[Game Update] - Public Testing 508497 and 508567

[JarrettM]

Hi everyone, this patch for the public testing branch includes a few tuning changes we wanted to get in before the weekend. Looking forward to hearing what you think.

Build 508497

Changes and Improvements

• All versions
  • Oakshell and Sanishell can now eat slime.
  • Curried Beans tuning changes: 16 cycle spoil time, recipe no longer require Pincha Peppernuts, increased to 5,000 kcal, and the Hot Stuff effect gained +3 Strength.
  • Yodeler and Serenaded effects now apply bonuses to Construction, Machinery, and Strength attributes.
  • Added new mouth flap animations for Yodeler and Duplicants with the Serenaded buff.
  • Added sound for Sanishell’s germ eating anim.
  • Neutronium dig commands are automatically canceled.
• Spaced Out! only
  • Hooked up new Rocket Fuel and Rocket Oxidizer diagnostics icons.

Fixes

• All versions
  • Fixed crash that could occur when attempting to use the 'copy' button on a POI building. 
  • Fixed popping in the Sanishell germ killing animation.
  • Fixed issue causing fish overcrowding to behave incorrectly
  • Fish not in liquid are now considered overcrowded
  • Save migration now works properly even if the name has trailing whitespace.
  • Fixed Ice-E Fan minimum temperature reached tooltip not displaying the minimum temperature.
  • Yodeler will only play singing mouth animations if their mouth is not already animating.
  • Fixed Canister Emptier Auto Bottler setting not working.
• Spaced Out! only
  • Potential fix for Materials Study Terminal not creating errands after finishing research.

Build 508567

• Fixed crash that could occur when loading a save with Neutronium tile dig orders

View full update

[Primalflower]

i wonder what these pacu tunings mean.

[Saturnus]

37 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

i wonder what these pacu tunings mean.

Well, no more flop farms obviously.

Before you could exploit the fact that flopping pacus weren't overcrowded so you have like 10 (being about the optimal number) of breeding pacus in a single tile and then just flood it occasionally so the pacus could be fed.

Mostly useful for mass omelette production, for example for E52b feeding

Edited May 20, 2022 by Saturnus

[JRup]

This is as good a place to ask as any: is the polymer press supposed to accumulate steam if its environment is hot enough to melt the plastic that it's trying to produce? Steam is only released when it's actually successful in its endeavor...

44 minutes ago, JarrettM said:

Fixed Canister Emptier Auto Bottler setting not working.

Yes!

45 minutes ago, JarrettM said:

Fixed Ice-E Fan minimum temperature reached tooltip not displaying the minimum temperature.

Hydrofan FTW too, at least from in-game-database-memory lane...

[Primalflower]

1 hour ago, JarrettM said:

Curried Beans tuning changes: 16 cycle spoil time, recipe no longer require Pincha Peppernuts, increased to 5,000 kcal, and the Hot Stuff effect gained +3 Strength

I wonder how good this is, not considering shove vole starvation ranches. 

Would this allow the delecta vole to produce more food than the basic morph? If so, I'm awfully happy!

Edited May 20, 2022 by Primalflower

[JarrettM]

Added a new build with this change:

• Fixed crash that could occur when loading a save with Neutronium tile dig orders

[Primalflower]

shove vole produces 3333.3333 kcal of BBQ per cycle if fed and happy.

the delecta vole produces exactly half of this, it produces 1666.66666 kcal of meat every cycle. In addition to this, it produces the tonic root necessary for roughly 1298.7013 kcal of curried beans every cycle.

This means that the delecta vole, discluding the nosh bean cost for simplicity, produces roughly 2965.36797 kcal/cycle. a kcal loss of ~= 367.96533 in exchange for a fair few duplicants getting +3 athletics and +3 strength.

It's interesting, I suppose. If It were me, I would reduce the food that the delecta vole requires.

Edited May 20, 2022 by Primalflower

[lich46]

Could you please fix the bug about missing artifact in a rocket module after loading? This bug has existed for a long time and has been quite annoying.

Quote

 

Sorry to post it here, as there have been several bug reports but no one noticed that.

[Fradow]

Since you asked for opinions ...

TL;DR: Oakshells need their diet halved, the other critters are fine.

Oakshells: let's start with the one that still need balancing: they compete with Arbor Trees, and they currently require grooming, as fed+ungroomed is no longer an option. The only way they can compete in the long term is by allowing a pdirt neutral/positive version of an ethanol loop with fed+groomed option. According to my maths, they'll be running at a 10% pdirt deficit. Making them eat even 25% less (70kg/cycle => 52.5kg/cycle) would make them okay. A nice option would be to halve their diet, at which point they'll be balanced in my opinion (considering the dupe labor).

