Please fix these core problems!

[ZombieDupe]

Besides possibly performance itself, there are many mechanical faults with an otherwise amazing game. Whether it's micromanagement where it doesn't need to be or just nonsense mechanics that you expect players to use to solve problems, this points out some things I have taken issue with the game both personally and as a result from watching and reading how other players play. First 3 points are the biggest issues that you should solve right away.

* Add guaranteed slush geysers to the base vanilla game, it's not fair the only new DLC players get to have a guaranteed easy cooling solution to their colony, while the vailla players have to pray they have one or resort to a AT + ST setup on the "easiest" asteroids, which makes no sense! This is why you get people dropping in player amount btw, this massive restriction leads many more players somewhat interested in the game quitting at cycle 200 or so instead of reaching the temoral tear. This should be PRIORITY NO.1 on your to do list to tweak for this game!

* Actual airlock door, liquid locks don't make enough sense to new players, it's annoying micromanagement to make them and they feel like a cheap exploit. In my opinion, PRIORITY NO.2 to implement this!

* Building that takes chlorine to clean germs. It does not make sense that germs would disinfect inside a reservoir if it's surrounded by chlorine, why is THIS the solution you provided us with? It doesn't work with germs in pipes, it doesn't work with germs in liquid being in contact with chlorine gas, so why this? In my opinion, PRIORITY NO.3 to implement this!

 

The rest of this is a bit more subjective, but I guarantee that it also ties in with why people would stop playing this game and what's so annoying to deal with it even if you stick through with it.

Spoiler

* Blueprints! You know the mod, please add it. Talk to the mod developer, maybe give them some money for the code they have provided. The mod can be deprecated and become part of the actual game. Why this isn't something you do boggles my mind. Easy, off-contract work that matches or exceeds the quality of the base game, is very often found in the workshop of the game. Not everything mind you, but vast majority of mods I would say are deserving to be in the game.

* More noticeable and concrete notifications. It seems way too many new players ignore the notifications on the left. Now you also added notifications on the right which are almost completely invisible as they blend in with the messy layout of resources and rocket/planetoid list. Why do you have TWO notification systems? One that can be toggled on/off (and can lag the game to hell), another that can't. You can do better than this.

* Automation ports on things that really should have them but right now don't for some reason. I'm talking automation port for reservoirs to let/not let liquid/gas OUT (currently only has automation for letting gas/liquid in only), automation port for gas cannister emptiers and fixing issues like autosweepers not putting the gas canisters in them for some reason.

* Temperature toggle for the fridge, maybe with more varying wattage use so food can be deep frozen in there. How to balance it? Make food debuff if a duplicant eats a frozen food, maybe take longer to eat and absorb the calories, and a mechanic for them to heat it up, say in a microwave to heat it up a bit. Beats needing to build a complicated system every time that only overengineering players could really comprehend. That's still an option, especially if you don't have fridges unlocked, but it being necessary to keep at least a bit of a supply of food fresh is a little irritating to say the least and something less experienced players will never do for sure.

* Pipe clogging instead of pipe breaking. If you let liquid or gas state change in pipes but they keep flowing, you could end up with dozens of pipes being partially broken. It's annoying to have to fix, especially since the flow doesn't stop in any way when a pipe does break. Some sort of pipe clogging or busting system would ensure only one or two segments of a pipe get destroyed. For more experienced players this will ensure less micromanagement and annoying pipe repairs to deal with, for new players it means they can also experiment without as much hassle.

* Refined metal/steel ladders. Why am I using ladders made of minerals (that actually look like they are made of lumber instead) so late in the game? Because the plastic ones have way too low a melting point. Gravitas buildings have plastic ladders with different textures, that texture could be used for the new metal ladder type. It could have no decor effect at all while providing same speed boost as plastic ones, and plastic ladders could have a slightly positive decor effect. Then I have a use case for all 3 ladder types, rusty lumber looking ones for starting out, plastic for comfort in colony interior and the refined metal ones for more extreme heat places and space with rockets nearby. This would be one way you can make some of the gravitas buildings eventually available to build too; make them decor items or useful later on in the research tree, it's so disappointing to see all this potential go to waste honestly.

* High pressure gas/liquid pumps and pipes for collecting and transferring x10 liquid. Such mod already exists too, though I would also suggest you make such high pressure pipes not pass through tiles (for gas pipes) or be tiles themselves (for liquid pipes). Changes the dynamic while allowing you to do so much more quickly later on in the game, much like heavy watt wire mechanics. Means also less pipes needed, which means slightly better performance.

* Fish to eat full seeds. The balancing of eating portion of a seed is already wack and somewhat annoying, I'm confused as to why you didn't set it to at least 1 full seed per pacu per day to begin with. You don't need to work with floating point numbers then with rounding errors, just keep it to integers.

