Difficulty settings

[Henlikuoth]

Hello everyone, 

This thread is essentially about the seven (7) difficulty settings that are currently available in the game, namely hunger, durability, radiation, disease, morale, meteor showers, and stress.

How do you usually modify these settings?

In my case, I set the settings to maximum difficulty for four from the seven: radiation, disease, morale, and stress.

This makes the game more interesting and challenging for me, and thus, more exciting. For example, if the stress setting is set to the maximum (frankly depressing), the player is forced to pay attention to small things that provide a bonus to stress relief. Things that are often ignored or not even noticed, like "Saw a friend" or "Smelled flowers." Suddenly, these details become more important again. The same is true for the morale requirements (draconian). Maintaining a high morale becomes much more important now, especially in combination with the increased stress. This motivates the player to do certain steps to increase the morale, like better food and a significantly enhanced decor. 

However, I am not sure how to evaluate the remaining three settings: hunger, durability, and meteor showers. 

Raising the hunger setting simply increases the amount of kcals a single dupe requires. That are 2000 kcals for the "ravenous" setting. This would mean you only have to build more planter boxes in the beginning to feed all dupes. And I do not see any real "difficulty" in this. It is only an expansion of planter boxes and, consequently, a bigger grind, and nothing more than that. The same is valid for the highest durability setting (threadbare). The consequence would be that you just have to build more farm plots for the thimble reeds to produce more reed fiber. And this would just be another adding of plots and another (mindless) grind. 

I would suggest a different approach to the hunger and durability settings. I would suggest to keep the kcals requirement for hunger at the default level (1000 kcals) for all higher settings. However, on higher hunger settings, the dupes should want to eat higher quality food. If they, for example, don't eat higher quality food for a certain number of cycles (maybe 3), they should get additional stress (like 10%), a reduction of germ resistance (maybe -1), and a morale malus (maybe like -3 to -5, depending on the setting). On top of that, the dupes might want to eat 2 or 3 different food types within 3 cycles. If not, they should get similar debuffs. This would be some examples of a real more challenging hunger setting. Of course, the details of the maluses are open for debate. But you get the general idea.

Similarly, instead of just letting Atmo suits decay faster, the decay rate should stay at default level (10% per cycle). On higher durability settings, the repair of the Atmo suits could be more difficult by adding other required materials. For example, instead of only needing reed fiber, a balm lilly could also be added for the repair of an Atmo suit (or any other appropriate plant). This gives at least a good reason to create farms for balm lillys (finally!). The details are, also here, open for debate, but I believe it should go into this direction. 

All in all, I think this would make hunger and durability more exciting, because it would force the player to look for better strategies, like creating better food and harvesting balm lillys (or other then needed plants). Other than that, it seems to be the consensus to just leave them at default level. This is understandable, because the boosted difficulty settings just increase a rather useless and tiring grind without any strategic value. 

When it comes to the settings for the meteor showers, I am unsure. Increased meteor showers might damage the top of your base somewhat more, but on the other hand, they also provide more resources. So, this is a double-edged sword. You may tell me your opinion about this. 

In any way, I hope Klei will take a look at the difficulty settings, especially hunger and durability. 

 

 

[Lilalaunekuh]

I just started a new base and as usual did crank up all settings to max.

Radiation, Disease, Morale and Stress without beeing on max difficulty make the game much more shallow.

[Without many systems/buildings/considerations are just obsolete. The radiation setting feels the least impactfull, but at least adds some considerations and desgin space for the later stages of the game with space exposure/rocket travel.]

 

Not sure if I´m alone with it but I like the "Hunger setting":

• It really feels like the most impactful difficulty setting when doing (all) challenge runs (mostly considering locavore/carnivore achievments)
• Don´t underestimate the double time needed to eat every cycle (~ 3% of a cycle additional time needed just to eat
• I wouldn´t want to have the "Hunger" setting SOLELY modify the food quality modfier (would reduce it to just an other stress setting)

 

I don´t have a strong opinions on the Durability setting, to me it feels like just an additional daily water consumption (irrigating reed fibers) setting.

[At least it creates some incentive to not just rely on wild reed fibers or limit exo suit use.]

 

The Meteor shower setting feels odd. After >200 cycles with space exposure as my experience, I would argue that the additional received resources make the game easier without adding any meaningful additional hazard considerations.

But would love to hear more about how other people view the Meteor shower setting

[Charletrom]

On 7/1/2023 at 4:05 PM, Henlikuoth said:

Similarly, instead of just letting Atmo suits decay faster, the decay rate should stay at default level (10% per cycle). On higher durability settings, the repair of the Atmo suits could be more difficult by adding other required materials. For example, instead of only needing reed fiber, a balm lilly could also be added for the repair of an Atmo suit (or any other appropriate plant). This gives at least a good reason to create farms for balm lillys (finally!). The details are, also here, open for debate, but I believe it should go into this direction. 

I use the customize recipes mod to achieve some of this… I set the durability difficulty to “reinforced” but use the mod to increase the repair costs by 4X and add plastic and glass as ingredients. 

[Henlikuoth]

2 hours ago, Charletrom said:

I use the customize recipes mod to achieve some of this… I set the durability difficulty to “reinforced” but use the mod to increase the repair costs by 4X and add plastic and glass as ingredients. 

Sounds interesting, but Klei would need to implement something similar. The system right now is not very creative, with regard to hunger and durability in particular.