Don't get me wrong, the Slime addition to their diet is a nice touch: it greatly simplify the initial breeding, especially on vanilla.

Sanishells: compared to most other critters, they seem to be about right. They aren't quite up to Vole level, considering they are on the same starvation-ranch niche, but on the other hand they allow Surf'n'Turf. The real issue is that they compete with Pacus, which are broken in terms of balancing (infinite food with no resource or dupe labor once the population is scaled up). The real solution would be to nerf Pacus. But that would upset a significant part of the player-base who got used to it...

In short, they seem about balanced, and should stay as-is.

Delecta Voles: it's clear from the get-go they are a vanity critter: they are super late game and require a very strict diet. The upside isn't much (especially as it lowers the calorie output, as calculated PrimalFlower), but with that last balance patch, it's good enough to make it worth it for the determined player. It's clear only a tiny minority of players will ever ranch them unless they are made easier to ranch (less strict temperature requirement mainly) or the Tonic Root usage are great. I still think there should be more uses for Tonic Roots.

So definitely a good design for a vanity project, but not enough to make it mainstream.

Cuddle Pips: they are the cutest of the bunch, and this plays in their game design too. That's their main value proposition, and I think they are well designed in that regard, especially with the last few patches that added buff to dupes and relaxed their hugging requirements. As such, I can see them used by players for that reason, though from as pure balancing view, they fall short, as their main mechanism is underwhelming and simply not needed: adding them to an already working setup is more complication than it's worth.

Not everything need to be balanced, and what they lack in effectiveness, they make up in cuteness, and that's reason enough to consider them good.

 

A long-form version of my opinion that I maintain updated is here:

 

[pether]

13 hours ago, JarrettM said:

Yodeler and Serenaded effects now apply bonuses to Construction, Machinery, and Strength attributes.

I feel like the Baloon artist is still better. As long as both focus on increasing attributes, one will be always better than the other. Sure, both in combination give even better results, but when compared Yodeler feels meh.

Maybe it should focus on other thing than increasing attributes?

Also I feel I should bring up Plug Slug morph topic again so it wasn't forgotten. That critter needs and deserves a useful variant that encourages ranching them. Or we could see some metal ore renewalble sources - Sanishells molt maybe? Or even better - both.

[Bluefoxfire]

2 hours ago, Fradow said:

The real solution would be to nerf Pacus. But that would upset a significant part of the player-base who got used to it...

I'd say might as well nerf, since the cycle has already happened twice before (exo suits and food storage), and things went back to normal anyway.

[Gurgel]

10 hours ago, Bluefoxfire said:

I'd say might as well nerf, since the cycle has already happened twice before (exo suits and food storage), and things went back to normal anyway.

Probably. Personally, I feel Pacus are pretty broken at the moment anyways. A redesign, not just a nerf, would be welcome.

[blakemw]

19 hours ago, Bluefoxfire said:

I'd say might as well nerf, since the cycle has already happened twice before (exo suits and food storage), and things went back to normal anyway.

Yep, and it's not like anyone sincerely thinks that putting 100 starving pacus in 1 tile of water and having it produce unlimited food out of thin air (or CPU cycles) is a reasonable game mechanic. They're just enjoying the obvious exploit until it gets fixed.

Before pacus could be fed with seeds there was more justification to exploit starvation ranching just because the only way to sustainably feed pacus was to ranch 3 pufts per pacu, which was such ridiculously bad balance that no-one wanted to deal with actually feeding pacus. Now pacus work really well in a balanced "normal person" base which has some farming and some ranching, and for those players who are vehemently opposed to farming for no good reason there are specialized builds just for producing seeds.

[zach123b]

having more uses for slime is cool but could we get more ways to produce slime?  having only pufts produce slime makes them stand out but ranching them can be annoying.  plus polluted oxygen is only made through a couple ways and are either slow or inefficient (sublimation station @66% mass or off gassing polluted water/dirt) maybe a dirt plug slug morph that excretes polluted oxygen

[Primalflower]

On 5/21/2022 at 6:09 AM, Bluefoxfire said:

I'd say might as well nerf, since the cycle has already happened twice before (exo suits and food storage), and things went back to normal anyway.

I think I'd be pretty happy honestly, about getting rid of how you can stuff a bunch of pacu in one tile and have them live and die there infinitely. Even if you get rid of that, pacu are still awesome for food and personally i find them so fun when you feed them and such! 