* Some simple way to create more of extremely limited resources, examples being buddybuds, wheezeworts and slime, which do not involve exploits. The fish eating part of a seed btw created this exploit. Sounds great, except not only is this a duplication glitch that you could have avoided but the micromanagement of creating this build I can see to be absolutely irritating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnb188ed5E

* Only print the things you have discovered/manufactured or maybe even only if you have had access to at some point first (shown in the resources panel) and include every material, seed, critter and egg type on there when it comes care packages. Some things can be printed despite you not discovering them first which is too big of a benefit, or you can never print certain resource types because they are not part of the care package list, which makes it awful. You could even make it so duplicants have to scan each item type at the printing pod before such materials are available to print, which would make much more sense and be fun to do (if you can also queue them up later on) from a gameplay perspective.

* Less frequent printing pod prints (like 10 cycles), longer cycles (double the length or so). Some have argued against this, but there are very good reasons for this change to take effect. With it, payers then can take a little more time preparing toilets and beds at the beginning of the game and more work can also be done during the day if duplicants move at the same speed, and one thing this game does need is more time duplicants can work and more efficiently because things just take too long. Going into astronomical cycle counts also starts to make the journey of playing the game feel less enticing past a certain point. Taking cycles to do things even at max speed gets real dull real fast, even for someone like me who's played way too much of this game.

Also every duplicant and care package printed will matter! No more printing a new dupe every 3 cycles and making them so expendable, or if you take a care package, make sure that's worth not having a new duplicant.

* x10 speed being the max speed as opposed to x4 or whatever it is right now, and some suit for duplicants to carry much more resources. This way you are unlikely to get bored playing the game as things can be fast-forwarded so much more, from duplicants grabbing and building with resources, to the speed of the simulation itself.

* Frostbyte. Sounds like a neat feature, but I think it's more than that. It should have been implemented a long time ago as the reverse of scalding temperatures. There must be more incentive for players to use suits and considering how useful and almost essential a frost biome's resources are, it only makes sense for balancing to require atmo suits to traverse it.

* Buff wheezeworts and AETN so they are comparable to AT + ST setup, even if they ultimately take up more space to construct enough to do the same amount of cooling. These make more sense for cooling than AT + ST setups given the context of the game and so on. People also don't think by default on the gas .

* Some way to reconstruct AETN after being deconstructed an example being a component that requires rare resources, like insulation, to construct for it, but it drops 1 when you deconstruct an AETN, making it possible to reconstruct elsewhere. The fact you can deconstruct this building and lose it forever is kind of an insult to injury to a player.

* Change biomes for Terra for an easier introduction to the game. If you ever make disease more dangerous, which you should, and chlorine deadly, which you should, caustic and marsh biomes need not be adjacent to the main sandstone biome on Terra. New players appear to not want to traverse a germ-filled biome without a suit, but you need to get in there to build a suit, and so they stay inside their first biome and sooner or later retire their colony, starting from scratch or stop playing the game entirely, you should know this to be true by now. You can also make reed fibre available in the sandstone biome itself to make it easier for players to learn about atmo suits and start using them earlier on.

Oxygen masks help, but they make more sense to be used when you feel more secure, for biomes with unbreathable gases (like CO2), not a gas people will instantly think is toxic and deadly or a place filled to the brim with germs you eel the need to create a decontamination team to properly deal with it, something you will never get right out of the gate. Harder planetoid starts can mean harder to obtain such materials so the challenge is kept for that, that's what they are for, right? And to make the game more interesting? So why not focus on this balancing act more?

* Fix starvation ranching AND make critters eat far less material, they gobble up way too much! Pacu either need only 1/3 of a seed or way too many kg of algae, this isn't balanced. 10 seeds per cycle or 10kg of algae per cycle per pacu would make more sense. Means you also don't need to tame a truck load of volcanoes or mine entire asteroid fields to sustain a decently sized colony on stone hatches without starvation ranching exploits.

* Make building make more sense for what they are built from in relation to their visuals and what purpose they serve. I can't imagine anyone making a solar panel purely out of glass, that has to require some refined metals as well, no? Especially since so many people have found them to be too powerful in the DLC, even though you made adjustments to the lux on each planetoid surface in the DLC. Lumber can be a more common early game resource through mealWOOD a tiny bit for example, then you could use it to build outhouses, wash basins and ladders, something that is clearly in the visuals of those buildings, instead of minerals and metal ore, which makes no sense.

A lot of this comes down to annoying micromanagement and solving the disconnect between players who don't understand things and will never really get to, showing a pattern in line with the points above.

