feedback Rocket's Crew

[AndreyKl]

1. Crew selection

While functionality is sufficient, there are some issues and space for improvements:

• List itself is too short, it displays only 3 dupes out of potential dozens, so it can be hard to navigate.
• On selection of a crew members list jumps to the top making player scroll down again if player needs to select another crew member. Either it shouldn't jump, or newly selected crew should be moved to the top, to simplify deselection later.
• Transporting passengers one way is a bit problematic. I have to keep track of the rocket (or have a notifier block) and unassign passenger manually after landing. Suggestion: a way to designate passengers that are there for a one way trip, so that they will be unassigned after arrival.

2. Grounded and access restrictions

'Grounded' simplified things a lot, thank you. But there are some complains:

• On the rockets with automation controlled groundings some of the storages occasionally remain in 'grounded' state.
• Beds and ladder beds when restricted do not unassign crew and my dupplicants end up sleeping on the floor.

However there is an access issue that 'grounded' doesn't address: When I'm colonizing planetoids using multiple rockets (2-3 dupes per starfarer with suit stations inside), crew from another rocket can wonder in to do something (eats, idle, toilet) and as result will block dedicated crew from entering and reaching their assigned tables and beds. Fortunately this issue is possible to resolve by setting door restrictions, but in such case door restrictions need to change each time crew changes (fairly often for me).

Suggestion: There are two modes 'All' and 'Crew' for confining crew to rocket. Rename "Crew" into "Lockdown". Make a new "Crew" that allows only assigned crew to enter, yet they can leave rocket at will. And may be merge in "grounded" into same list as a fourth option. Because if rocket is grounded and in lockdown, crew will be not able to eat or use toilet, might make sense for these options to be mutually exclusive.

3. Manifest

Game checks and warns about not having enough food or oxygen on planetoids, I think same should be done for rockets, but in a form of lines in manifest. As it is, I have to check food and oxygen presence manually before each mission, having a manifest record will lessen that burden for short one-way missions (if rocket is going to be away for 3 cycles, it's safish to assume that food won't spoil that fast). Would be ideal if it also accounts for spoil-time and shows how long dupes will live from this food and tank-stored oxygen.

4. Schedule

There are some small issues with crew during flight.

• Crew is often idling and game notifies about that. Besides managing schedules manually (moving crew between schedules on liftoffs and landings), there is very little player can do here and this lessen importance of 'idle' warning. I think that either warning should be possible to suppress during flight or idling/schedule should be treated differently
• Multiple pilots. Quite often rocket requires dupe-operation during night-time, as result when a mission ends up with multiple pilots, I'm manually moving them into different schedules to cover different time of the cycle. Would be nice if this was possible to automate in some way: automatically move one of the pilots to a night shift during flight.
• Food restrictions. I'm mostly forbidding my dupes from eating grubfruit preserve and preserve it for rockets ('grounded' won't preserve it if rocket is on a mission), but when I send out a mission I have to unblock said restriction. Would be nice if this was automated.

5. Wishlist

At the moment there are two command modules, solo spacefarer nosecone and spacefarer module. Solo spacefarer is perfect for 1-2 cycle trips, including automated ones. Spacefarer is good for maintaining 2-3 crew members with rooms and suit stations. However there is nothing in between these two. Using solo spacefarer for 6 or 7 cycles trip with a single dupe is fairly limiting: it's preferable to have a suit dock, toilet, bed, table, life support (vent, outlet, inlet plus mini-pump, preferably to have gas element sensor to have a fridge in co2 and not to run pump 24/7) automation (location detection for 'grounded', notificator for landings). Yet only half of that fits in 'solo' module (usually I use solo spacefarer without a bed and without a suit dock). On the other hand spacefarer is an overkill for a solo or 'automated' cargo rocket.

Would be very nice to have a nosecone command module variant that is in between solo and spacefarer modules in size and burden.

[Sasza22]

17 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

Food restrictions. I'm mostly forbidding my dupes from eating grubfruit preserve and preserve it for rockets, but when I send out a mission I have to unblock said restriction. Would be nice if this was automated.

I believe the grounded state actually fixes that. Dupes are allowed to deliver resources but not "use" buildings so they should be able to deliver grubfruit but not remove it from the fridge.

[AndreyKl]

39 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

I believe the grounded state actually fixes that. Dupes are allowed to deliver resources but not "use" buildings so they should be able to deliver grubfruit but not remove it from the fridge.

Only if the rocket is down, grounded normally won't help accumulating grubfruit if rocket is on a mission. It can be used if you have another rocket that only sits on the landing pad (in such case add a wort into it and fill with CO2).

But this reminds me about another issue: I have a -40C fridge where I keep some of the food frozen (and conveyor loaders to restrict access/higher capacity), so each time rocket returns from a mission I have to unassign fridges to return food to storage and then assign it again before launching. Rocket stays down for multiple cycles while oxygen loads (especially in case of a large tank) and food will just spoil if it stays in a rocket. I forgot to do that couple times and ended up with stale grubfruit in a rocket's fridge. Would be very nice if it was possible to disable the fridge in question (ex: have a lower capacity fridge variant that can be disabled).