[Primalflower]

3 hours ago, zach123b said:

having only pufts produce slime makes them stand out but ranching them can be annoying

Well, with slime specifically, you barely need to do anything. Puft princes and pufts in their own seperated ranches will always produce eggs of one another, so you could very easily ranch for slime specifically without having to get into the nitty gritty of pufts.

Edited May 22, 2022 by Primalflower
don't like that word

[Fradow]

10 hours ago, blakemw said:

Yep, and it's not like anyone sincerely thinks that putting 100 starving pacus in 1 tile of water and having it produce unlimited food out of thin air (or CPU cycles) is a reasonable game mechanic. They're just enjoying the obvious exploit until it gets fixed.

Before pacus could be fed with seeds there was more justification to exploit starvation ranching just because the only way to sustainably feed pacus was to ranch 3 pufts per pacu, which was such ridiculously bad balance that no-one wanted to deal with actually feeding pacus. Now pacus work really well in a balanced "normal person" base which has some farming and some ranching, and for those players who are vehemently opposed to farming for no good reason there are specialized builds just for producing seeds.

Using game mechanics as they should be? Heeehhhhh no fun!

Why not instead exploit Arbor Trees to generate a humongous amount of Acorns and confine fed Pacus to a single cell (for performance) to produce a huge amount of automated Omelettes? (or Pacu Fillet / Surf'n'Turf if you'd rather cook it).

In case it's not obvious, I agree that it would be a good idea to revamp Pacus, and the links I provided actually show how it could be done, would the starving mechanism be changed. It was originally made to feed the Experiment 52b the equivalent of 56 Dupes worth of Omelettes (56.000kcal/cycle).

On the other hand, it's really not fun to have a well-oiled base break because of a patch on an already released game where you don't expect such changes.

[Jorge Junior]

On 5/21/2022 at 1:19 AM, JarrettM said:

Added a new build with this change:

• Fixed crash that could occur when loading a save with Neutronium tile dig orders

I wish there was swimming in the game..   thanks for hot fix update..

[Caesium]

Small bug to report - not quite sure which patch it started with, but on this development branch I've noticed some machines continue their operating animation even when no dupe is stood next to them. I've seen this on the electric grill and the rock crusher so far.

[JRup]

The advanced-gumball-pachinko-thingmajig, otherwise know as the Molecular Forge, also presents this behavior.

@Caesium: You should consider this as a great opportunity to file a bug report...

[Bluefoxfire]

On 5/22/2022 at 2:14 PM, Fradow said:

Using game mechanics as they should be? Heeehhhhh no fun!

Why not instead exploit Arbor Trees to generate a humongous amount of Acorns and confine fed Pacus to a single cell (for performance) to produce a huge amount of automated Omelettes? (or Pacu Fillet / Surf'n'Turf if you'd rather cook it).

There's pushing the limits of a mechanic, then there's abusing an oversight to super easy mode the game.

[Saturnus]

56 minutes ago, Bluefoxfire said:

There's pushing the limits of a mechanic, then there's abusing an oversight to super easy mode the game.

You're missing the point then. If no one explores just how much you can exploit a specific mechanic then the devs don't have any measure for how severe a potential problem is. We're doing the devs, and all players, a huge favour by testing the game and pointing out potential problems because the devs do not have a budget for doing this themselves. Obviously, we have fun in the process.

If think the devs are caught between two chairs on the matter because there's two ways to handle the pacu problem.

The heavy-handed way is to adjust confinement rules so that pacus always needs 8 tiles of water each in order to avoid being confined.

And there's the soft-touch solution of adjusting tame pacus calories so they always require some feeding in order to lay at least one egg before dying.

Edited May 24, 2022 by Saturnus

[Bluefoxfire]

On 5/24/2022 at 1:52 PM, Saturnus said:

You're missing the point then. If no one explores just how much you can exploit a specific mechanic then the devs don't have any measure for how severe a potential problem is. We're doing the devs, and all players, a huge favour by testing the game and pointing out potential problems because the devs do not have a budget for doing this themselves. Obviously, we have fun in the process.

If think the devs are caught between two chairs on the matter because there's two ways to handle the pacu problem.

The heavy-handed way is to adjust confinement rules so that pacus always needs 8 tiles of water each in order to avoid being confined.

And there's the soft-touch solution of adjusting tame pacus calories so they always require some feeding in order to lay at least one egg before dying.

I actually came up with a better explanation the day after that post I made. There's pretty much what you already mentioned, then there's using it as a tool of compare and despair to bully others.