Falling down the mod rabbit hole

[beeper]

I am a big fan of so called quality of life mods. Things like the blueprints, bigger camera zoom out, and gas overlay mods that make my interaction with the game easier but do not change the game mechanics. Things like the piped output mod change how the game works too much for my liking. This brings me to a couple of mods I am conflicted about.

Wounded go to med bed: When dupes are stressed out they go to the massage table, but when dupes are injured they don't seem to go to the med bed. This mod makes it so injured dupes go to the med bed. On the surface this seems like it changes dupe behavior and therefore does not meet my standard for a quality of life mod. But then I fall down the rabbit hole of justification and think to myself that I could continually pause the game and check dupe health and assign them as needed, but that this would suck and the mod just automates that.

Sharing is caring: A bed and mess table can only be assigned to a single dupe so if you have 4 dupes you need 4 beds. The mod lets dupes share beds and mess tables, so if you have 4 dupes with different schedules they can share 1 bed and table. Not having to make multiple bedrooms and decorate them seems like a total cheat, but then I think to myself I could just reassign the bed/table as they become free. If Klei didn't want them shared they would put a moral penalty whenever another dupe was using another dupe's their bed/table. The mod automates that sharing and therefore is a QoL.

Do you consider these QoL mods? Are there other mods that push the QoL boundary that you like?

[BT_20]

I use chain deconstruct as one of my qol mods it’s just so convenient that I can deconstruct things without having to micromanage dupes with their horrible horizontal reach.

I also use Duplicant Genration Settings Manager to make the best dupes. My excuse for using it is that I’m trying to get the most out of my small colony as I’m on a laptop and I can’t rly go over 20 dupes.

[Yobbo]

I would say it's only a QoL mod if you would waste time doing the other behaviour without it, or if you believe the original behaviour is unreasonable. I'd never mess around with reassigning beds when i could just place one per dupe, and i think it's reasonable for them to demand their own beds.

My wounded dupes do seem to go to med beds though, and i don't use that mod. They do wait until they are at absurdly dangerous health levels, which could be why it seems like they don't. Tweaking that threshold seems quite reasonable if it's not working.

With DGSM, i absolutely would reroll for half an hour to get perfect starting dupes if i didn't use that mod, so... definitely QoL if you do that ☺

A bit similar that i use Resculpt to quickly choose the artwork i want. Before i used the mod, i really did deconstruct and rebuild artworks until i got the variant i wanted.

[cpy]

I definitely like thermal interface plates mod. I mean current method of cooling things in vaacuum is stupid, drop liquid on tile with background if in space to cool things? Just slap thermal interface plate behind and you can just route pipe there! Makes things easier to build in survival mode.

[gabberworld]

12 hours ago, beeper said:

but when dupes are injured they don't seem to go to the med bed

that's correct, but one time i saw that dupe go self, i still not sure what exactly triggered that.

[NewWorldDan]

22 hours ago, beeper said:

Wounded go to med bed:

This is absolutely a quality of life mod.  Normally dupes only go to the triage cot when assigned or possibly when they are down to about 10% health.  I have no idea why the triage cot has different behavior than the massage table.  When dupes are eligible, I want them to use the triage cot.  This is what their behavior should be.  It's not in any way a cheat mod.  If I was setting up triage cots like message tables, dupes would seek treatment at 70% health and return to work at 90% health.  This is not behavior that I want to micromanage.

My main view on mods is that they should transform the game into what you want it to be.  You're the one playing it.  I'm a fan of Falling Sand.  It does a lot to keep dupes from getting trapped as they dig.  Again, dupes still need to dig themselves out, it's not providing any actual advantage other than automating what you would order them to do anyway.  One mod I have mixed feelings about is Refined Metals Usable as Raw Metals.  This is the way I think the game should behave.  Getting the 50C material bonuses from iron and copper as opposed to the ore is a substantial change to the game.  I've played with it and without it.  It makes some things possible without steel (especially if you're on a map without any gold amalgam) and really reduces that bottleneck you face while getting steel production ramped up.

[SackMaggie]

My QoL mod would be Immigrants Reroll so I don't have to save/load to reroll my bad dupe and Build Over Plants.

[nipodemos]

My humble opinion: Wounded go to med bed is absolutely a QoL mod. As @NewWorldDan said, it should be the same as massage tables, and it helps a lot.

 

"Sharing is Caring" I think is NOT a QoL, more of a exploit. The game is intendend for you to make a bed and mess table for each dupe, and it brings it's own set of challenges the more dupes you have, that this mod would completely remove. If you dupes sleep 3h a cycle, that means that you can have 1 bed and mess table for 8 duplicants a the same time, If they sleep 2h per cycle, it means 1 bed for 12 dupes! This in my opinion changes the game too much, so it falls in the category of exploit mods or whatever

[Yunru]

On 11/3/2021 at 7:33 PM, beeper said:

I am a big fan of so called quality of life mods. Things like the blueprints, bigger camera zoom out, and gas overlay mods that make my interaction with the game easier but do not change the game mechanics. Things like the piped output mod change how the game works too much for my liking. This brings me to a couple of mods I am conflicted about.

[...]

Do you consider these QoL mods? Are there other mods that push the QoL boundary that you like?

I think the important distinction (that you appear to be subconsciously making) is that these changes don't actually alter the mechanics because they're already things you can do with just the UI: You could manually track each dupes health, or unassign each table and bed after use. You can't, however, just wave a tool over a tile and have it's contents be in a pipe (to compare to the piped outputs mod mentioned).