Critter Sensor "Outside of room" - anybody seen this or know how to fix it?

[justajones]

Hi folks, I've been playing ONI for almost 200 hours now, but have been able to find what I needed by searching... until now.

I'm trying to set up an auto-incubator for sani-shells, then drop them into my main water supply. However, the critter sensor I built is non-functional, saying "Outside of room" , with the tooltip "This building must be built inside a Room for full functionality". I haven't seen this before - certainly some buildings want to be in a specific kind of room, but my whole base seems to count as a Miscellaneous Room in the room overlay.

On top of that, the sensor is in a room! My water supply is 16x19 internally, with one pneumatic door. Originally it had a mechanical airlock set to "Open", but figuring that was the issue, I replaced it with the pneumatic door. While there was no door, the critter sensor worked, sensing 23 critters/eggs not in other rooms around my base. Once the replacement door finished building. the critter sensor returned to its "Outside of room" state.

I'm attaching a screenshot of the situation. I'm running the DLC (patch U44-537329-5) and a few utility mods: Pliers Fixed, Fast Track (manually installed beta), and Deconstruct Only Building.

If nobody's seen this, I may file a bug report.

Thanks!

[Sanchozz]

show us the room overlay

[Gurgel]

Does it happen w/o all the mods? You need a mod-less issue to get support from Klei. 

[Joe Dee]

I've noticed the same thing lately. Sometimes it stops working when the room is larger than 128 tiles, and the only way to fix it was to either make the room smaller or rebuild it a few times, then sometimes it'll work for a while even when the room is bigger or so it seemed.

The room overlay does say that 128 is the maximum size for a room but until now the critter sensor didn't care.

You could probably partition your room with pneumatic doors and put the sensor in with the crabs to make it work.

[justajones]

Thanks for the replies! If this was known I was hoping to avoid doing the disable-mods-restart dance. Since it's not, I did disable all my mods, and have been doing some experimenting in sandbox.

I hadn't been aware of the max room size of 128 tiles, since most everything in my base that's not in an explicit room is "Miscellaneous Room", "Room Size: ###### tiles". I had figured that whatever was not in a room was just counted as one giant room, and thus that rooms did not have an upper limit in size unless it was a specific room type from the overlay.

However, after experimenting a bit... I still don't know exactly what allows a room to be bigger than 128 tiles. It seems like it may have to do with number of undisturbed tiles, or connections to existing "natural rooms", however.

If you wall off an empty area with no undisturbed tiles, it's not a room. However, if you dig out a long area from the world, say, 30 tiles wide, and cap the ends, it's a "Miscellaneous Room", potentially thousands of tiles in size. Digging a round hole in mostly solid material usually resulted in not-a-room if my brush radius was 15-20. Sometimes it was a room, however, but nibbling away at the edges with a smaller brush turned it into not-a-room after a few bites. For instance I dug a 50-radius hole and it was a room, but nibbling with a 10-radius brush turned it into not-a-room after about 8 clicks.

Connecting not-a-rooms like this to existing natural rooms just extends the not-a-room nature to the small natural rooms, at first. However, if you do it more than a few times, the whole thing becomes a room again.

Anyway, the issue turns out to be that the Critter Sensor really does need to be in a room, but what the game considers to be a room is pretty wacky and inconsistent. A completely excavated and walled-off area larger than 128 tiles is definitely not-a-room, though.

Cheers!