Recent Update Feedback

[dantaeusb]

After playing the latest update for several hours, I want to provide some feedback/ideas that I hope you find valuable. I'm not sure that's the right way but hope someone from the team will see that.

1. Increase solar radiation on the asteroid surface to 60 rads/cycle. I suggest that because it would make indoor surface farms more viable, since most of the mutated plants require 25 rads/cycle at least but cannot survive in vacuum. The thing is that most of the plants require specific atmospheric conditions, and honestly, surface farms that covered on top with glass look dope. I don't like the idea of Shinebug farms because it's on the edge of abusing game mechanics for me, looks weird and, supposedly, slows down the performance. If I want to dump a lot of food, I have an Experiment 52B for that purpose. The problem with surface farms is that glass will consume half of the radiation (as I understand, because currently it gets around 12rad/cycle below glass). Increasing the solar radiation will not only make surface farms easier to manage, but also will make it harder to work on the surface and build surface bases, which will bring more usability for anti-rad pills and lead platforms in mid-game. I also think this is a good challenge to have caution on how long dupes work on the surface. Bonus, this would make rad collection for Interplanetary Launchers a bit easier, since it would allow enclosing radbolt generators with decent efficiency.

2. There's a problem with filtration medium in mid-game. Maybe this could be solved by adding meteor showers to distant asteroids. It's getting hard to get enough sand even in late mid-game: currently I'm using Pokeshell farms and volcanos with rock crushers, but the first way is not really sustainable enough (just a guess though, I didn't do the math), and the second is a bit too complicated for the mid-game, plus I don't think a lot of players want their dupes to crush sand 24/7. Maybe it's good to have them on a third asteroid, where it's still quite easy to manage heat and there's giant holes left by the satellite that can be utilized for building a rocket shaft in the early exploration stage.

3. Add limits for conveyor loader. It's quite hard to manage the amount of goods you want to ship by a rocket or interplanetary launcher. I found myself either precisely watching the amount of goods being stored and removing the checkmark when it's "enough", or just missing the moment and sending all my steel supplies to the distant asteroids. This could be solved by meters, but this is overcomplicated as I feel: often there's a dozen types of resources you want to send, and as a player I don't want my dupes to constantly try putting more and more selected resources into loaders after meter throws those resources back. Just a limit for loader and manual activation will do the job I think.

4. Reduce power production for solar panels a little. I'm not sure if I just got used to building efficient structures by playing a lot, but currently I have zero to no difficulty in power production on distant asteroids, even when taming volcanoes. Solar panels make all the electricity for my distant colonies and I feel like there's no reason in power plants anywhere but on the starting asteroid. Maybe reducing power production even by 40-80w would make a big change.

 

Thank you!

 

[dantaeusb]

As for bugs, I believe that they're well known but anyway will write down some I've encountered.

1. Duplicants are constantly stuck before doors. I think's it's about beta and is not easy to fix, so I'm waiting patiently;

2. Some constructions might be stuck in not-finished but yet no work errand. Had a bug when Rocket landing module was not finished but was showing in rocket and wasn't able to do anything with that -- only rebuild module;

3. When you rename rocket, rocket platform's getting signal to disable immediately. You cannot enable it back, need to focus on another object, then focus on rocket and cancel disable errand.

 

P.S. I think there should be some clue in-game on how to feed isoresin tree.

[AndreyKl]

9 hours ago, dantaeusb said:

Increase solar radiation on the asteroid surface to 60 rads/cycle.

That sounds like something that should be on 'per planet' basis, along with solar light intensity. 

9 hours ago, dantaeusb said:

Reduce power production for solar panels a little.

Exploitability of solar panels was discussed a lot. Without meteor showers they are too 'free' and it won't change by simply reducing efficiency a bit.

