[Game Update] - Public Testing 565965

[spkthed]

Well done team. This is amazing. One of the best updates so far.

[Farsight]

Good stuff!

Quick ask: could critter drop-offs be made to never flood? We have a number of aquatic critters now, and managing them can be quite a pain without a mod-fix.

Trying to keep a sponge slug ranch working is especially painful, since an unflooded drop-off means they're likely to lay the wrong eggs.  

Edited July 21, 2023 by Farsight

[BezKa]

I feel so bad for missing this, especially after playing ONI today for 5 hours! I really can't wait to test this update out!

On 7/20/2023 at 9:13 PM, JarrettM said:

• Added Grubfruit Plant Seed care package.
• Care packages for seeds, food, critters, and eggs which require you to first discover them are now available after cycle 500.

Skewed asteroid grub grubs real!

I read the entire post and holy !!! That's so many good changes, thank you!!

[BezKa]

Maybe it's time for a separate "Critters" tab for buildings? There seems to be a buildup and they're getting split between stations and food a bit too much imo

[Colqhoun]

20 hours ago, BezKa said:

I feel so bad for missing this, especially after playing ONI today for 5 hours! I really can't wait to test this update out!

Skewed asteroid grub grubs real!

I read the entire post and holy !!! That's so many good changes, thank you!!

Does this mean nosh beans and sleet wheat will appear in care packages?

[BezKa]

2 minutes ago, Colqhoun said:

Does this mean nosh beans and sleet wheat will appear in care packages?

From how I understand it, no. Grub fruit seeds care package got added, so it will now appear in the game after you discover the plant, or after 500 days. Other care packages like shove voles, thimble reed seeds, that are already in the game and require you to discover them first will show up after 500 if you don't discover them until then. Afaik there are no care packages with Sleet Wheat and nosh beans, so they will not appear at all.

[Magheat2009]

On 7/21/2023 at 12:43 AM, JarrettM said:

Gas Grass now requires 25 kg dirt per cycle in addition to its liquid chlorine requirement.

It seems a bit unnecessary. Gassy Moos are quite complicated even with reduced lux demand and gas grass growing without atmosphere. If it gets overly cumbersome, most people simply wont bother with Gassy Moos.

On 7/21/2023 at 12:43 AM, JarrettM said:

Colonies that don't have Gassy Moos can produce Brackene using the new Plant Pulverizer.

I don't understand this. Brackene is not a necessity in the game. Making it available to players without dealing with Gassy Moos may remove the incentive to mess with them.

On 7/21/2023 at 12:43 AM, JarrettM said:

We've also added a new Bleach Stone Hopper that converts Salt and Gold into Bleach Stone

Poor pufts, becoming more pointless day by day.

Overall a good update. It lost hope when the game files related to milking moos were removed, only to be surprised with a "Game Update" notification. I was not expecting another update to come out before October.

Edited July 23, 2023 by Magheat2009

[sakura_sk]

1 hour ago, Magheat2009 said:

I don't understand this. Brackene is not a necessity in the game. Making it available to players without dealing with Gassy Moos may remove the incentive to mess with them.

Brackene->Brackwax->Plastium. Like plastic, it's not mandatory to go through ranching in order to get it, right?

[JRup]

1 hour ago, Magheat2009 said:

It seems a bit unnecessary. Gassy Moos are quite complicated even with reduced lux demand and gas grass growing without atmosphere. If it gets overly cumbersome, most people simply wont bother with Gassy Moos.

Milking the moos yields considerable amounts of brackene in comparison to using the new squishing machines. The big-daddy lamp can finally provide for the light requirement, if you put them outside and above the gas grass (and assuming the ranch is 4 tiles tall) then you can cover up to 3 plants with one sun lamp. Gas grass growing without an atmosphere now enables wild farms, I did try pip planting but they've gone on strike - I have to double check the requirements list for wild planting gas grass, maybe the pip union didn't get the memo...

1 hour ago, Magheat2009 said:

Brackene is not a necessity in the game.

Dupes shall have their moo milk! It's also directly used in ranching, that last one I encourage to check out for cuteness' sake...

