I swear to the sweet lord.  In the new expansion where you sorta need pips to keep lots of wild plants I’ve spent about 200 cycles trying to organize 3 rows of 10... this is a nightmare.

I don't understand all the fuss.  I've done this in the past and its rather simple, though does require a little bit of micro-management.  The first thing is I dig out the room, then I build tiles in the places where plants won't grow.  Finally, I build ladders over the rest of the spots, except for the location of the first couple plants.  On one of the tiles, I build a storage bin, in which I put the seeds I need, and on another tile, I build a critter drop off. 

After the setup, I move a few pips into the room.  Then periodically as I'm doing other things, I check to see how the pips are doing.  Within 5 to 10 cycles I have three nature reserves set up with trees -- provided I have all the seeds to start with.  On maps with limited seeds, it takes a bit longer to get things set up.  Either way, it really isn't that difficult if you prevent pips from planting randomly and only uncover the next tile in line after they have filled the previous.

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1 hour ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

require a little bit of micro-management

As do many things in this game. MM is a winning strategy for most critter / dupe related tasks.

Standard pip planting boils down to:

  1. Choosing your planting pattern,
  2. Setting up your natural tiles,
  3. Choosing your plant,
  4. Ensuring viable environment for planting... Pips won't plant if the plant's requirements are not met...
  5. Managing pips respecting distances.

Pictured: Pip ranch with farmed trees & Pip "nursery" with planted trees. The gulag nursery also provides dirt & cooling via critter and plant temperatures.

800387484_pipfarm.thumb.png.c1a9d7f40e9f5bf1f9d2e2ed396d454e.png

Note that points 1&3 go hand in hand. I haven't tested the mod that simplifies pip planting... But in the back of my head pip planting is overpowered enough for me to go the extra mile.

So yeah, lot's of wiki reading. The rules have already been found by others to let the squirrels annoy us as it is.

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8 hours ago, Gurgel said:

It is not _that_ bad, but a, say, "wild planting machine" or end-game dupe skill would be highly appreciated, agreed. 

Giving Tier 3 farmers the ability to plant seeds in natural tiles would be the way to handle it, methinks.

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15 hours ago, boohboomagoo said:

Although cute and adorable.  Pips are a total pain.  Can we please please review the planting pattern rules cause I swear to the sweet lord.  In the new expansion where you sorta need pips to keep lots of wild plants I’ve spent about 200 cycles trying to organize 3 rows of 10... this is a nightmare. I hate how you have to build in a really strict pattern.  Cant we just do every other tile or something and just be done with it.  Not to mention that I am using a dirt mod that makes planning this 50% faster and easier.  None the less still. It’s hard it’s not fun and it’s frustrating.  And with the new spaced out patch it’s really key to keeping bases sustainable.  Consider patching or adjusting how this works; I’d love for tamed pips to have a more predictable planting pattern (like every other tile) or tame pips ignore vertical restrictions- something like that.  Cause we’re really limited on space now.  Pips don’t work in outer space tiles. So I’m forced to plan them in the middle of the asteroid.  Next to volcanoes? I mean.  Rough.  Y’all are being brutal.  Lol I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to get farms set up to build exosuits and I’m at the breaking point with planning for pips in these tiny tiny maps. (Over 2000 hours of play)

In fact, you complain about Pips in Spaced Out, and not Pips in general, so you're in the wrong forum. First, they're balanced, you forget that you obtain a 100% free ressource plantations, try to do the same with a total ecosystem you will see it will more complicated. Because, once set up, you don't need to manage it.

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 This is so needlessly complicated.

It's complicated when you discover the system but when you know the pattern, it's easy.

 

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Cause we’re really limited on space now.

Totally wrong, first example :

 

unknown.png

You have a lot of space, but you have to play on multiple asteroid, not like in the vanilla game :

 

spacedeau.thumb.png.67551c23776ecdad1e8abf0f29a6eee1.png

An don't worry, next patch you will have a big asteroid.

 

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And with the new spaced out patch it’s really key to keeping bases sustainable.

You don't need Pips to have a sustainable base. Geyser sulfur with grubfrut plant, Pacu farm with seeds, bristle blossom, etc. There's so many way to produce food.

The real problem is you are part of olds players that try to use old strategy in Spaced Out that implement new system and logic. Yes, you can't do a gigantic overpowered ressource farm in Spaced Out but you have so many other solution.

With the same logic, we should complain about the absence of shove vole, I need my overpowered free meat factory. :lol:

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7 hours ago, SamLogan said:

With the same logic, we should complain about the absence of shove vole, I need my overpowered free meat factory. :lol:

Will it return at the same time as the regolith? Find out on the next episode of....

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On 4/13/2021 at 8:42 AM, goboking said:

Giving Tier 3 farmers the ability to plant seeds in natural tiles would be the way to handle it, methinks.

I'm with @KittenIsAGeek; (A) it's not that bad, and (B) "Industrialised wild farm" is a bit of an oxymoron anyway so if you want to do it I think it should be a pain.

But if one is going to implement it, it should be tech-gated not skills-gated. I get Lv3-skill dupes by like Cycle 20, so gating it behind a Lv3 skill is barely gating at all. Make it a tech that requires radiation and orbital research at least, otherwise everyone will do it from earlygame.

Incidentally I think the decision to gate pips themselves behind "having enough space infrastructure to get to the 3rd asteroid and back" was a good one. Pre-Spaced-Out it was trivial to set up an earlygame nature reserve smack in the middle of your base; now one has to actually integrate organic formations. And I like being forced to do this, because otherwise my worst cookie-cutter instincts would assert themselves and I'd build the same 4x24 repeating Commieblock matrix every asteroid. It saves me from myself.

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19 hours ago, Tsabo said:

Incidentally I think the decision to gate pips themselves behind "having enough space infrastructure to get to the 3rd asteroid and back" was a good one.

The most recent update made it so there is a forest start in addition to the sandstone and swamp starts. The current design is that the three starting biome types rotate between which start you choose. So pips are only gated on 2/3 asteroids. People keep making assumptions on developer intent when they can't even see the full picture yet. They aren't necessarily being gated its more likely just a coincidence. 

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3 hours ago, crbd115 said:

The most recent update made it so there is a forest start in addition to the sandstone and swamp starts. The current design is that the three starting biome types rotate between which start you choose. So pips are only gated on 2/3 asteroids. People keep making assumptions on developer intent when they can't even see the full picture yet. They aren't necessarily being gated its more likely just a coincidence. 

Fine, fine.

"I think it was a good coincidence and it should be done intentionally"

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