If you got to solve such issues and got hundreds or thousands of hours in the game, please do not argue against these points! You may be an engineer, or attuned to it because of being smarter than average or just look up guides and could never understand why other people would struggle with this. I didn't either until I observed how other people play and what they most often ask for help with (ends up being heat and germs) and it happens too often and too consistently to not make a pattern! Check the steam forums for this game for proof of what so many new players struggle with consistently. It seems often enough somewhat more proficient people can't understand why those that are more inept never think of things they do and say "oh, just do this, problem solved" and that continues to be the problem, but those that do, like me, have to try and explain the basic sense of how confused people not putting hidden things together just to make progress get lost in the first place.

It takes a whole another level of understanding to both be able to understand how to do something AND be able to put yourself in the train of thought of those who CAN'T do as well to be able to comprehend why that is and being able to point out core bottle necks of a situation. If it's a pattern, many of which the above are, there is something wrong with the systems in place, in this case, some of the awful game mechanics at play.

Klei, in the next coming updates, please address these by tuning and fixing them already.

[GluttonyMain]

5 minutes ago, ZombieDupe said:

it's not fair the only new DLC players get to have a guaranteed easy cooling solution to their colony, while the vailla players have to pray they have one or resort to a AT + ST setup on the "easiest" asteroids, which makes no sense!

DLC asteroids dont have guarenteed cool slush. I know for a fact that forzen forest, desolands, flipped asteroid and metallic swampy do not have a gauranteeed cool slush geyser.

[ZombieDupe]

1 hour ago, GluttonyMain said:

DLC asteroids dont have guarenteed cool slush. I know for a fact that forzen forest, desolands, flipped asteroid and metallic swampy do not have a gauranteeed cool slush geyser.

Those are the later, challenge asteroids, NOT the easy starting ones you get presented first in the list of choices. Read again what I wrote about that and you will get my gist about that distinction. In vanilla, the first few asteroids you get presented with like Terra, Rime, Oceana do not have guaranteed slush geysers, but DLC's counterparts to some of these do.

[Spoonwood]

On 8/2/2022 at 12:59 PM, ZombieDupe said:

Building that takes chlorine to clean germs.

According to the Wiki:

"Ore Scrubber is a Utility Building that uses Chlorine to kill Germs on items. Chlorine used by the Ore Scrubber is consumed."  https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Ore_Scrubber"

Yea, I've never used it in game.  I think I've seen a video of CrypticFox using it from a while back.

It seems though that you want some building to clean germs in a fluid?

[SharraShimada]

You know https://toolsnotincluded.net/map-tools/map-browser?

Let me show you some examples without any slush geyser on the starting terra-asteroid:

V-SNDST-C-1646765579-0

V-SNDST-C-95527157-0

V-SNDST-C-506285009-0

And many many more. 

In fact, there are ~60 pages listed without ANY slush on terra start.

 

And you can also use this website to find asteroids WITH a slush for vanilla. Its not that hard. And if you dont want to do this, please dont complain.

[ZombieDupe]

On 8/4/2022 at 4:53 AM, Spoonwood said:

...
It seems though that you want some building to clean germs in a fluid?

That is correct, there is a mod for such a thing as well, though I think it's fair if the building requires plastic, for example, and only kills a certain amount of germs when cycled through, so you have to cycle it through again by either building more of these or creating a loop to check if there are germs in the pipes before letting them back into clean supply, making germ sensor at least somewhat still useful. That sounds fair and more obvious for new players to understand and isn't so much of micro-management to do as the current reservoir system does.

Germs aren't strictly necessary to clean either at the moment, but the idea is that they should be and they will be. Making germs as big of a problem as you would expect for each disease type is better than having it so weak, if the colony is infected with slime-lung, it's no big deal and easy to clean with deodorisers.

12 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

And you can also use this website to find asteroids WITH a slush for vanilla. Its not that hard. And if you dont want to do this, please dont complain.

Tell that to the thousands of people who can't get past cycle 200 until the reasons for it are explained to them in great detail, I'm sure they would all take it fondly and consider that as the standard, reasonable game experience and not at all convoluted and unfair.

[Sasza22]

On 8/2/2022 at 6:59 PM, ZombieDupe said:

Actual airlock door,

Once again i will say i`m ok with a proper airlock door that`s higher tech (plastic, refined metal). But also: Insulated Airlock. If building liquidlock is tedious then what would you call building liquidlocks that don`t let heat through?

[pether]

19 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Once again i will say i`m ok with a proper airlock door that`s higher tech (plastic, refined metal).

I'd love to see door building that costs visco gel to build. And it acts like visco gel when opened, solid tile when closed. Would give more reasons to create gel