Brackwax is the newest "consumable" on the block... Transit tubes seeing the most direct use besides as an ingredient for plastium. Such a missed opportunity to provide beach chairs with a booster ingredient as well...

Talking about plastium, it "melts" into *naphtha*. At its melting temperature one would argue that it should directly flash into sour gas...

2 hours ago, Magheat2009 said:

Making it available to players without dealing with Gassy Moos may remove the incentive to mess with them.

In my opinion, the plant squishers don't help as much as using the moos because you'd need to invest a resource you've farmed + water + duplicant labor. These new buildings are not directly automatable either.

2 hours ago, Magheat2009 said:

Poor pufts, becoming more pointless day by day.

Dupes shall have their target practice! Down with the puft monarchy!

[asurendra]

Quote

The big-daddy lamp can finally provide for the light requirement, if you put them outside and above the gas grass (and assuming the ranch is 4 tiles tall) then you can cover up to 3 plants with one sun lamp

Wait-wait-wait. Do you want to say that I finally can invest my megawatts into something actually usefull? And I need to produce that new element endlessly as it is actually consumable... OMG! Thats so cool!

[JRup]

In the large rectangle 3 plants are sufficiently illuminated. The rectangle to the left is little ugly duckling gas grass receiving booster light from the other lamps. It works! And yes, the brackwax gets chipped away at transit tubes by 100g a pop, watch your dupes zoom!

[watermelen671]

On 7/20/2023 at 4:13 PM, JarrettM said:

Adjusted Telescope animation.

Spoiler

I'm fine I'm fine...

 

[Magheat2009]

1 hour ago, sakura_sk said:

Like plastic, it's not mandatory to go through ranching in order to get it, right?

I thought the point of Brackene was to make Gassy Moos useful? I don't see why it has to be consistent with plastic.

1 hour ago, JRup said:

Milking the moos yields considerable amounts of brackene in comparison to using the new squishing machines.

It hangs on the fact whether or not one can use the Plant Pulverizer (without having to use like 100 of them) to produce enough Brackene. It is the Research Reactor problem. If one can generate enough Radbolts without the Research Reactor, the extra radbolts from the Research Reactor become pointless. Similarly, Pufts are more efficient at converting Oxygen to Oxylite, but who cares when you can just slap down an Oxylite refinery.

Two examples of good balancing in this regard are the Uranium Centrifuge, Manual Radbolt Generator and Oil Refinery. They strike the balance of being a quick solution, with major inbuilt inefficiencies which makes their more complex counterparts still worth going for. 

[sakura_sk]

2 hours ago, Magheat2009 said:

I don't see why it has to be consistent with plastic.

Well, not only plastic. What I meant is most things in game, you can get them on multiple routes. You can get refined metals, plastic, fiber, sand, oxylite, oil, petroleum using ranches or machines or both (and I probably forget some because I haven't ranched every critter)

[JRup]

Now all we need is some fancy shmancy liquid bottler that takes a piped input and that hopefully packs more than 200kg at a time...

[Farsight]

5 hours ago, JRup said:

I did try pip planting but they've gone on strike - I have to double check the requirements list for wild planting gas grass, maybe the pip union didn't get the memo...

Pips can't plant without an atmosphere.

So you have to have an atmosphere to plant, then can void it to space afterwards.

[JRup]

26 minutes ago, Farsight said:

Pips can't plant without an atmosphere.

Suspected as much, I'm just cooling down the surface to avoid killing them in 200ºC+ hydrogen... Let me just say that, besides several tours to icy locations and a mod that enables some rare seeds, the wheezeworts shall have a field day on the area I have spared for a wild gas grass farm...

[RealTimeBen]

I had a chance to mess with this for a while tonight, fun times. However I'm noticing in a base game save that the space scanner is acting kind of strange now. When it detects a meteor shower, it seems earlier before it gets here. And when the meteor shower ends, my space scanners ended up outputting a detection signal for a full cycle after it had ended. It just feels like a really long time after a meteor shower ends. Especially when there are frequent showers where my doors don't open for several cycles. 

I can't test it any more because my gassy moo is attempting to beckon from space however the game is crashing related to that based on the stack trace. Bug reports have been sent in for ya'll. 

