Frozen Forest Asteroid Feedback

[silentdeth]

I've played the Frozen Forest Asteroid (with no teleporter) three times, focusing on the first 50-100 cycles. Overall I would say it is more tedious than difficult. This comes down to a lack of dupe labor due to a few factors:

1. Unable to support a fourth dupe until cycle 30-50.
2. No sand.
   • The rock crusher is a rather significant drain on dupe power.
3. No alternative power source, other than hamster wheel.
   • There is no coal.
   • There is only one hatch, which takes a long time to breed up.
   • There are trees, but it is too cold to for them to grow.
   • Other sources are based on random vents, natural gas, hydrogen, etc.
4. No food, outside the starting hexfruit.
   • The single starting hatch takes a while to breed to the point where you can support more than the initial dupes.
   • There are abundant pips, but, again, it is too cold for trees to grow.
   • Mealwood is your only solution, sorta. See below.
5. Difficulty in heating during the early game.
   • The space heater is terrible. It can't even offset the heat loss from the cold dirt used to fertilize mealwood in an insulated 2x22 room. It also drains a lot of power for the amount of heating it accomplishes.
   • The metal refinery works well. However, there is limited ore in the starting area and the power requirements limit how often it can be run. Additionally, it takes a while to research and setup. Using this, I still have issues with my pure water pools freezing.
   • The liquid tepidizer is the best option, but it too take a while to research and setup.

 

Other issues:

The starting area needs to be moved down. As it is, the crashed satellite can breach the starting area and vent a significant amount of the starting oxygen.

 

Suggestions:

• Increase the temperature of the starting area to around 30C. This will give the player the option of adding new dupes earlier, if they can use them wisely.
• More hatches, less pips. A 50/50 ratio would be better.
• Sand! Some sand somewhere, anywhere, please.
• Salt. There is a lot of rust, but no salt. There are salt vine seeds, but without any natural sand, it really isn't a good option.
• Instead of a guaranteed polluted water geyser. Make it either polluted water, salt water, or brine. This will improve replay-ability.
• A very small amount of sucrose on the map. Without coal or wood, it takes a while the scrounge up enough CO2 to colonize another asteroid.

[sakura_sk]

Frozen forest means the new "moonlets start" right? I think the intention of the game was to be played with teleporters. Please don't make it too easy just because people chose to play without teleporters... It is "spaced out!". If you were supposed to survive only in one planetoid (in this case not even planetoid but moonlet), almost every biome would be available like in the base game

[pether]

I didn't play on new maps, but I guess it is OK if some configurations are hard. Let people who enjoy challenges have something for themselves as well. I don't thing there is a urgent need to rebalance everything to be easy for everybody.

[NeoDeusMachina]

40 minutes ago, pether said:

I didn't play on new maps, but I guess it is OK if some configurations are hard. Let people who enjoy challenges have something for themselves as well. I don't thing there is a urgent need to rebalance everything to be easy for everybody.

^This. Keeping in mind that the "spirit" behind the new moonlet clusters seems to be that we might not be able to have sustainability unless we visit other asteroids, I think balance needs to go in that direction. From the testing branch patch notes releasing the new clusters:  

On 10/15/2021 at 11:50 PM, JarrettM said:

For clusters: We’re excited to try out a new series of options that lean heavily into Spaced Out! mechanics. In these clusters the starting asteroid is smaller, there are fewer biomes per asteroid, and instead of two nearby asteroids there are four. Sustainability in these clusters might require visiting multiple worlds and some creative thinking.

I hope they stick to that and make those clusters more challenging and do not give everything that is needed to be sustainable from only the starting asteroids. Some starts will probably be tricker/more difficult than others, but imo that is fine - there are plenty of other starting options that are easier and allow full sustainability in a rather straightforward manner.

[silentdeth]

Intellectually challenging is OK, tedious is not. Right now it tends more towards the latter as it takes so long for anything to get built due to all the demands on dupe labor. By increasing the starting temp, it becomes something like the oasis map in the base game, where dupes are rushing the insulate the starting area before the temp can change. That feels like you have more agency than just sitting around waiting while a dupe builds a four or five tiles then runs off to crush rock into sand, or run on a hamster wheel every cycle.

 

I chose to play without teleporters as, with teleporters, the obvious solution is to evacuate to the teleported asteroid. Then it plays not all the different from the terra cluster start. Rather boring imho. The linked asteroid needs to be equally challenging as the starting asteroid before playing with teleporters enabled becomes meaningful.

[sakura_sk]

24 minutes ago, silentdeth said:

By increasing the starting temp, it becomes something like the oasis map in the base game, where dupes are rushing the insulate the starting area before the temp can change.

There is an Oasisse classic start and there is The Badlands SO start that is hot (40-80C). Why should a Frozen Forest be hot too?

[Yobbo]

I didn't find so much trouble supporting dupes with mealwood on this start. I just tried it from scratch and it seems quite easy to support 4 dupes around cycle 10. I have 6 dupes at cycle 30, and this is with my usual +50% hunger as well. I've used all the hexalent, but i've also started heating the farms and insulating the base. It's pretty close to stable.

I don't think i got lucky with seeds or anything. It does help to quickly dig a small gap around the starting region to thermally isolate it. As the starting area is so small this is easily completed by cycle 10.

Rather than a lack of power, i seem to have a problem with excess hydrogen. If i was less anal about keeping it all i could probably grow twice as much mealwood as i am. As it is i can't spend it fast enough.

From the rate i'm going, i estimate i can start growing wild arbor trees around cycle 50, and should easily have enough wood for regular CO₂ rocket trips by cycle 100. One electrolyzer and a row of batteries has already heated enough soil for 6 wild arbor trees. There seems to be plenty of coal in caustic biome deposits to tide things over until then.

All in all it seems to me to be a pretty neat challenge.