Blueprints included?

[erny0507]

That mod has become such a necesity, please do a dev version on it, if possible that allow to change the material to use or use similar and available material.

Things like rockets need command modules and their interior design, making those after getting a good design becomes so boring.

Thank you.

[babba]

+10000

[tuxii]

I agree.  ONI is too much like work because of this.

[Primalflower]

i used to use the blueprints mod, but it stagnated my builds. If i don't go through the process of building it each time, there is little opportunity for me to make improvements on the field. Though I can see the use case for it with spacefarer modules in particular.

[NurdRage]

I'm going to go against the grain and say blueprints may be a bad idea if it straight up gives you optimized builds.

half the fun of this game is designing stuff yourself and being rewarded with a machine that works. 

Remember how it felt when you first started the game and most of your dupes died?

(I still have grief over watching Joshua give up, sit amongst all the bodies of his dead mates... then curl up and cry until he died from lack of air.)

Then remember how it felt when you finally got oxygen working and your dupes survived? 

... only to die again from lack of algea?

as you solved problems you felt better and more badass. 

Your machine designs might suck, but as long as they WORK, they feel awesome because YOU built them. You can take pride because YOU did it, not some blueprint.

But what if the blueprints gave you a working machine without any effort? The game just boils down to you laying out all the machines you want and letting the dupes build it. You didn't really solve anything. And if you don't know how a machine works, how do you know how to fix it if it goes wrong? or if an angry destructive dupe smashes a critical part?

Meanwhile, another big part of a game like this is the community around it. All those youtube videos and posts about people showing off their machines and tutorials makes for a wonderful community. I love ONI and the community. I learn so much watching other people build their machines. And i love the excitement when someone makes a crazy contraption and shows it off. 

Granted, the majority of players don't engage with the community, so maybe giving them blueprints might be beneficial to them.

A worrisome issue is that a lot of the more interesting machines use exploits. A good example is my "OSHA's Revenge" sour gas boiler. It's more exploits than game mechanics. And the huge problem with that is once an exploit gets patched or tweaked, the machine breaks. If the players don't really think about the machines they're blueprinting, and one day it stops working, they're not going to be happy. 

Now if you install the mod yourself, and build a blueprint library yourself, you are taking responsibility for the contents of the library. But if Klei includes a set of blueprints, they are taking that responsibility. and i'm not sure if that's something we should ask of them. It's hard enough fixing bugs, and then having to go through each machine to see how a bug fix makes or breaks it is a lot of work.

as @Primalflower says, if you're not building it, you're not really thinking about it, and seeing how to improve it. I would also add that you don't really respect a build if you don't feel the work that went into it. I have tremendous respect for all the sour gas boilers out there, because they're exceedingly hard to optimize. But if everyone can just press a button and out pops a supreme 10kg/s sour gas boiler, then when someone posts their own 2kg/s boiler no one will respect it, even though its tremendously hard just to go through the whole cycle once, let alone tune and optimize it enough to get 2kg/s.

 

On the flipside of the flipside... maybe blueprints are important because the majority of players aren't experts in the various disciplines of engineering to make the various machines. Should we deny a player a fun time because "you're not supposed to have it easy!". I think that is equally dumb and elitist. Some parts of the game are just super hard to do completely on your own. You kinda need the community to lean on. Then when you've gotten the basics, you can get going.

And as @erny0507 says, some parts are just stupid boring if they must be done. I absolutely hate laying down a stack of 70 nat gas boilers for my power plant. it's stupid on repeat. 

 

Maybe a compromise? the default library of blueprints consists of working, but obviously BAD machines, so players can get started, but if they want better, they have to do it themselves or at the very least seek it out in the community on their own. idk. But straight up giving people good working blueprints I think diminishes the challenge of the game.

 

The blueprints mod is wonderful, i use it too, but in addition to adding a feature to the game, it fundamentally changes a core part of the game: About solving your own problems and feeling pride in doing so. I feel this is so fundamental to ONI that we must be extremely careful when messing with it. 

[tuxii]

1 hour ago, NurdRage said:

half the fun of this game is designing stuff yourself and being rewarded with a machine that works. 

True, but the problem lies in when you have already tamed the beast already.  Like a Cool Steam Vent for example.  Once you've tamed it and come up with a design you're happy with, you shouldn't have to tediously rebuild it from scratch the next time you encounter a CSV, you should be able to just copy paste and move on.  Being able to save your own designs to reuse in a later save should be a given. The player could take pride in their build and not have to tediously rebuild it next time.

There shouldn't be a default library at all.  This game doesn't give anyone anything for free, look at the tutorials as proof of that.  If players want to seek out blueprints made by others, they should certainly be allowed to do so.  Let them play the game how they want.

Being able to change the materials of the blueprint before allowing construction would be really nice.

1 hour ago, NurdRage said:

But what if the blueprints gave you a working machine without any effort?

Has anyone ever suggested this as part of blueprints?  Does Factorio or other building games do this?

[NurdRage]

Hmm.. If the functionality is JUST copy and past your own machines between saves (with getting external ones being completely optional), then that indeed retains a lot benefits and minimizes drawbacks.