Thanks for allowing us to milk our space cows now!

[blakemw]

8 hours ago, JRup said:

The big-daddy lamp can finally provide for the light requirement, if you put them outside and above the gas grass (and assuming the ranch is 4 tiles tall) then you can cover up to 3 plants with one sun lamp.

I tried coming up with some layouts.

Is this the most gas grass that can be grown with a single Sun Lamp?

That is 11 plants, the "naive concave of farm tiles" only grows 9 plants.

As with the Beach Chair, it's much cheaper to use normal lamps, for instance here is the same 11 Gas Grass being illuminated by only 348 W of lighting, compared with the 960 W of a Sun Lamp.

The 36 lamps do generate 18 kDTU/s of heat, compared with only 5 kDTU/s of heat for a Sun Lamp.

When you are at the point of fooling around with Gas Grass, power probably isn't a serious concern, unless doing very specific strategies like self-powered setups. There are likely also good compromises that use Sun Lamp and then top up the slightly not illuminated enough tiles with normal lamps.

[goboking]

Does the Exuberant mutation override gas grass' lux requirement?

[blakemw]

Investigations into Brackwax.

Brackene turns into Brackwax in the Brackwax Gleaner at a 9% ratio, 1 kg of Brackene becomes 90 g of Brackwax, 810 g of Brine and 100 g of CO2. It has to be emptied like the Desalinator.

It making Brine reminds me of something annoying: it'd be nice to have a route for growing Waterweed that doesn't require a Salt Water Geyser.

Anyway, the Transit Tube consumes 100 g per use, and the description is that it increases travel speed by +25%, this means that a journey that would take 10 seconds, instead takes 8 seconds (10/1.25), reducing trip time by 20%, I measured this to make sure it is working, and it does work that way.

If you went the Plant Pulverizer route then the 20 kg of Brackene, would become 1.8 kg of Brackwax which would permit 18 waxed up trips, I have a suspicion that considering the amount of manual labor involved, it wouldn't really add up to a good deal unless the transit tube routes are particularly long.

Investigations into Moo Milking:

From preliminary investigations it seems:

1. Whenever a Moo eats, it gets a buff that causes it to gain +25% "Brackene Supply" per cycle. This means if the buff is sustained it can be milked every 4 cycles.
2. The amount milked is 200 kg.
3. Brackene supply doesn't seem to directly benefit from being happy, however since it only gains the buff when it eats, reduced metabolism means the Moo eats less often and doesn't generate as much Brackene supply, this greatly reduces Brackene for wild and glum moos.
4. The amount of plants required is a little complicated. When a Moo eats a Gas Grass which has grown to 25% (the minimum it can eat it at), it gains the Moo buff for 0.7 cycles (or I think it adds 0.7 to the buff if it's already up), as another point of reference the plant has regrown to 18% once the buff has expired, so it's not the case that the Moo needs 2 Gas Grass to maintain the buff, it's more like 1.4 Gas Grass, or perfect ratio would be 5 Moos to 7 Grass with 8 to 11 also being pretty good, this ought be enough to maximize Brackene, though it wouldn't maximize natural gas production. However it should be noted that Moos probably aren't gong to correctly take turns eating so one Moo can accumulate a long duration of buff while another's buff is down.
5.  What his means is that over-stocking the Gas Grass produces more Brackene per gas grass than feeding the Moos all the grass they can eat. I think. But if you want to absolutely maximize Brackene per Moo rather than per Grass, you'd use 2 grass per moo.

Having established that a Moo needs 1.4 Gas Grass, we can look again at Plant Pulverizer. The best plant, the Nosh Sprout, requires 3.5 cycles of growth to make 20 kg of Brackene, another way of looking at this is that the Nosh Sprout is good for 5.7 kg/cycle of Brackene.

The Moo on the other hand, produces 50 kg/cycle of Brackene, while needed 1.4 plants, or 35 kg/cycle of Brackene per plant, or if fully feeding the Moos, it is 25 kg/cycle per plant.