Personally I think that solar panels need 1. Have efficiency different on 'per asteroid' basis (potentially based on light intensity and asteroid's traits) 2. Need to generate heat, have both minimum and maximum work/work-efficiency temperature, more involved cooling and/or dupe labor. Example: Exposed to vacuum solar will slowly accumulate dusts on surface, thus dropping efficiency over time, needs dupe or bot based cleaning. Have a liquid input and output pipe for active cooling/heating so that on higher light intensity world it will be possible/needed to actively cool them and on frozen worlds it will be possible to jumpstart solar panels.

9 hours ago, dantaeusb said:

Add limits for conveyor loader.

It's possible to load specific amount. Like: have 3 smart compactors/bins, one for 300kg iron, one for 300kg sand and one for 10kg food. After they get full, use logic to lock the room (or disable any other type of input), then activate/unlock loader that leads to the rocket (ex: via mechanical door). Loader will get loaded with only the resources from bins and not a gram more than needed.

But I do agree that rocket based logistics needs a lot of improvements.

[Sasza22]

9 hours ago, dantaeusb said:

1. Increase solar radiation on the asteroid surface to 60 rads/cycle.

That would make it too easy to farm radbolts imo. But if they raised it to like 30-40 so a single layer of glass put it at around 25 it would be just fine for the mutated plants (imo some mutants shouldn`t require radiation).

9 hours ago, dantaeusb said:

Add limits for conveyor loader.

They recently added a limiter for conveyors and other pipe types. You can configure it to load a precise amount of stuff.

7 hours ago, dantaeusb said:

Duplicants are constantly stuck before doors. I think's it's about beta and is not easy to fix, so I'm waiting patiently;

This is a graphical glitch. They still do the job on the other side (it`s only sweep errands from what i`ve seen) it`s just not visible. I wish it was fixed too. Along with other graphical glitches like using curative tablets that has a broken animation.

[dantaeusb]

I think AndreyKl's ideas about solar generators are great really. Not sure about dupe labor exactly: sounded very cool conceptually to clean them, but then I realized that it would not make this energy less free, with new asteroids in such a limited space it's not hard for dupe to get anywhere even without suit. Unless if you would have to do that like daily if it's exposed.

Heat control for solar panels would be nice, but I think -- I might be completely wrong here though -- that there's something wrong with solar generators when they're located below glass. I remember that some time ago I had a quite big efficiency penalty for putting them below glass indoors, however as of writing this post I see that Lux level is far above 50k... Maybe it's actually glass + atmosphere, but I tested it with like 4 tiles of oxygen, as far as I remember. Heat control in vacuum is always seemed to me as something weird, I remember building this oil baths with pipes for robo-miners, not something I loved in pre-dlc game.

Summarizing, I think maybe glass rework actually would make a big deal? Like if it would let more light and radiation through it would be more essential for base-building. This would allow to re-introduce maybe not as heavy but some-kind-of meteor rains, add solar panel heating and mutated plant farms.

Though I guess almost everyone who played this game long enough were just placing bunker tiles at the top of the map to get rid of regolith, I think that some kind of soft re-introduction here would be good. Just not as annoying as it was: reduced speed, rate, temperatures. Like a random events, with the small meteor breaking the glass at the worst case, but not melting entire rocket shaft. Just regular enough to supply ~1t of filtration medium per cycle. Maybe it should be dependent on the asteroid, really. Haha, that really sounds like "I hate it... but I love it"

Both meters and special cargo rooms are good, and I used the room method, but my point is that I don't think it's really worth the deal. It's like solving something unnaturally overcomplicated: why dupes can’t just put specific amount of goods into loader? This also applies to transfers with teleports. It should be easy to implement, but very beneficial. Just most interplanetary loads are like ad-hoc solutions, when you can't really plan that "I'll be sending 1000 Steel, 500 Plastic and 6000 Sand every rocket cycle". Works for late-game with regular cargo transfers, and you can take a time to set up memory / checkpoints to make sure no one adds extra resources or will be locked, but in early-mid game it's just... Out of place, for my taste. I found myself just transferring stuff in a few Orbital Cargo Modules to avoid "cheating" with storage in nosecone.

