Midgame gas storage (Aka Gas Reservoir is pretty bad)

[Fleetfeet]

Regarding storage, I do feel like like current (gas) storage structures are inadequate and feel out-of-date (design-wise) for common uses. What I would expect of material storages would be that they organically fit their common use case and exist as a 'sensible solution' for players who don't have more complicated or advanced designs yet.

As an example, the liquid reservoir is (imo) fine as it is. The game teaches you just by virtue of its mechanics that a big ol' open basin will work just fine for most of your liquid storage needs, and the first time you consider using liquid reservoirs is likely to be as buffers to avoid pesky things like your mid-game bathrooms not getting water. You don't really need to store mass volumes of liquid in storage tanks, and if you want greater compression than water naturally allows, you can link up a bunch of liquid reservoirs in your liquid basin and feel okay about it. I agree that a mid/lategame consideration for liquid storage wouldn't hurt, but in my experience by that point I've dug out so much of the map that I'm fine designating an entire quadrant of the map to a big water storage area, and can refine any salt/brine/ph20 geysers into water if I so chose.

Gases are a different story, and the gas reservoir feels unsuited for hypothetical use cases. The first time in a normal playthrough you're looking to store volumes of gas is one of two places - One, as a solution to this slow, pesky CO2 buildup, or two, because you found a hydrogen/nat gas geyser and want to use its output. For the former, one gas reservoir stores the c02 production of 12 dupes for 12 cycles. Not very effective, but it's something. Gas geysers are a different story.

For a gas geyser (300g/s, 600s/1100s uptime, 100/160 dormancy) :
Storing the gas from one vent cycle is 1.2 reservoirs, or minimum 15 tiles of storage space (10kg/tile for reservoirs, plus natural 5kg/tile compression from geyser, plus 1k/tile for snaky gas pipes.).
Storing the gas from one dormancy cycle is 65 reservoirs, or 608 tiles of storage space.
Even if you're at plastics and can make a high-pressure vent, you're still looking at a maximum gas storage of 21kg per tile (10kg ambient, 10kg/tile in gas reservoir, 1kg in pipe) and have 9,720kg of gas to store.

Even given a natural gas geyser and your base using half of its product per cycle, you're still left with 300ish tiles devoted to buffering the gas output of a single geyser. That's a lot! The issue I have isn't so much with the space as it is the fact that it feels extremely clunky and inorganic, as though you as the player are missing something about how this issue is expected to be solved. Granted, geysers are one of the most interesting problems Oni presents, and I don't think they should be -easy- to solve, but I do feel there should be clearer lines of progression regarding gas storage.

I suggest a post-industrial refined metal storage container capable of compressions around 100kg per tile. This would mark a substantial increase in space-efficiency regarding gas storage, barricaded from obsoleting the current gas reservoir by position in the research tree as well as substantial refined metal cost. Additional balancing / 'interesting' components could include a soft power requirement (60watts) with the unpowered variant leaking 30g/s of its contents and/or the structure producing a small volume of heat, augmenting the typically already hot production of most gas geysers.

[pnambic]

You're going to love the next QoL update (Gas reservoirs buffed from 150kg to 1000kg).