The main issue becomes if that slows down your own innovation if you're not constantly rechecking things. But i guess that's on you as a player, the game can't hobble you just to teach you, that's what school is for.

One bad thing for Klei is that i'm certain they'll get loads of complains about dupes building things badly and how their AI is incredibly stupid because most players will blueprint a finished machine that may actually need to be build with certain parts in certain orders. Does Klei want to deal with constant deluge of complains about dupes building the walls and then locking themselves out of the core of a machine? look at how much people complain about dupes entombing their numbskulls into the ceilings and floors. It's going to be a nightmare if blueprints are official.

(i still want the blueprints though)

[erny0507]

6 hours ago, Primalflower said:

i used to use the blueprints mod, but it stagnated my builds. If i don't go through the process of building it each time, there is little opportunity for me to make improvements on the field. Though I can see the use case for it with spacefarer modules in particular.

but once u have a good design you repeat from memory and you can always improve and adapt with both options

[Primalflower]

8 minutes ago, erny0507 said:

but once u have a good design you repeat from memory and you can always improve and adapt with both options

The game places it all for me. There is no point when i place a blueprint where i question "hey, why am i placing this bit again?" Or "couldnt this be a little smaller?" The difference between building it yourself and placing all of the pieces pre-assembled is much bigger than you think. Blueprints work as they are- an optional piece of content that you opt into.

[tuxii]

There should just be a "tutorial" that tells players "Hey dupes are stupid, if they were smart they wouldn't need you."

Besides, this problem was mitigated with trapped dupes being detected and alerted now, rather than back in the day when we didn't know a dupe was trapped until they started suffocating or made a mess.

45 minutes ago, NurdRage said:

The main issue becomes if that slows down your own innovation if you're not constantly rechecking things. But i guess that's on you as a player, the game can't hobble you just to teach you, that's what school is for.

Putting good tools in player's (an people's) hands is what leads to innovation, not tedious repetitive human drudgery.  Just because someone has to rebuild from scratch their own design doesn't mean they're going to innovate and redesign.  If their old design worked without issue and was efficient enough, they don't need to reinvent the wheel.  Or worse, they just sigh and box off the vent because they can't be bothered.

If I have to tame a Cool Steam Vent I am going to slap down my sVent. It's not particularly energy efficient because it is a condensor design, but it is small, bulletproof and doesn't use any exploits.  I made evaporator designs and the power savings are just not worth added complexities and introduction of other problems.

[NewWorldDan]

7 hours ago, Primalflower said:

i used to use the blueprints mod, but it stagnated my builds. If i don't go through the process of building it each time, there is little opportunity for me to make improvements on the field. Though I can see the use case for it with spacefarer modules in particular.

I use the copy and paste function a lot. I don't have any saved prints, although I could probably save my spom designs. Most things need to be customized to the location and local materials. But copy and paste, yeah, all the time.

[NurdRage]

2 hours ago, tuxii said:

 

Putting good tools in player's (an people's) hands is what leads to innovation, not tedious repetitive human drudgery.  Just because someone has to rebuild from scratch their own design doesn't mean they're going to innovate and redesign.  If their old design worked without issue and was efficient enough, they don't need to reinvent the wheel.  Or worse, they just sigh and box off the vent because they can't be bothered.

If I have to tame a Cool Steam Vent I am going to slap down my sVent. It's not particularly energy efficient because it is a condensor design, but it is small, bulletproof and doesn't use any exploits.  I made evaporator designs and the power savings are just not worth added complexities and introduction of other problems.

I think the better argument is that if had to repeat something mindlessly, you actually simplify the design so it's easy to repeat and remember. This can lead to even worse stagnation because you don't want to innovate. A better and more complex design is a drawback if the mental cost of repeating it tile for tile is too high. So you end up stagnating a mediocre and less efficient (or even buggy) design, simply because it's easy to remember.

But if you had a blueprint, you could iterate on the differences rather than repeat the similarities.

 

[Primalflower]

18 minutes ago, NurdRage said:

A better and more complex design is a drawback if the mental cost of repeating it tile for tile is too high. So you end up stagnating a mediocre and less efficient (or even buggy) design, simply because it's easy to remember.

its scary how true this sort of sentiment is, even if I don't want to admit it. In a similar vein, I can't remember how many times i've placed down a simple Gas Filter building because i didn't want to have to figure out how to deal with the possible overflow of one made with automation and shutoffs.

[gabberworld]

6 hours ago, NurdRage said:

Remember how it felt when you first started the game and most of your dupes died?

i to remember. my dupes still die tho sometimes as im not careful en-oh

[tuxii]

On 3/26/2022 at 6:33 PM, NurdRage said:

But if you had a blueprint, you could iterate on the differences rather than repeat the similarities.

Blueprints really helped me in my sour gas boiler designs.  It allowed me to easily section my designs to test if I could make them smaller.

[Sebastiangperez]

I would like to see how they achieve missing material on blueprints. I mean , materials that are not in the starter asteroid and the blueprint has it. maybe substitution on the fly ?