For radbolt farming… I don’t think it’s anything complicated right now even, to be honest. My lazy *** just puts new radbolt generator as previous got melted. As they’re heating very slowly, extremely cheap to build and don’t have work temperatures, it’s enough for every research / cannon launch almost. I’m not proud that I’m just ignoring the complications here, but I have no idea how radbolt generators are supposed to be used properly, and just ignoring this part for now. Glass letting through more rads would make a big difference here too, again.

Speaking of duplicant door bug, it's not only visual in my case. Yes, I see they can do the errand behind the door, and it looks like the state is actually applied as if duplicant is behind the door (they can take damage, for example), but it only works fine until the game needs to check whether the errand is finished: they're like freezing for a few seconds. And it could take much more than the errand itself.

Thank you all for replying, by the way, haven't really expected to get much feedback.

[babba]

Solar Panels - Hopefully raining regolith will have its comeback within the next 3 months, together with new starter worlds  + perhaps some fat reactor update

[goboking]

I like the idea of dust (regolith?) slowly accumulating on solar panels exposed to space.  Mechanically, it would work similar to pressure release for oil wells.  A dupe with tidying enabled having to spend time clearing the panels every few cycles seems like a fair enough tradeoff for free power.

[AndreyKl]

On 5/23/2021 at 3:58 AM, dantaeusb said:

Not sure about dupe labor exactly: sounded very cool conceptually to clean them, but then I realized that it would not make this energy less free.

It's not free if it requires dupe-time. Dupe time is often the most valuable thing in this game early on. And if solar panel requires dupe time than you automatically can't use it to fully automate an asteroid and will need to go for more complex solutions.

[pether]

On 5/24/2021 at 11:31 PM, goboking said:

I like the idea of dust (regolith?) slowly accumulating on solar panels exposed to space.  Mechanically, it would work similar to pressure release for oil wells.  A dupe with tidying enabled having to spend time clearing the panels every few cycles seems like a fair enough tradeoff for free power.

Yup, this is a very good idea. Balances solar panels and gives you free filtration medium.

Another idea would be to make temporal tear emmit light as the sun would. Bases closer to the tear on hexmap would have more light and the farther you live the less light you have. Assuming that the tear would be in one of 6 corners of hexmap, starting base would have an average amount of light and bases on the other side of the map would be in constant darkness, using terms "night" and "day" only to reference standard dupe time, not actual brightness of the surface.

Since each worldgen places asteroids on different hexes, each time you play the game you would use different setup for your panels. Sometimes only lava world would have enough light to use them, sometimes you would be able to setup them on 3 other and more habitable asteroids. Each game would be even more unique!

[NewWorldDan]

1. I'm down with this.  There are not enough good radiation sources, so I just end up not dealing with the mutant plants.  Can't grow enough seeds to make them worthwhile at this point, then the radiation requirements as well.

2. This is a feature.  Resource scarcity is the core of the game.  If you're short on filtration medium, you're probably lacking creativity.  Fun fact, you can use aquatuners and volcanoes to boil polluted water and recapture it with a steam turbine.  Feeding hot water into an electrolyzer for oxygen eliminates about 75% of the surplus heat.  You can also crush rocks, use pufts to eat polluted oxygen, and take any of a number of pathways to clean water and oxygen.  I like this the way it is.

3.  Interplanetary logistics is a problem that I haven't quite solved yet.

4.  solar panels are so overpowered, I don't use them.  Personal choice.  Make them vastly more expenive (like 800 glass and 200 steel) and cut the power output in half.

On 5/24/2021 at 4:31 PM, goboking said:

I like the idea of dust (regolith?) slowly accumulating on solar panels exposed to space.  Mechanically, it would work similar to pressure release for oil wells.  A dupe with tidying enabled having to spend time clearing the panels every few cycles seems like a fair enough tradeoff for free power

OMG, best suggesting I've read yet.  Combined with a general nerfing of the solar panels, this is brilliant.  The regolith can gradually reduce the output of solar panels until cleaned where a rather small amount of regolith is harvested.  This can very easily be tuned for balance.  Please do this!