What to tackle next?

[aderae]

Hey everyone, long time lurker first time poster.

I have around 350 hours spend in ONI through years and around 100+ with DLC. I tried various starting combinations / play styles but each time I am getting stuck at one point. Lately, I favor swamp starting spaced out style asteroid due to cold being a lot easier to handle than heat. I tame both cool geysers pretty early, feed my farms of polluted water and SPOM from cold brine. I move my power grid to be %100 solar (here and there some local individual power supplies), bathrooms automated etc. Then I just set up some idle power generators because everything else is almost fully automated. At this point I move 2-3 dupes through the teleport and focus that planet completely. I supply this planetoid with water and oxygen from my main planetoid and set up a food, solar power grid and a small petroleum operation which then moves it back to my main base. Then I send a rover to the third planetoid but this is where I kinda get stuck. Both planetoids are almost automated and it seems to me that I don't need anything from the 3rd planetoid or anywhere else in this case. Almost all research is completely done. Solar power is OP and doesn't need any upgrading. Food is pretty much stable with a lot of overflow, I can generate unlimited amount of plastic due to petroleum constantly coming from the second planetoid and basically I have no interest in getting any of the late game resources. Maybe I am not an experienced late game player but I feel like this is where DLC is lacking a bit so far. Why do I need nuclear? Do I really need to go for gold / aluminium geysers? Why do I need bigger rockets? it just looks pointless right now.

Can I have some suggestions?

Thanks!

[Jann5s]

Colonizing the further asteroids can be a real challenge. Some are freezing, some are pure magma, getting food and oxygen over there is a puzzle to be solved. Even if you don't care about rare resources, see it as a challenge.

This will naturally force you to progress to use more advanced materials (steel, gold, alu, ceramics, etc.) and more advanced rockets.

[marioespinho]

Yes. That is a problem that ONI has, but to be fully honest, always had, even in the main game. There is little to do besides projects that we make just for the sake of making.

There isn't a real endgame or anything to do after a few hundred cycles. Unless we set ourselves some challenges, there isn't nothing we actually NEED to do after we built a sustainable base.

I wish KLEI would consider adding some sort of lategame objectives, or some timed challenges, etc. Something like : Build abandoned space stacion in X planet, something that would require a massive amount of lategame materials and dupe labor. Or something like asteroid hitting planets at X cycle, coupled with some nuclear rocket system that needed massive power or radbolt collection to work.

I don't know. some more creative minds than mine could come up with something, for sure.

[NewWorldDan]

The first question is what draws you into the game - are you a survivalist?  an engineer?  or a base builder?  I like the survival aspect and the engineering aspects.  The swamp asteroid?  Pfft.  That's nothing.  If you look to the vanilla game, you can play on an easy asteroid, or you can play on Aridio - where you can't grow any crops in the starting biome.  You have to very quickly progress outward, find some place where you might be able to grow a small amount of mealwood.  Develop your research quickly and maybe create a temperature management solution before your dupes starve.  There are some world gen mods that I've enjoyed - Absolute Zero and Inferno - that are exceedingly inhospitable, require lots of creativity.

As for the DLC, colonizing some worlds has required solutions that I never would have bothered with before.  Growing arbor trees to make ethanol to make polluted water.  Using the polluted dirt to feed pokeshells to make sand, ranching pufts and slicksters to use other byproducts, boiling water in volcanoes to save on filtration medium. 

Klei seems to be working on a big endgame goal that will almost certainly require a huge amount of power and radiation.  It's still some distance away, but it will give you an objective to work towards.  Until then, the goal is whatever you make it.

[Sigmok]

I often get to this point myself and wonder what to do especially in the early days of the DLC.  Now I find plenty to do:

• Explore the System to discover Planetoids and POIs.
• Collect Artifacts
• Mutate Plants
• Experiment 52B
• Breed exotic Critters
• Build the Monument
• Play a game to complete Achievements

I also like to spend time in the Sandbox when an update comes out to test the new Buildings and Mechanics.  I do auto building and simple tests just to see how it's working and look for obvious bugs; I don't want to spoil the experience for when I play in survival.