So on a per-plant basis Moo-milking is far more productive, roughly 6-7x more productive. Of course, as fickle Nosh Sprouts are to farm, Gas Grass is a lot more annoying requiring both very cold chlorine and very intense light. Gas Grass needs 5x as much dirt as Nosh Sprouts, but the amount of Chlorine is very small: only 500 g/cycle, a truly trivial amount that could easily be supplied with a Rust Deoxidizer, with the only difficulty being making and keepng it liquid (considering the very low thirst of Gas Grass, it'd probably make sense to feed it with Valved liquid chlorine loops no more than 1 kg per packet: these are most easily done by filling the loop with a Liquid Meter Valve which has the nice property of not merging packets, so set the Meter Valve to 500 g or 1 kg or whatever and it just puts new packets in empty slots in the loop, by exploiting 1 kg/s loops this eliminates the issue with chlorine warming up in the pipes - something which is a big problem when consumption is so low meaning fresh cold chlorine rarely enters pipe segments).

Getting back to milking vs plants: labor-efficiency I would tend to think favors Moo-milking, the Moo has to be groomed or cannibalize some of its bracken to be happy, and it has to be milked, but that is likely less labor than using the Plant Pulverizer 10 times.... but not dramatically less considering the Plant Pulverizer would tend to involve very little running around.

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by blakemw

[Magheat2009]

On 7/21/2023 at 12:43 AM, JarrettM said:

Brackwax can also be used to make Plastium (solid), a new plastic-like material with much higher heat resistance. 

I forgot to mention this, but this solidifies Transit Tubes as the high power cost airlock people always wanted.

[Magheat2009]

16 hours ago, sakura_sk said:

Well, not only plastic. What I meant is most things in game, you can get them on multiple routes. You can get refined metals, plastic, fiber, sand, oxylite, oil, petroleum using ranches or machines or both

Petroleum, Sand and Plastic are essential materials. So, it makes sense to have multiple routes of getting them, especially in Spaced Out. Oxylite Refinery makes sense as Oxylite is used for lower tier rocket and rocket missions, so having to ranch pufts to get it is a bit too much.

Brackene on the other hand, is more in line with substances like Isoresin and Niobium. They are nice to have, but more of a mid to late game thing. Hence, the developers can use them as carrots for players to come out of their comfort zones and try out more challenging builds. 

This is why I don't see why an alternative route to Brackene is necessary.

[gigamoi]

5 hours ago, blakemw said:

Investigations into Moo Milking:

From preliminary investigations it seems:

....

That reminds me, along with sleet wheat, nosh sprout is one of the few plants that, thanks to their ability to yield numerous similar seeds at once, are not tedious to mutate in large quantities and are therefor viable to farm in their mutated forms. Exuberant nosh sprout could be most efficient, or at least very coompetitive, ressource-wize.

If I take 5.7 kg/cycle of Brackene as a basis, the mutated yield should be 22.8 kg/cycle for 7.5 kg/cycle of dirt and 12.5 kg/cycle poluted water. Considering how difficult it can be to get dirt, that's a pretty interesting deal.

The only data I am missing to evaluate how good this route is for mass production is how long it takes to operate the plant pulverizer. Does anyone have a number?

[blakemw]

24 minutes ago, gigamoi said:

If I take 5.7 kg/cycle of Brackene as a basis, the mutated yield should be 22.8 kg/cycle for 7.5 kg/cycle of dirt and 12.5 kg/cycle poluted water. Considering how difficult it can be to get dirt, that's a pretty interesting deal.

The only data I am missing to evaluate how good this route is for mass production is how long it takes to operate the plant pulverizer. Does anyone have a number?

Like most refinement buildings it is a base of 40 seconds, modified by lit workspace and machinery attribute, so like for a +24 machinery dupe with lit workspace it would take 11.3 seconds. As an additional labor requirement it requires manual delivery of water which can be optimized but is pretty bad if a random dupe grabs that task from across the map (optimization would be having a pitcher pump right next to it and only giving one dupe access).

Incidentally I don't agree that dirt is hard to get. It's only hard if there are no arbor trees, even then Sleet Wheat and Nosh Bean use so little dirt that composting of water sieve pdirt easily handles it.

Edited July 24, 2023 by blakemw